Mobile app design: Clutter free using 1% prominence.

By now, it’s no secret that making mobile products has a unique set of design challenges. All companies and individuals making mobile products struggle with this. Finding the right balance between power and ease of use on a 3″ – 4″ screen is hard.

It really all boils down to the natural rule of features:

More features => harder to understand, more useful.
Fewer features => easier to understand, less useful.

So if you just add more features, without applying careful thinking about the whole experience and especially the experience for new users, you’ll inevitably make a complicated product.

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The problem with “Lorem Ipsum” and What You Can to Do Instead.

Usually when designers are designing both print and website layouts, banner ads and other user interfaces, they need to have some text copy to work with. Most of the time, the client or the company they are working for doesn’t have text copy prepared, so designers usually place so called “Lorem Ipsum” content into their designs.

Lorem Ipsum has been used for many decades as placeholder content in print layout designs. It’s based on latin, but is actually just gibberish and doesn’t have any meaning. It’s purpose is to divert the reader’s attention away from the text itself and onto the layout and the design. That seems very logical.

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I like these fonts

Two fonts I like.

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How to Draw an Equilateral Triangle in Photoshop CS5 (updated)

An equilateral triangle, in case you’ve forgotten, is a triangle composed of lines that are all of the same length.

For some reason I started thinking about those kinds of triangles the other day and wanted to create one, for use in a pattern or something.

I could have opted to just google for an image of one, but I wanted to draw one by hand. I started by creating a shape using the pen tool (p), but I found out quickly that it’s not intuitively easy.

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New Vodafone in Iceland website launched

The Vodafone website in Iceland has just undergone a redesign. It was designed by the amazing web agency Kosmos & Kaos, which is also based in Iceland.

I’m very grateful to have been able to partake in the project. I helped with the CSS, initial HTML and most of the Javascript interactions on the website, and I’ve got to say I’m pretty proud of the work. That includes some nice CSS3 effects, a custom parallax slider, the modern dropdown menu etc.

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Apple’s design inspired by Dieter Rams

Somebody tweeted this link out today: 1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s Future. The title is link bait and inaccurate, but I found the article fascinating.

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Jakob Nielsen on why the WSJ app gets bad reviews

Jakob Nielsen recently published this post, where he (and I guess his team) analyze why the Wall Street Journal mobile app gets such bad customer reviews.

It all stems from a horrible interface where the customers are led to believe that they need to pay separately for the monthly subscription to to the mobile app, when in fact it’s free for existing subscribers.

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Online Magazine Launched: Nordic Innovation

I’ve been working together with the great people at the startup hub Klak (See http://klak.is/) to launch a new magazine called Nordic Innovation.

It’s an online magazine focused on startups, innovation and design in the Nordic countries. The first issue has some amazing interviews with out-of-the-box people. I encourage you to give it a read.

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Designing Great UI is like Cleaning

Usually, when you need to put something down, you just place it on the next table and don’t think much about it. After a few days (or weeks/months/years) your appartment looks like shit and you have to clean it up. How do you clean? One thing at a time.

So one by one you take each item lying on the floor, on a table, in a shelf and find it a new home. Sometimes you can see a pattern in all your stuff that’s lying around and you might find a good place to put many of those things, like a cupboard a drawer, etc. Often you’ll already have great places to put them in, so you put them there.

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Previewing fonts using Google’s font directory

Now you can preview fonts in the Google font directory. This is exactly the kind of thing Google does incredibly well. It also gives you the CSS needed to make the font appear the way it does in the preview. Nice one Google. Font Preview – Google Font Directory.

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Google’s new Font Directory is a Disaster

Yesterday, Google released the “Google Font Directory”: A list of free fonts that can be embedded and used directly from their site. It’s a promising service and a good boost for fonts on the web.

However, I wanted to try to use one of the fonts for this blog and the results were pretty surprising.

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Bit the bullet, redid the layout

I bit the bullet and added the sidebar on this blog’s theme. I wanted to keep the blog design really simple and clean with no side column, but I think it’s easier to browse the articles etc when you have the categories, etc.

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