Interface Design Archive

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Contrast is King in Design

Tweet“If you can make a solid design in black, white, and shades of gray, it will often allow you to translate your design to almost any color combination—as long as that color combination maintains... 
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Quick and Dirty Remote User Usability Testing

Tweet“There are three basic approaches to conducting quick remote interface tests, whether you’re testing live websites, designs, wireframes, or prototypes. The approach you take will depend mostly... 
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How to Find the Perfect Color and Create a Color Palette

Tweet“No single visual element has more effect on a viewer than color. Color gets attention, sets a mood, sends a message. But what colors are the right ones? The key is that color is relational.... 
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UI Pattern Documentation Review

Tweet“To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization. Development teams... 
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View Your Web Pages in Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer Browsers

Tweet“How many times have you had to debug your web pages on virtual or multiple machines running different versions of Internet Explorer? Or had to wait for a slow web service to return renderings... 
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Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities

Tweet“Such problems often come from trying to make a Web site accessible without understanding how people with disabilities actually use the Web. The challenge for UX designers is to find ways of... 
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20 Steps to Better Wireframes

Tweet” Possibly the biggest mistake in any development project is failure to plan. Recently, the owner of a prospective start-up told me that planning was unnecessary and a good developer could just... 
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An Overview of Prototyping and Interactive Design

Tweet“In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings,... 
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Anatomy of an Iteration

Tweet“Unfortunately, we’ve found that many teams don’t know how to iterate effectively. Good iteration is a deliberate activity, with four important stages: planning, implementing, measuring,... 
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Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

Tweet“Whereas a design pattern is a common solution to a specific, recurring problem (such as pagination interfaces), an interaction design framework is a set of design patterns and other... 
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Use of Photos in Interaction Design

Tweet“The barrier between web pages and desktop software is beginning to disappear, and modern rich client user interface technologies such as Silverlight/WPF, Air, or Java FX enables designers to... 
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User Type Views & Annotations with Polypage Software

Tweet“Here is another very good Polypage HTML wireframe submitted by Joey Marchy from nGen Works. Two interesting uses of Polypage make themselves visible in this sample. First, on the upper left... 
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Leveraging XHTML Code as a Design and Specification Platform

Tweet“One of the biggest problems with wireframes is the lack of a standardized notation. In other words, my wireframes certainly don’t look anything like your wireframes. This means that visual... 
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Pattern Languages for Interaction Design

Tweet“An interaction design pattern is not a step-by-step recipe or a specification. It’s a set of things we’ve learned that tend to work in clearly defined situations as well as some known issues... 
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Recreating the Button

Tweet“These buttons just launched in Gmail yesterday, and they’ve been in Google Reader for two months now. The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can... 
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Educating Clients about Information Architecture

Tweet“I often tell clients that IA [information architecture] establishes the baseline, or foundation, for a solid site structure. It helps create the traffic patterns and navigational routes that... 
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Eight Ways to Save Your Client Money

Tweet“Part of being a freelancer is helping clients understand precisely what they are getting themselves into when it comes to contracting a designer or developer. You can write a great proposal... 
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40 Useful Photoshop Web Design Tutorials

Tweet“In this collection, you’ll find 40 high-quality tutorials on creating web layouts from scratch using Photoshop. This article contains a copious variety of tutorials to help you learn and... 
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Review of 16 User Interface Design Tools

Tweet“People constantly ask me what the best prototyping or mockup tool is.  My standard answer is “whichever tool you are most comfortable/experienced with.”  But just to cover all the bases... 
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Using Adobe Fireworks to Create Interface Design Prototypes

Tweet“So my choice of using FW for prototyping is most definitely not a statement about it being a great prototyping tool overall, just that it works great for me personally because I can go all... 
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