CategoryDesign Patterns

February 24, 2014 — The off-canvas flyout menu has taken over as the primary navigation pattern for mobile layouts — even some desktop layouts have jumped on board. And for good reason: An off-canvas menu is a great way to maintain context while giving the user a lot of additional information. Read more…

January 2, 2014 — Research wall, design wall, research board, ideation wall, inspiration board, moodboard, pinboard — Working walls are known by countless names. Underlying them all is a single idea: that physically pinning our sources of inspiration and work in progress, and surrounding ourselves with them, can help us to rearrange concepts and unlock breakthrough insights. Read more…

October 9, 2013 — Behind every successful design is a dynamic creative team, and it takes all kinds of personalities and skills to get the job done. However, the culture and expectations of a design agency are often largely centered on one outspoken, gregarious personality. Read more…

May 17, 2013 — Good typography has always been a defining aspect of effective Web design, and this holds true especially for websites in which the emphasis is on presenting a large amount of content — specifically, articles, news and stories. Read more…

March 1, 2013 — One of the most famous interfaces in sci-fi is gestural — the precog scrubber interface used by the Precrime police force in Minority Report. Using this interface, Detective John Anderton uses gestures to “scrub” through the video-like precognitive visions of psychic triplets. Read more…

February 1, 2013 — One of the best patterns for browsing a small collection of featured products is the carousel. Unfortunately, many mobile app implementations do not offer an engaging or satisfying carousel experience and are not effective at driving conversions. Read more…

August 10, 2012 — The accelerometer embedded in our smart devices is typically used to align the screen depending on the orientation of the device, i.e. when switching between portrait and landscape modes. This capability provides great opportunities to create better user experiences because it offers an additional layout with a simple turn of a device, and without pressing any buttons. Read more…

July 12, 2012 — Mobile users and mobile usage are growing. With more users doing more on mobile, the spotlight is on how to improve the individual elements that together create the mobile user experience. Read more…

July 5, 2012 — Despite a great deal of mobile innovation, many creators of financial apps still copy their interface patterns from the desktop Web, even though these patterns are not as well suited to the mobile space. Small screens, custom controls, divided attention and fat fingers demand different thinking when designing for mobile. Read more…

June 13, 2012 — Emergency car shopping is no fun. This past month was the second time I had to shop for a car in a short timeframe without advance warning. Like most informed shoppers, I went online to get a feel for my options, armed with knowledge of what I was looking for: apart from safety, gas mileage and reliability, it had to comfortably seat six and not require me to take out a second mortgage. Read more…