This week I had the great honour of being named by the RSA as the first Royal Designer for Industry for Service Design. My hope is to inspire the next generation of designers, just as the current Royal Designers for Industry have inspired me.
Drawing and editing lots of lines and boxes for user flows in any design tool is is a real pain. If you’ve ever done it, you know what I’m talking about. Even if you manage to get it done for your current project, there’s always the next project that needs almost the same treatment.
Companies realize a design system’s value when adopting products use a system to make and ship experiences that their customers use. As a part of that value chain, the system releases features over time. This puts the system into the hands of its customer: designers and engineers doing their job.
Much of my career as a web designer has been spent, quite happily, working alongside programmers, engineers, people with computer science degrees. In this symbiotic relationship, each party has a secure job with a well-defined role, and gets to work on the thing they are best at and enjoy the most.
When we do front-end development at Clearleft, we’re usually delivering production code, often in the form of a component library. That means our priorities are performance, accessibility, robustness, and other markers of quality when it comes to web development.
Tap, tap, one, two… is this thing on? Ahem … My dear designer friends, I have a confession to make, on behalf on anyone who’s ever worked in the field of digital accessibility. We, the accessibility community, have been lying to you for the better part of the last twenty years.
By now, I have to be on record at least a few thousand times in saying that WebPageTest.org is an absurdly valuable tool. Pat gave the performance community an incredible gift by building it and making it available to the broader community for free. I spend a lot of time in WebPageTest.
This is a Sketch plugin for creating charts with random data for use in mockups. Change the size of selected rectangles. Chose between random and linear. Works for both horizontal and vertical bar charts. Made with love by Small Multiples in Chippendale.
A collection of thoughts, experiences, ideas that I like, and ideas that I have been experimenting with over the last year. It covers HTML semantics, components and approaches to front-end architecture, class naming patterns, and HTTP compression.
Making incremental changes to prototypes isn’t iterative. When we’re designing prototypes and user journeys to meet user needs we’re not going to get this right first time. We learn more about user needs as a result of designing and testing possible solutions.
Early in my career when I worked at agencies and later at Microsoft on Edge, I heard the same lament over and over: "Argh, why doesn’t Edge just run on Blink? Then I would have access to ALL THE APIs I want to use and would only have to test in one browser!"
A lot of factors are at play within an organisation that hinders or helps good design to happen. Investing effort into maintaining a strong design culture is important. For a good design culture to thrive certain things need to be in place.
Colours is a big part of what makes up graphics and making colours accessible is important. We’re used to thinking of colours in terms of red, green and blue. Add these colours together and you get white. We can describe colours using RGB, breaking up each colour channel into 256 parts.
SmugMug, the professional photography oriented company, bought Flickr in April 2018. On November 1, 2018, SmugMug announced changes to its free and paid (or “Pro”) tier. SmugMug said that the 1TB of storage that Yahoo gave free-tier users is not sustainable.
If you’ve searched for “Bullet Journal” or “BuJo” online, you may have seen the elaborately illustrated interpretations people have created. They’re gorgeous–motivating to some, but intimidating to many others.
The other day, I heard a story about a leadership retreat where the goal was to agree upon shared values. They held a vote, and lo, there was an even split between all the values. The group could not agree on which ones represented the company. This makes sense. Our values are part of our identity.
Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer or selfie lover: Removing backgrounds has never been easier. Spending hour after hour separating foregrounds from backgrounds? There's a better way now - and it's FREE.
I’ve had the pleasure of working for a variety of clients – both large and small – over the last 25 years. In addition to my work as a design consultant, I’ve worked as an educator, leading the Interaction Design team at Belfast School of Art, for the last 15 years.
01. Minimal viable bureaucracy — I’m not one of those JFDI people. I believe that is the fastest way to get something done that will not stick. If we are in this to make real change then that isn’t good enough.
As part of a minor org shuffle this week I will no longer be working directly with Benjy. Benjy isnt a showy man, so wouldn't want a fuss, but he is a brilliant writer and his blog is one we should all keep an eye on.
It has come to my attention that many in the web standards gang are feeling grumpy about Full Stack Developer™’s lack of deep knowledge about HTML. One well-intentioned article about 10 things to learn for becoming a solid full-stack JavaScript developer said
The word “semantic” is regularly used in the context of web development. We talk about “semantic code” and the “semantics” of a given element, but what do we really mean by it, and why is it important? The word semantic comes from the French sémantique, meaning non-comparable.
They were looking for developers, interaction designers, user researchers, product and delivery managers. There were even spots for a couple of content designers (we’re a depressingly rare breed in design system teams). But there was one glaring omission: they weren’t hiring a service designer.
Our boss, Permanent Secretary Jonathan Slater, posted last week over on the Civil Service Blog about how we’re working to make the Department for Education user-centred. This post sets out a bit more about what we mean by that, and what we’re doing about it.