Companies often tout their “culture” as a reason to you should consider working there, but often what they pass off as culture amounts to little more than a foosball table and free snacks. In this excerpt from Creative Culture, Justin Dauer draws direct connections between an organizations’ true culture and the design work that it does.
Articles
Mr. Roboto: Connecting with Technology
Behavior change design creates entrancing and effective products. In this excerpt from Chapter 9 of Engaged, Amy Bucher shares insights into using personalization to create meaningful user experiences.
Color Craft & Counterpoint: A Designer’s Life with Color Vision Deficiency
There’s a common cognitive dissonance about design: that good design can’t come from designers with color vision deficiencies. Much to the contrary, people with CVDs are far more aware of color and usability gaps, and can be invaluable during the design process. Sharing his first hand perspective as a color blind web professional, Noah Glushien discusses his career, living with CVDs, and how to enhance projects.
Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice
From banking to civil services to education, the internet intersects every part of our lives in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago. And yet the web remains inaccessible to vast swathes of people, with code issues far from the only roadblock. Olu explores the complexity of true accessibility, and offers a thoughtful approach to building a safer and more welcoming web.
Figure It Out
How much do you really know about color? In this excerpt from Figure It Out, Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast dive deep into the science around color, cultural aspects of how color is perceived, and how our thoughts on color have evolved over time.
Jobs To Be Done
Ever find solutions before you find the problems? In this excerpt from The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, Jim Kalbach gives some advice on aligning innovation to customer needs, including creating a jobs-driven roadmap and using job stories to solve specific design problems.
Usability Testing for Voice Content
It’s an important time to be in voice design, but it’s not without its own challenges. Content in voice-driven interfaces can vary wildly from that of traditional websites, which might leave many of us wondering about our existing approaches to usability testing. Preston So not only shows us how to reframe these challenges into opportunities, but as advantages for the medium itself.
Cross-Cultural Design
How much consideration have you given to how the text of your site is rendered when it’s localized? Do you consider whether your webfonts load in China? How dense your paragraphs appear in Korean? How your buttons grow (or shrink) in Japanese? Senongo Akpem covers all this and more in this excerpt from Cross-Cultural Design.
Standards for Writing Accessibly
In this excerpt from Writing Is Designing, Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle discuss critical accessibility considerations for content authors, including reading order, references to additional content, and instructions.
Making Room for Variation
Design systems exist to bring unity, cohesion, and harmony to our designs. That said, the best design systems are flexible enough to enable variation while still maintaining connectedness between those variants. In this excerpt from Expressive Designs Systems, Yesenia Perez-Cruz goes deep on what it takes to create design systems that enables intentional, meaningful variation.
