Take a look at this beautifully meticulous, hand-crafted paper alphabet by Sabeena Karnik, a caligrapher, fine artist and illustrator/ typographer specializing in paper sculpturing and acrylic murals.
Design
NEST: Smart and Beautiful
Beautiful, utilitarian product design has always thrilled me. Dyson is my idol and half the products I see over at the Swissmiss blog leave me drooling. Take a look at this new device, billed as the world’s first Learning Thermostat.
Nest learns from your temperature adjustments, programs itself to keep you comfortable, and guides you to energy savings. You can control the thermostat from anywhere using a smartphone, tablet or laptop, and Nest never stops learning, even as your life and the seasons change.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCJ1PnVlzIE
[d]online Medium Typeface featured on MyFonts.com Home Page
This week, I was delighted to learn from a few separate sources that [d]online was featured on the MyFonts.com home page. I have to assume that this coveted real estate is reserved for fonts that portray their catalog in a positive light and feel honored that they selected one of my typefaces to do so. I’m hoping that my second font, era404 Regular, will pop-up there at some point too.
Pantone Moods v2.0
We’re excited to be working with Pantone again to develop a more robust version of our Moods Facebook Application. The announcement went live on Facebook on Friday and I’d love any feedback you can provide while we’re working on developing it. Your ideas can help mold this and future versions of the application.
My Typefaces on MyFonts.com
Since August 2010, [d]online Medium has been downloaded 13,643 times on dafont.com. Since January 2011, era404 Regular has been downloaded 7,619 times. And as I watched these numbers continue to rise, a collective 21,000 downloads of my typefaces, I began to wonder if people were only downloading them because they were free or if people liked them enough to spend some money on them.
Vector Browser Components
I’ve updated this template on my original post, here, to include additional form elements (radio buttons, checkboxes, form and combo box fields) as well as the original vector scrollbars to make it easier to mock-up UIs in Adobe Illustrator.
Seven Questions to Ask When Designing the Feel of Your Mobile App
Feel Can Make or Break a Product
Imagine you are shopping for a new car. You found a model that looks great and has all the features you want. It’s even in your price range. So you go to the dealer and take a test drive. After about five minutes of driving, you find you are mildly dissatisfied with the car. Perhaps it’s the way it takes the bumps. Perhaps it’s difficult to check your blind spot. Perhaps the pedals and buttons are not responsive. Do you buy the car anyway? After all, you like the look, it’s a good buy and it’s got the features you want. Odds are though you are not going to buy it. Why? Because you don’t like the feel of it, and the majority of your experience with a car is tied to the feel.
Feel Plays a Key role in Mobile App Satisfaction
Since mobile devices are held in our hands and operated with touch, the feel of the experience becomes a key determinant of user satisfaction. Also, since the screens are small, more interaction is generally required than on desktop devices. So we experience the nuances of the feel again and again as we use an app. Mild annoyances can add up, let alone major ones. Conversely, a good feel will create an ongoing sense of ease and comfort. This makes it more likely the app will be used repeatedly, bubble up on users’ favorites list, be talked about and recommended to others.
Seven Questions to Ask When Designing the Feel of Your App
So are you ready to optimize the feel of your mobile app? To help, here is a list of questions worth asking when designing a mobile app to make sure you have addressed the feel:
- Have you anticipated how the user will hold the device?
- Have you designed for operation using fingers, thumbs or a combination of the two?
- Have you eliminated undesirable “eclipsing” effects, that is, uncomfortable blind spots where the finger obscures what is being touched in such a way that the interaction is awkward
- On screens with a dense amount of content, have you kept the structure of the layout and interactions simple?
- Have you used an intuitive sequence of gestures to perform core tasks?
- Have you minimized user effort to see, locate and interact with elements on the screen?
- Have you asked someone (or several people) to try a prototype of your app on an actual device?
Check your design against the above items, and you will find the improvements you make to the feel of your app to be well worth the effort.
Original post: Bob Moll, Pathfinder Software