“Temporal beauty lives in state-change animations, nuanced timing effects, strategically placed user feedback, and other “interesting moments,” not drop shadows and Photoshop layer effects. Flatlanders build all kinds of emotion and depth combining these moments with delightful microcopy, personality, and typography. All honest—all web—all good.”
March On
A mix for walking.
I like this.
UI is visible. Type is visible. »
Morgan Freeman has a memorable, wonderful speaking voice. One that adds colour and weight to the words. His words are not just audible, and understandable, but they are rich with personality. His voice adds to the words he speaks.
Ashley – A Readable & Responsive Theme for Tumblr
LIke my Tumblr theme? Now you can have it and tweak it to your heart’s content. It uses Gentium Book from Google Web Fonts, but you can plug in your own font of choice.
I updated the site for my Microbeats side project. It’s now generated with Jekyll, which was surprisingly easy to set up – switching everything over from WordPress only took a few hours. I also swapped out the default SoundCloud widgets for custom players – which made everything much, much faster.
“Since copywriting is interface design, you can do an awful lot of great design in a text editor. Don’t worry about where things will go, or how they will fit. Worry about explaining it clearly and then build the rest of the interface around that explanation.”
I made a browser extension for Twitter to make it slightly simpler and readabler. Check it out: Twipster.
A Most Peculiar Test Drive »
Cars are dumb. This New York Times journalist is even dumber. And this electric car, slightly less dumb.
Labels always win »
In the battle of clarity between icons and labels, labels always win.
I’m Sick of Your Tiny, Tiny Type
Your tiny type is hard to read – no, not hard to read, impossible to read. I carry my phone with me everywhere, but I always seem to forget my magnifying glass. I tap the Safari Reader button, but that’s not a solution to the problem. That’s a band-aid for your bad typesetting.
Sometimes I’m on my computer, and Reader doesn’t work on your web app. I hit CMD + two or three times so that my dyslexic brain can make sense of the musty 14px Helvetica your servers regurgitated all over my screen. Then the layout falls apart. Words start smashing together. Ads bleed into my emails. And I find myself scrolling up, down, left, right, left, right – what in the hell is this? The Konami code? I don’t need 30 extra lives. I want to read your content.
And I know I’m not the only one who hates your tiny type. How many times have I heard users complain about fonts being too small? More times than I’ve heard them complain about fonts being too large – wait, I’ve never heard a user complain about that. Your users aren’t asking for a faster horse – they’re struggling to read your content. Surely that isn’t what you’re going for, and surely that isn’t a good experience.
Further reading:
The Typography and Layout behind the new Signal vs. Noise redesign
“Rather than send a message back to my younger self, I would destroy the message-sending technology immediately. The potential for universe-ending paradoxes is too great.”
On to New Adventures
I’m excited to announce that next week I’ll be starting a new job at Stitch Fix, working on a product so good that it makes me consider becoming a cross-dresser. I’ll be joining some very talented people, including some coworkers from previous endeavors, and getting my hands dirty in some ground-level UX research and design. Stitch Fix is all about things like mobile-first responsive web design and data-driven machine learning – I’m guessing the latter means we’ll actually be building a very fashionable Skynet.
I’ve had a great time working at LivingSocial – probably the most enlightening and rewarding two years of my career so far. I’ve learned so much from the people there and made some great friends along the way. I know I leave them in good hands and wish them all the best going forward.
