Crash Course: Design for Startups

I recently stumbled across screenshots of old websites of mine and was hurled into a state of reminiscent shock. I knew they were bad, but wow they were outstandingly horrible (redeemed only by their microformats support! I kid, I kid). Several years and a few Georgia Tech design and HCI courses have passed since those atrocities graced the web but I archived them in a sort of reverse portfolio as a personal reminder of how much my design sensibilities have matured. Only in the last year have I begun feeling slightly more confident about my design quality and process. I have yet to consider myself a real designer and there are quite a few things I would do differently with my most recent work on Notifo and Pic A Fight. I have been brainstorming for the past few days about how to scope this article. What I can do is share what has worked for me. Subtle is key! When I was a wee pixel pusher I would overuse whatever graphic effect I had just learned. Process Required Reading More Homework

52 Weeks of UX A good designer always works to keep the form, function and the aesthetic quality of a design in balance throughout the life of a project. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean its useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful. More often than we want to admit, we use glitz and glam—or worse, the current popular design trend—to hide the areas where we simply dont have an elegant solution appropriate to the problem at hand. It is too easy to get caught in the trap of focusing on “making it pretty” without giving consideration to the actual purpose of the design. At the same time, a designer should understand that even the most utilitarian product can benefit from subtle, refined aesthetic treatments and turn what is a dull and boring, yet necessary, task into something enjoyable and engaging. The most elegant solution will yield a design that is gracefully tempered with restraint and precision—both useful and beautiful.

Year 1: Official Weekly Challenge List : 52WeeksOfDesign Articles Archive Most front-end developers will be familiar with at least some of the options available to them when it comes to enhancing front end performance. Performance in this sense is not referring to the speed at which a given page loads, but instead how smooth and responsive it feels when a user interacts with it. A specific example would be the frame rate a user experiences when scrolling down your home page; if it’s consistently high, then performance is considered good. There is a chance you may not have experienced a need to address performance issues before.