Principles of Flat Design Flat design – the design community just can’t stop talking about it. And feelings are strong. Most designers either can’t get enough of this trend, or absolutely hate it. I am somewhere in the middle. So let’s examine what makes something flat. No Added Effects Flat design gets its name from the shapes used. The concept works without embellishment – drop shadows, bevels, embossing, gradients or other tools that add depth. Nothing is added to make elements look more realistic, such as tricks designed to make items appear 3D in skeuomorphic design projects. So what makes it work? Simple Elements Flat design uses many simple user interface elements, such as buttons and icons. Each UI element should be simple and easy to click or tap. In addition to simple styling, go bold with color on clickable buttons to encourage use. Need help getting started? Focus on Typography Because of the simple nature of element in flat design, typography is extremely important. Focus on Color Minimalist Approach
There is No Spoon: The Construct of Channels As products become services, and services become more thoughtfully and holistically designed, we are breaking out of our digital silos and endeavoring to support a more seamless cross-channel customer experience spanning every touchpoint between the customer and company. But what constitutes the channel in cross-channel? And what implication does this have on the customers’ experience when interacting with your product or service? When we are trying to gain an experiential view of the customer journey, channels aren’t the best lens to view the experience. Ceci n’est pas une channel A channel is typically the means, or medium, in which information is conveyed. I don’t claim to have a new authoritative definition of what constitutes a channel. A channel is a medium of interaction with customers or users Most of us have some sense of what this means. Photo: Katie Greiner, @klgreiner Channels aren’t a place A channel isn’t the point of interaction. You keep using that word.
Flat Design: Can You Benefit from the Trend? Flat design – a concept popular many years ago in design – is making a comeback. With many redesigns and new websites employing a flat design scheme, the trend is appearing almost everywhere, both on websites and in app design. Its popularity has been made even more popular by the releases of Windows 8 and the new Google design, which includes a completely flat aesthetic. And other popular sites use this theme as well. Can you make it work for your project? Flat design can be both beautiful and charming. What is Flat Design? Flat design is a method that does not use any extra effects to create a scheme that does not include any three-dimensional attributes. Flat design is just that – flat. Flat design is not completely without effects, it just lacks added extras to create “artificial” depth and dimension. Techniques Forget all the decorations. Focus on the color. Focus on typography. Focus on the words. Simple user interface and UI elements. Create hierarchy. Naming Flat Design Conclusion
Creating An Adaptive System To Enhance UX Advertisement In computer science, the term “adaptive system” refers to a process in which an interactive system adapts its behavior to individual users based on information acquired about its user(s), the context of use and its environment. Although adaptive systems have been long-discussed in academia1 and have been an aspiration for computer scientists and researchers2, there has never been a better time than today to realize the potential of what future interaction with computer systems will be like. The abilities of today’s network information technologies to create rich, immersive personalized experiences to track interactions and aggregate and analyze them in real time, together with the data collected by the sensors we carry in our smart devices, provides us an opportunity like never before to design adaptivity in order to ultimately offer a better user experience that is both unobtrusive and transparent. Examples Of Adaptive Systems Adaptive Thinking Adaptive and Responsive Design
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
How To Design Mental Models That Create a Superior User Experience “Much of this article is adapted or excerpted from the book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with User Behavior by Indi Young (Rosenfeld Media, 2008).” Designing something right requires that you completely understand what a person wants to get done. You need to understand how a person uses something if you’re going to get the design right for them. You also need to know the person’s goals and the procedures she/he follows to accomplish those goals. Mental models give you a deep understanding of people’s motivations and thought processes along with the emotional and philosophical landscape in which they are operating. Let’s begin with a simple mental model that might be used by a company like Procter and Gamble to determine the needs of its market on a typical work or school day. Click to enlarge Mental model of a typical morning for people who commute to work or school. They can also act as a road map, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity. Affinity Diagram Grocery Store
LevelEleven redesigns & rebrands its Salesforce app that cleverly gamifies sales Sales people are an incredibly important resource, but how do you motivate them to close more deals without being an aggressive, insulting prig? LevelEleven believes its flagship app that gamifies the sales process is the answer to that problem. Detroit-based LevelEleven recently caught our eye when it raised $500,000 in additional seed funding from Detroit Venture Partners and others. The company’s flagship application encourages sales people to meet certain goals like following up on leads, increasing numbers of face-to-face meetings, making calls, and logging events. Now the company has rebranded the flagship app from the name Contest Builder to (fittingly) Compete. “One of the most frustrating things of sales is having so much data but still finding it hard to motivate sales people,” Marsh said. On top of the name change, the app has been redesigned to simplify the user experience and modernize the look. Photo via LevelEleven
krishna is not available Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially “enchat, simplify and amaze,” but there’s much more to those principles that that relatively slippery and non-scientific language might lead you to believe. In fact, Garb and Roeber have based the ADP on compelling recent research that suggests eliciting negative emotional responses have an outsized effect on user experience, and require lots more counterbalance in terms of positive experiences to achieve a net positive, or even net zero lasting impression. The Math Of Joy They cited a John Gottman study that found successful marriages maintain around a 5:1 ration of pleasant feelings to bad, whereas those with more like a 1:1 ration have a far greater chance of ending in divorce.
