Making it Work: Flat Design and Color Trends

We’ve talked a lot here about the flat design trend here at Designmodo. We’ve raved about it, showed you plenty of cool examples and even developed a free user interface kit for you to download and use for projects. But what if you want to do it yourself? One of the most important parts of the trend is color. Flat Design Refresher Flat design is a technique that uses simple effects – or lack thereof – to create a design scheme that does not include three-dimensional attributes. Some call the look of flat design simple, although it can be quite complex. Learn more about the flat design trend in a previous Designmodo article. Defining a Color Palette When it comes to color, flat design works with a variety of colors, but most commonly designers are choosing to go bold and bright. The other thing that makes flat design different in terms of color? What we are seeing more of with flat design and color though is the matching of tone and saturation. Bright Colors So where do you start? Retro Colors

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Be Willing To Be Wrong Early in our work designing Ribbon content, we had little data to go on in terms of how different content layouts within the Ribbon would affect the usability of the features being laid out. Being a new control, there wasn't any direct information we could fall back on to tell us how to use it most effectively. So, we did what we almost always do in the absence of good information: use our gut feeling to make a decision and then get the prototype into the usability lab as soon as we could to start validating the design. This was one case in which I was pretty sure I was right. (Excel "Sheet" tab in recent builds - click to view full picture) To my surprise, some of the tabs using these left-to-right layouts were performing terribly. In short, my gut instinct and my intelligent guess were both as wrong as they could have been. As we watched more people use the prototypes, we started to understand more the scanning process that was taking place. It's not even that straightforward.

PC World - Three Minutes With Steve Wozniak Steve Wozniak isn't perhaps as well known as his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, but "Woz" invented the Apple I in 1976 and the Apple II in 1977, which was one of the best-selling PCs of that time. In this interview, Wozniak, who turns 57 on August 11, talks about how he met Jobs, his most cherished inventions, and why he believes thinking robots and artificial intelligence will never happen. IDG: You said in your autobiography that you and Steve Jobs had complementary personalities. Wozniak: We first met during my college years, while he was in high school. IDG: Are you still friends? Wozniak: Yes, we're still friends. IDG: Why did you quit Apple? Wozniak: Being the sort of designer I was, I was designing things all on my own, working alone, and now the company grew to a point that it had organized engineering departments. IDG: Do you think Apple was right by not licensing the Macintosh operating system? Wozniak: That's very hard to say even now. IDG: Do you think the PC era is over?