Tag Archives: design

Where to begin?

March 4th, 2010
Incomprehensible industry jargon? Check. (What is a “TOD”, why would I care?) Apostrophe abuse? Check. Weirdly formatted unreadable text? Check. Poorly designed machine with usability failures leading to poorly designed poster to cover same? Check. I don’t know what pisses me off more; that the process of collecting tickets is so badly designed it requires a sign like this to be stuck [...]
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Design

August 25th, 2009
Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.
- Shaker design philosophy (via Joshua Porter)
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Future of Web Design

April 18th, 2008

Unfortunately I couldn't make it to the Future of Web Design conference this year, partly because of the ongoing integration work (if you're following me on Twitter you know what that's been like) and partly because I wanted to save some cash for dConstruct 2008.

Luckily Jeremy Keith has done a fantastic job of liveblogging the presentations, so between his sterling effort and the torrent of photos on Flickr I can almost kid myself that I was there.

Roll on 3rd September.

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Testify

April 19th, 2007
Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.

- Jeffrey Zeldman

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Good design

March 28th, 2007

Dieter Rams' principles of good design:

  • Good design is innovative.
  • Good design makes a product useful.
  • Good design is aesthetic.
  • Good design helps us to understand a product.
  • Good design is unobtrusive.
  • Good design is honest.
  • Good design is durable.
  • Good design is consequent to the last detail.
  • Good design is concerned with the environment.
  • Good design is as little design as possible.
  • Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of these things.

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  • What is this place?

    Polytechnic is the online home of Garrett Coakley.

    It tends to focus on such geekery as web development, technology, music, film, and photography.

    A proud member of Oxfordbloggers.com.

  • Elsewhere

    Other places I can be found on the web.