I’ve used WebAIM’s Contrast Checker forever but WhoCanUse is a new color accessibility checker that adds some nice features and is certainly better looking. The breakdowns by each vision impairment with visual examples and percentage of people affected seems especially useful.
Video: An introduction to Photoshop’s Generative Fill
Adobe’s five minute demo of their new AI-based Generative Fill feature in Photoshop is absolutely incredible. Check it out:
I think using AI for iterative creation like this could be the more interesting new capability AI gives us, at least for for a little while. Fabricating new images from thin air still has so many obvious flaws (ethically, technically, and artistically) so this type of use seems like it could be both more successful while also less ethically murky.
What it looks like to be colorblind
“Living with colorblindness feels like you’re constantly being pranked by the world in subtle, irritating ways.”
From This is what it looks like to be colorblind by Andy Baio over on The Verge. An interesting look and some interactive examples visualizing the idea of colorblindness.
The Verge Color Quiz
Take The Verge’s Color Quiz to test your color recognition skills and see if you can identify the hues of the logos of various tech brands. I did pretty terrible and only got 3 out of 8 right. The most interesting bit is post quiz when they give some background of the company logos and how they changed over time.
Spotify’s TikTok redesign is making us all angry
Spotify is apparently redesigning to make the app more like TikTok with autoplaying fullscreen video/audio.
This design is what happens when you design based off trying to guess what Wall Street wants instead of what your users want and need. Been wanting to switch the family to Apple Music (via Apple One) and this looks like it’ll be the final push to get me to do so.
Does Your Product Actually Need Dark Mode?
We’ve been having the conversation regularly at the day job recently about how much time and effort we should be investing in dark theme component variants, and Brad Frost coincidentally just linked to a great article from CommandBar exploring that same question.
An Event Apart is shutting down
An Event Apart is shutting down: aneventapart.com
AEA Austin in 2012 was one of the first big design industry conferences where I didn’t feel like a complete impostor. At least not for the entire time. Ha. I was making plans to attend An Event Apart in DC in 2020 when everything shut down.
Designing autosuggest experiences
UX Magazine has a good overview that I found helpful of best practices for designing autosuggest experiences. Includes helpful examples and puts vocabulary around things like scoping, autocomplete vs autosuggest, and types of suggestions themselves.
Games UI Database
The Games UI Database is a collection of screenshots of the user interfaces of various video games, filterable by a number of different categories. Definitely interesting to look through and possibly useful reference as well.