Writing tagged with #Design
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Implementing Design Feedback
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Design feedback is a crucial part of the creative process, allowing designers to refine and improve their work. However, implementing feedback effectively can be challenging. This guide will explore some practices for incorporating design feedback into your workflow. 1. Understand the Feedback An ea
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User-Centered Design Principles
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User-Centered Design is a common approach to creating products that truly resonate with users. By focusing on the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-user at each stage of the design process, we can ensure that the final product is not only functional but also enjoyable. In this post, we will e
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Using Data to Improve Design
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When setting out to create a design for a new product or reimagine an existing product, how we decide what to focus on and how to know if a change is working are critical to understanding and discussing the work. Design by its very definition has to have intent behind it; there is a motivation and a
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Site Redesign Retrospective
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When I migrated my site from Eleventy to Astro I was more concerned with making sure everything was functional. The overall design of this site has been something that has bugged me for the last 8 months; the blue and gold didn’t really feel like me, it was more a placeholder than anything else. I w
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Site Rededesign is Live
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Shorter post today. After a few months of delays and reworks I finally decided on an overall theme for the site, put together the design, and got it out the door. I’ll write up a longer overview and breakdown later on, but I’m super happy with the final result and even more so that it’s finally out
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Evaluating Design Success
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Design is creativity with a specified purpose. Design always has goals and intention behind it. So how do we know when we’ve achieved those goals? Measuring the success of design can be incredibly simple, it can also be one of the most challenging aspects of a design career. With advertising, measur
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Data Over Dogma
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When working on design at scale one of the largest speedbumps you’re likely to encounter is a designer that feels like a design needs to change. Whether it’s something relatively small like the padding on a button or a heading’s font size, or something much larger like the layout of a card or the si
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Config 2024 Day Two
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Starting off day two strong, I was lucky enough to get upgraded access to the leadership collective, massive thanks to our Figma rep for pulling in that favor. Opening Keynote Leaving Fingerprints Karla and Nash kicked off the talks with Leaving fingerprints: product, design & stories at The Bro
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Config 2024 Day One
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Figma started off the day strong with their opening keynote. UI3 looks like a fresh take on the editor interface, and aims to solve a number of existing issues, from small improvements to massive overhauls that needed a refresh to tackle. The improvements to dev mode are a welcome addition given my
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Config 2024 Wishlist
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With Config 2024 right around the corner I figured I’d put together a little wishlist of things I’d like to see them announce, some more plausible than others. The Likely More Variable Support The most likely thing on this wishlist is additional advancements of Figma Variables. As a member of the De
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Using Object Maps in Design
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; Came across this post from Adobe and I've been tossing the idea around in my brain for the last few weeks. Using Object Maps in Design The core idea is simple, an object map is essentially a visual representation of the relationships betwe
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Learning through Teaching
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Did you know that the DOM (Document Object Model) defines the web as objects? Or that this representation of web pages is object-oriented so that it can be modified by scripting languages? While these may seem like basic ideas it’s always interesting to dig into the details of the web that we work i
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Design for the web
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While catching up my my RSS feed, I read through Brad Frost’s recent post Should Designers Code? I’ve always agreed with the overall sentiment of the article, especially this bit: Designers need to understand and work with the grain of the medium for which they’re designing. For the web, that means
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Improving Team Alignment and Understanding
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As a part of looking to improve our the efficiency and effectiveness of our product and design teams I’ve been reading Discussing Design by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry. I’d like to boost one of the concepts discussed in the book that I think could benefit a lot of teams I’ve worked with in the pa
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Leveraging AI to Improve Accessibility
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There’s been a lot of talk over the last few months about using AI to improve accessibility. I’ve seen and heard people talk about the potential for a browser or OS level AI to swoop in and solve “last-mile” accessibility issues for a user that a designer or developer has not considered or accounted
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Solving Complex Dynamic Problems with Systemic Design
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Over the past few weeks, I've been collaborating with a product team to create an interface for state and academic standards. The primary idea is that a user could select the standards document they want to view and then browse or filter the records for a specific standard. They could then view all
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The Box Model for Design
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Everything on the web is structured using the box model. HTML elements (e.g., paragraphs, div blocks, sections, etc.) are expressed in boxes. By default browsers stack these elements vertically, like boxes on top of each other. Through the use of modern CSS features we can organize and position thes
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Declarative Design and the Unknown Web
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This past week I got enticed into and pulled down a web design rabbit hole. Chris Coyier wrote on FrontendMasters back in mid February about part 2 of Jim Nielsen’s The Case for Design Engineers. The post Chris links to is a great argument for why we need people who can "bridge the gap" be
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Indicating Link Posts
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As I read posts or see cool videos on the web I want to be able to write a short post and link to those resources. However, I want to be able to clearly indicate those posts and differentiate them from other blog posts that are primarily content to be read on this site. Thankfully that's relatively
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Managing Change in your Design System: Workflows and Change Control at Enterprise Scale
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This past week Knapsack held a session with Nathan Curtis all about managing change in a design system. I took some notes on things I thought were interesting, figured it be worth sharing them here as well. How do I make this [Design Systems] a priority for my organization? Hitching your Wagon Often
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Systems of Harm
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; I've recently started listening to the Systems of Harm podcast by Amy Hupe. It's a short (6 episodes) series of podcasts discussing design systems and probing into how in addition to speeding up the design process they can also accelerate
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Goals for 2024
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As this year comes to an end and we begin looking into the next one I’ve decided to publish my goals for the next year in a hope that this will help keep my accountable to reaching them. Visit Scotland We’ve planned a trip for this fall to visit England Scotland and Ireland. This is one of our major
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Taking off with Astro
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It's been about 3 years since I moved this site over to 11ty (Eleventy), and it's been a great ride. I still think 11ty is a fantastic static site generator, but I wanted to try out some new front-end frameworks and I feel like a personal website is always the playground to learn new things. The two
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Learning Grid Thanks to Codepen Challenges
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This past week I partook in my very first Codepen Challenge. This month’s Codepen challenge is Style Trends. It’s an interesting “meta-challenge” where every week the HTML template provided is exactly the same and you need to create a unique design that matches the theme of the week. This past week
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Brad Frost on Atomic Design
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Brad Frost recently posted this wonderful article reminding us all that Atomic Design is not a step-by-step process, and instead a mental model we should use to look at the parts and whole of a design at the same time. I know that I’ve been guilty of this myself. It’s very easy to fall into the trap
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A Playbook for Accessibility
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In my work with Design Systems, accessibility often comes up as a topic. Questions can range from the incredibly basic, "What is accessibility?" to the more complex and nuanced, "Is the language of this modal clear enough?" Part of my job is to help guide the designers, developer
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Diving into DesignOps
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Over the last few months I’ve been spending more of my time learning and thinking about how to implement a DesignOps practice across the teams I work with. Large portions of my work with Design Systems already relate to a number of DesignOps ideas and principles: helping teams solve for efficiency,
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Be a Design A11y: An Introduction to Accessibility
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import { Icon } from "astro-icon"; import contrastExample from "@images/writing/design-a11y/contrast-ratio.png"; This is an introductory overview of Accessibility and how it relates to designing and building digital products and e