There’s no shortage of posts that inspired us and sparked lively conversations over this past year. Out of those, in no particular order, are some of our favorites. We’d love to hear what was on your radar.
1. Andy Budd and the dirty little secret of our industry
“We live in a world of instant gratification, so is it any wonder that clients expect their projects to start yesterday and ship tomorrow, irrespective of how long the work actually takes? Clients usually don’t know—and often don’t care—about the intricacies of our business, and why should they? Instead they rely on our feedback to assess their schedules.”
From The Pastry Box Project
2. Butterick’s Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick
“A few hundred years of type and typography have established rules that only a fool would ignore. (Or a graphic designer keen to impress his peers.) For all those who need to communicate clearly and even add a modicum of aesthetic value to their messages, this publication provides everything you always wanted to ask but didn’t know how to.”
From PracticalTypography.com
3. The Dribbblisation of Design by Paul Adams
“There are divergent things happening in the product and interaction design community. On one hand, we have some amazing pieces of writing from the likes of Ryan Singer and Julie Zhuo, moving our craft forward. On the other hand, we have a growing number of people posting and discussing their work on Dribbble, the aggregated results of which are moving our craft backwards. This post is not about Dribbble itself, it’s about what the community on Dribbble value. I’ll use the term ‘product design’ throughout, but I’m including UX and interaction design when I do.”
From Intercom
4. How Food Companies Watch What You Eat by Mark Garrison
“Creating kitchens with this level of fine detail required entering customers’ lives. Researchers, including trained anthropologists, may spend hours with a family. It’s deep dive, personal research, the opposite of mass surveys.”
From Marketplace
5. How the ‘Failure’ Culture at Startups is Killing Innovation by Erika Hall
“Far from being the measure of disgrace it once was, failure now seems to be a sort of badge of honor. But underlying many popular Silicon Valley failure clichés is entrepreneurs’ belief that “starting companies these days is akin to doing research in the past” — as if we don’t need research when the opportunity to fail is so readily available.”
From Wired
6. Has the Recession Taken Your Experience to the Dark Side by Paul Brooks
“When a new milkshake bar opened in my local shopping mall, I was very excited; I went right over and ordered my favourite flavour (coconut, of course). The cashier responded “Would you like a regular size?” and I agreed. I paid what I considered a high price for a medium-sized milkshake and, as I left, I noticed the sizes available weren’t “Small, Regular, and Large” (as I might have expected), but rather “Tiny, Small and Regular.” Realizing I was duped, I lost my incentive to return.”
From UX Booth
7. The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don’t Consider by Kris Gale
“Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.”
From Firstround
8. The Redesign of the Design Process by Jared Spool
“Today, the best designs aren’t coming from a single designer who somehow produces an amazing solution. The best designs are coming from teams that work together as a unit, marching towards a commonly held vision, and always building a new understanding of the problem.”
From User Interface Engineering
9. CIOs Must Become Design Thinkers by Joyce Hostyn
“Delight. Beauty. Happiness. Purpose. These aren’t words you’re used to hearing when it comes to business outside of a few outliers like Disney, Apple and Zappos. But that’s starting to change. Companies like Rackspace, Intuit, ZipCar, FAB, P&G, Samsung and Commonwealth Bank of Australia are embracing emotional concepts like these as a core element of their business strategy.”
From CMS Wire
10. Good Design is Becoming a Must-have in the Enterprise, Too by Katie Fehrenbacher
“Over the past few years, a wave of consumer web startups focused on design have been making their mark on shopping, fashion, communications and social networking. But, as these startups — from Pinterest to Instagram — become billion-dollar players influencing how consumers use the web and mobile apps, the trend of design as a major tech differentiator has started to infiltrate the world of the enterprise, too.”
From Gigaom
11. How Designers Destroyed the World by Mike Monteiro
“You are directly responsible for what you put into the world. Yet every day designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change.”
From Webstock
12. The Future Of Technology Isn’t Mobile, It’s Contextual by Pete Mortensen
Next up: Machines that understand you and everything you care about, anticipate your behavior and emotions, absorb your social graph, interpret your intentions, and make life, um, “easier.”
From Co. Design
Bonus Love, Hate, and Empathy: Why We Still Need Personas by projekt202′s very own Kyra Edeker and Jan Moorman
“Good personas that enable us to have extended role-play with our users serve a need that isn’t currently filled by anything else. If the design community throws personas in the trash, they’re back to square one: the standard old argument around the product team table based on everyone’s personal opinion. The user is lost in the equation.”
From UX Magazine