Information Design & User-Experience
Posts about information design and user-experience design.
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Are newspapers all washed-up?
Even though our copy of the Greenville News was drenched by a downpour this Saturday morning, my commitment to reading the paper did not wane. As I stood in my garage methodically drying wet newsprint with a discarded hair dryer, several things occurred to me: Content is king. As I dried the paper, I crumpled…
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Emotional Design (Norman, 2004)
Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things (Donald Norman, 2004) Three basic processes (visceral, emotional, and reflective) guide our interactions with the everyday things in our lives. The visceral reaction is our gut reaction; the behavioral reaction is based upon our ability to use a product; and the reflective process is the cognitive…
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Space in the Margins
When I teach Layout and Design, we spend a great deal of time talking about margins. Margins organize space in a design by allowing “white space” to offset the area containing the content on a page. For example, on this website, you’ll see a margin to the left containing, well, nothing, and a margin to…
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The Laws of Simplicity (Maeda, 2006)
The Laws of Simplicity: Design, technology, business, life by John Maeda (2006) “Simplicity is sanity,” says Patti Palmer, quoting John Maeda. “Maeda is trying to get us to examine ourselves and simplify our lives.” It’s not an attempt to have us root out our craziness, but rather to articulate balance in our lives. One of…