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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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How To Design User Interfaces

Note: the image below was posted as a bit of an exper­i­ment, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, fol­low­ing a brief Pho­to­shop skir­mish between Didier and me. While no one has com­plained, I have one thing to say just in case: Zeld­man, please don’t kill us ;-)

How To Design User Interfaces

 

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

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15 comments on “How To Design User Interfaces”

  1. Posted by Dave S. on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

    Duu­u­u­u­u­u­u­ude!

  2. Posted by Andrew on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

    Sweet! I’m pick­ing this one up.

    Andrew

  3. Posted by Ethan on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

    Now that is a pim­priffic book cover.

  4. Posted by Scrivs on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

    And min­i­mal­ism again shows why it has no equal.

  5. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

    I would be impressed, and might even buy the book, had you not used the hor­rific hand cur­sor that was forced onto the world by Netscape.

    The orig­i­nal pixel per­fect cur­sor designed by Bill Atk­it­son for Hyper­Card that we also use in Pho­to­shop is, IMHO, the best hand cur­sor ever designed. All the oth­ers are cheap imi­ta­tions that should be burned at the alter of shoddy icon design.

    Smack down on that! 8^)

  6. Posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004.

    Andrei, don’t you think your pref­er­ence is a tad biased? ;-)

    Of course, I agree with you com­pletely. We might just have to issue a revised version…

  7. Posted by Keith on Thursday, January 29th, 2004.

    Very nice work fel­las! Can’t wait to pick it up! How long’s the wait?

  8. Posted by Ian on Thursday, January 29th, 2004.

    That is one of the clean­est page designs I have seen in a long time. The rough to smooth (for­ground to back­ground) tran­si­tion is what does it for me.

  9. Posted by Jack on Friday, January 30th, 2004.

    Very clean. The author’s names are also very mod­estly sized.

    If it was up to me, I’d be tempted to put ZELDMAN across the top in mas­sive letters. ;)

  10. Posted by Steven on Friday, January 30th, 2004.

    The image is perfect..and can’t wait till I can pick up the book.

    But can i as (sorry if this sounds dumb to you) why would Zeld­man want to “kill you” ?

  11. Posted by Marko on Monday, February 2nd, 2004.

    Nice! Don’t for­get to put ama­zon link when it come out — for non-US-buyers : )

    I can only assume that Zeld­man still doesn’t know he’s going to write fore­word — if that’s the case, this would be very orig­i­nal way to ask him and a very funny scenario : )

  12. Posted by Egor Kloos on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2004.

    ooooh I smell trou­ble. Zeld­man will turn into da HULK! ;)

    Good look­ing cover, but for once I hoped to see some­thing not so min­i­mal. Min­i­mal has it’s place but I believe web­stan­dards could ben­e­fit from a richer approach. We wouldn’t want peo­ple to think that good inter­face design is purely a min­i­mal affair. The suc­cess of com­pa­nies like 37signals shouldn’t be seen as the only truth.

  13. Posted by Dan Rubin on Thursday, February 5th, 2004.

    Egor: I agree that doing some­thing just because other design­ers have had suc­cess with it is not the best rea­son­ing (though fol­low­ing suc­cess is not really a bad idea per se), but min­i­mal design has its place, and its fol­low­ers. The web­stan­dards effort could prob­a­bly ben­e­fit from more rich graph­ics in its pub­lic image, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t also ben­e­fit from min­i­mal designs. We hap­pen to pre­fer a min­i­mal­ist style, so that is what our work reflects. Our pri­mary goal is to pro­duce well-designed work, whether for an elec­tronic user inter­face, a cor­po­rate iden­tity pack­age, or a book cover — if a project would be bet­ter suited by more visu­ally involved art­work, then that’s what we’ll do.

  14. Posted by fraew on Sunday, February 22nd, 2004.

    i believe the ami­gaOS hand-cursor would have been avail­able before Hyper­card was released, though i don’t think it was ever a _default_ cur­sor, as such..

  15. Posted by Design Services on Monday, March 8th, 2004.

    I like the cover, and I think that min­i­mal­ism is good here. It doesn’t make us think in a cer­tain way, it leaves us space for cre­ation. The only thing I don’t like is the hand cur­sor, which doesn’r fall into the style. Any­way the gen­eral impres­sion is quite good.