Designers are good people. Some designs exclude people anyway. Alan Dalton explains why—too much to remember—and offers a practical fix: accessibility personas that help you recognize problems while you’re designing, not after. Homework included.
Topic: Workflow & Tools
Better collaboration through good planning. Responsive comping: obtain signoff without mockups. Design contracts for the 21st century. Get started with Git. Test websites in game console browsers. Use Style Tiles to align client and designer expectations, expedite project timelines, involve stakeholders in the brainstorming process, and serve an essential role in responsive design.
Design Dialects: Breaking the Rules, Not the System
Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.
Opportunities for AI in Accessibility
Microsoft’s Accessibility Innovation Strategist discusses AI’s potential for accessibility, emphasizing the need for responsible use and diverse teams to mitigate harm and promote inclusion for people with disabilities.
Designers, (Re)define Success First
Designing ethically may sound daunting at first, but Lennart Overkamp sets forth a template for engaging stakeholders around new priorities, exploring objectives that span from individual to global impacts, and finally measure their effects.
Writing for Designers
Words matter. Even in something as banal as a form, the words we choose can determine what someone does and what they fail to do. In this excerpt from Writing for Designers, Scott Kubie explains the purpose of prose in a design and why we need to be more intentional with how we use words.
The Cult of the Complex
’Tis a gift to be simple. ALA’s Zeldman bemoans our industry’s current fetish for the needlessly complicated over the straightforward. Escape the cult of the complex! Get back to improving lives, one interaction at a time.
Priority Guides: A Content-First Alternative to Wireframes
The sirens’ song of wireframe visuals has been the thorn in the side of many a design project. With potential to undermine user-centricity, reduce team engagement, and limit creativity when it’s most needed, wireframes can bite the unwary. In this article, Heleen van Nues and Lennart Overkamp discuss an alternative that’s far more in tune with today’s content-first, responsive design ethos, whether used as a direct replacement or to help tame wireframes’ wilder side early in a project’s life.
The Mindfulness of a Manual Performance Audit
Sometimes we need to go through the clothes in our closet item by item to separate the chaff, cruft, and impulse buys from what we truly need. An occasional performance audit done by hand, argues Chip Cullen, gives us a detailed picture of our work, increases our awareness of what we ask of our users, and allows us to shape our findings in ways that make sense to stakeholders.
Focus on What You Do Best and Outsource the Rest
There’s all this other “stuff” that has to get done in support of what you actually do for a living. It slows you down and takes away from overall productivity in your specialty, yet you think you have to do it yourself no matter how hard it is for you. Suzanne Scacca says it may be a good investment to offload and outsource some of the tasks that aren’t in your wheelhouse. It just might free up your time to do more of what you do best.
Practical Design Discovery
When we can’t trace low-level decisions back to a specific objective or problem statement, we lose sight of what we should and shouldn’t do on a project. Dan Brown shows us how to create assertions that keep design direction from unraveling.
