January 21, 2013
John Gruber fireballs:
The trend away from skeuomorphic special effects in UI design is the beginning of the retina-resolution design era. Our designs no longer need to accommodate for crude pixels. Glossy/glassy surfaces, heavy-handed transparency, glaring drop shadows, embossed text, textured material surfaces — these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print, and, the higher the quality of the output and more heavy-handed the effect, the sillier such techniques look. They’re the aesthetic equivalent of screen-optimized typefaces like Lucida Grande and Verdana. They work on sub-retina displays because sub-retina displays are so crude. On retina displays, as with high quality print output, these techniques are revealed for what they truly are: an assortment of parlor tricks that fool our eyes into thinking we see something that looks good on a display that is technically incapable of rendering graphic design that truly looks good.
…
If you want to see the future of software UI design, look to the history of print design.
I mostly agree, but I would be carefull with relying on the print for guidence to future software UI designs. For one thing, print is not interactive, neither is used to get the job done in the same way software is.
I agree we are at the beginning of the swing in the opposite direction from skeuomorphism and I think we will overdo it, as we always do.
The evolution of design is sort of tacking against the wind.
January 18, 2013
Another example of what I call primary research in HTML5, CSS & JavaScript:
FFF is a collection of interactive experiences. Each experience has its own unique design and functionality. All the experiences are created in HTML5, the site works beatifully on both desktop and tablet.
January 9, 2013
Shapeshift is like Masonry but with drag & drop. Touch support included.
January 5, 2013
Good article by Alex MacCaw.
January 4, 2013
Thorough tutorial for this new CSS layouting by Greg Smith.
January 4, 2013
Nice overview of the possibilities of using CSS3, SVG, Canvas and WebGL for animation today.
January 4, 2013
Primary research in the field of CSS by Hugo Giraudel over at Codrops. It may have no direct implications for your work now but someday it may resurface as uniquely useful.
December 19, 2012
I believe Craig Mod is right in his vision of what’s to come for publishing. Everyone in publishing should read this.
December 18, 2012
Podcast tip:
Anderson argues that the plummeting prices of 3D printers and other tabletop design and manufacturing tools allows for individuals to enter manufacturing and for manufacturing to become customized in a way that was unimaginable until recently. Anderson explores how social networking interacts with this technology to create a new world of crowd-sourced design and production.
Go the EconTalk site where you can listen, download and follow a bunch of links.
I like the analogy that the 3D printers are in similar stage to where personal computing where in the Homebrew computer club ages on 1976.
Via @kober
December 17, 2012
You may try the webapp and read how they made it.
Via @keff85
December 13, 2012
Good people at Online MBA have sent me a link to this video.
December 13, 2012
Horace Dediu brilliant as usual:
Microsoft’s problem is not that it has difficulty offering an operating system for tablets. The problem is that the economics of both systems and application software on tablets is destructive to its margins.
December 8, 2012
4 kb of uncompressed JavaScript allows you to use <input type="color"> even for IE6+.