22 Extremely Well Written Icon Design Tutorials
The title says they’re extremely well written – I can’t speak to their quality (yet).
Category: Design
50 Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory
Looks like a great collection of free lessons on the theories behind graphic design. Not to be read all at once obviously, but a good place to start if you’re interested in a topic. Also might be worth checking out the site itself.
Picking Colours That “Go Together”
A nice web app (Flash) :Color Scheme Designer 3
Much like the Gnome application called Agave.
LEGO Design Wheel
Interesting approach to capturing a high level view of a user’s experience with a product or service from LEGO. Visual, easy to understand – not sure how to capture value in it though. Perhaps the little “i” and “<” icons are the key.
Kano Model Resource
A year or two ago I heard about Professor Kano’s model on user experience expectations at UI12. Here’s a nice little article on it, including a graphic.
Fantastic Gnome Theme
For anyone running Gnome, I highly, highly recommend a theme called Shiki-Colors. It comes with a great green theme, as well as a stunning red theme. Running it on Ubuntu 8.10 and my “look and feel” is simply stunning. Screenshots are at the theme’s linked page.
Seriously gorgeous design.
Design By Committee
As a designer I think big business and committees are the way to go for design decisions. How can you really get to the right product if you don’t talk to your stakeholders and solidly capture their needs in the product? How many users? Well, all of them! Can we tweak it a little more, just add one little thing to make it more “usable”? But let the committee make these decisions, its a recipe for success! The designer, well, they’re too artistic and aren’t in touch with the real users.
I love the “briefing”. 50% are women, 50% are men. We’re not targetting all drivers, just women. Men are being targetted “secondarily”.
To Buy Or To Rent – A Difficult Question
I just discovered an interesting data collection interface put up by the New York Times. Trying to juggle the various elements of finances and markets when deciding to rent or purchase a house is difficult. This tool they’ve put together really does simplify the data down to some concrete attributes that most people can easily find . It then lets you “fiddle” with the values to determine how far away a change in outcome really is. Interesting way of doing things – quite creative.
Is It Better to Buy or Rent? – New York Times
P.S. They’ve also put together a few other data interfaces that mix similar interface-savvy ideas with raw, boring, difficult to understand data. Unusual insights abound! List provided by today’s UIETips Newsletter.