iOS 7 Rumor Watch: 'Black, White and Flat All Over' It's widely rumored that Apple's new iOS 7, to be unveiled at WWDC next month , will ditch the company's ill-fated love affair with "heavy textures," also known as skeuomorphic design, for a more flattened take on the user interface. A new report from 9to5mac on Friday suggests that this new flat design will also incorporate lots of black and white, though it's unclear just how far this simplified color scheme will permeate the new OS. (See also: iOS Users Beg Apple: Set Our iPhones & iPads Free! ) Other updates will reportedly include changes to the longstanding lock screen, new widgets in the notification center and an overall uniformity in design and color among all native Apple apps. SimplyZesty, a digital agency specializing in design as well as mobile and social strategy, made headlines earlier this month with its mock-up of what iOS 7 might look like . Image courtesy of SimplyZesty's mock-up.
21: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark | Minimalist Posters That Reduce Your Favorite Movies To Basic Shapes In the future, when the history of the Internet is taught alongside social studies and algebra in middle school, there will be a brief, marginal mention of minimalist posters and how they, for a moment, encapsulated a bit of the late-aughts web. Curious students may do a little research of their own, going on to discover just how much of a hold the design trend once exerted over the popular imagination (or, at least, that of micro-bloggers). They may even come across Michal Krasnopolski’s set of minimalist classic movie posters. Speculation aside, Krasnopolski’s posters are the latest to crop up in the meme’s short but copious history. After spending months developing a series of movie posters that was going nowhere, Krasnopolski decided to start afresh. The designs rigorously adhere to the same mold: a circle overlaid by two diagonals, all inscribed in a square. Don’t expect every theme to be, well, abundantly clear. Krasnopolski is undecided about continuing the series.
How to Design for the Gut What makes your favorite mobile app so addictive? You know, the one you check over and over again throughout the day? The likely answer is visceral design. Visceral design is the key to creating experiences people can’t get enough of. So what exactly is visceral design? From the Gut The satisfaction comes from the gut level connection it makes, causing the design to just “feel” right. In the gaming world visceral design is called “juicy feedback,” and they’ve been using it almost since the beginning. There are huge benefits for designers when we move from design with a high aesthetic to one that affects users on a gut level. Users come back over and over, creating more value for the design and engineering teams that can deliver it. Study Behavior The catch, of course, is that creating these experiences is difficult. It’s clear that visceral design is effective, but how, exactly, do you go about building it into your next design? Focus on Feedback Loops Deliver Micro-Experiences Conclusion
10 Best Alternatives to Adobe InDesign Toolkits Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing program that can be used to create works of all kinds — books, newspapers, magazines, flyers, brochures, posters and more. Used with another Adobe product, Digital Publishing Suite, it can also be utilized for publishing content adopted for tablet devices. Best Alternatives to Adobe InDesign 1. We look first at another of Adobe's applications. 2. Microsoft Office Publisher comes built into almost every new computer that you buy. 3. Often called Quark for short (the name, incidentally, comes from the subatomic particles of which protons and neutrons are comprised), QuarkXPress is perhaps the best option for the creation of documents with complex layouts because it operates in a WYSIWYG environment. 4. Scribus is a free and open source software system that has almost everything you can find in commercial software. 5. 6. imPRESSion 7. PageStream antedates the Web, having been originally released in 1986 under a different name. 8. 9. Conclusion
Case Study — Typographic Design Patterns And Current Practices (2013 Edition)