Issue #708: Doing great design
Better designer, Themeable user interfaces, Redaction typeface, Responsive typography, Color space, OKLCH color picker, How to stand out, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The real traits that make people want to work with you, and set you up for long-term success - Being great to work with often matters more than raw talent. - everyday ux sponsored
- Doing great design requires detail obsession - Every great design has one organizing detail that unlocks everything else, and the best design leaders never stop looking for it. - Christopher Butler
- The history of themeable user interfaces - A full-ish history of user interfaces that can be themed to meet the opportunities and constraints of the time. - Brad Frost
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- Designing terrible solutions makes you a better designer - Applying the anchoring effect to design practice. - Jon Daiello
- “Your” vs “My” in user interfaces - Use “Your” when the system speaks to the user, and “My” when the user speaks to the system. - Adam Silver
Design engineering
- Visualizing responsive typography - What do all the numbers in our clamp() do? - Miriam Suzanne
- What is a color space? - In which we answer every question you've ever had about digital color, and some you haven't. - Dan Hollick
Artificial intelligence
- Where AI is failing design systems, and where we are failing AI - For a design system program where the goal is often stable, high quality, durable output, how much instability, lack of quality, or impermanence can we tolerate in our tools? - Ben Callahan
- We must build AI for people; not to be a person - Seemingly conscious AI is coming. - Mustafa Suleyman
Tools and resources
- Redaction typeface - Redaction is a bespoke typeface commissioned by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts' for The Redaction exhibition at MoMA PS1. - Titus Kaphar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Forest Young, Jeremy Mickel
- OKLCH color picker, generator and converter - Create unique and uniform color palettes for your app. - Jakub Krehel
Inspiration and creativity
- What I learned from making a (second) mobile app - Every now and then I get an odd tendency to just go off and make something. - PJ Onori
Last but not least
- How to stand out when anyone can build anything - We're living through a perfect storm where building products has never been easier, money flows to anything labeled “AI,” and the market gets flooded with half-baked solutions nobody asked for. - Anton Sten