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: 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.
∞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.
∞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.
∞Google unveils Material You
Along with Android 12, Google debuted their new design language Material You this week at their annual I/O conference. They are going extremely heavy on dynamic colors and on end user personalization of the user interface and the results are pretty striking.
It certainly is different.
While my first impression is not exactly positive, I’ll reserve final judgement until more details are out and it is actually on phones. It is good to see Google trying something interesting and new, and it’ll be interesting if they pull back from the monochrome app icons or anything else before the final release.
Lifecycle of a Design System
With some recent changes at work, I’ve taken the lead on organizing our UX-centric content for our LevelUp live webinar series. The latest session was a overview on design systems from two of our experience architects and it is definitely worth a watch if you’re a designer interesting in getting started with design systems.
I am transitioning to a new role soon and will be leading up a design system team within a gigantic organization so have been spending a lot of time getting my head around various related topics. Design system governance and contribution models have been of particular interest, and of course Nathan Curtis’ writings have been particularly valuable.
∞
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels
Dating back 50 years at this point, LEGO has designed tiny little user interfaces meant to be recognized by human-sized humans and “usable” by minifig-sized humans as well. An Austrian interaction technologist and design engineer does a fantastic deep dive into the design of LEGO interface panels as well as their real world counterparts.
Open Peeps. A hand-drawn illustration library.
Open Peeps is a collection of hand drawn vector illustrations you can mix and match and use in any project free of charge. Super flexible and inclusive. Looking forward to using in personas or storyboards in near future.
Reimagining a Self Ordering Experience
Some great thoughts and looks into the design process self-serve pizza ordering kiosk app.