The Code Sheriff: 8 Tips for working effectively with Interface Builder
Anyone who’s ever worked on UI design knows how difficult it is to get dimensions and proportions of onscreen UI elements just right. Interface Builder, Xcode’s inbuilt editor for designing UI, has some great shortcuts and tricks that help make this onerous task easier. The delightful blog, The Code Sheriff, has a handy guide to eight such tricks, complete with GIFs for demonstration, for your pleasure.
Stackicons
This is a fantastic, open source collection of icon fonts for the web. It has all the usual icons necessary for any webpage, including the icons for Reddit, Picasa, Google+, etc., all of which are an essential aspect of the sharing nature of most modern websites. They are available in six different designs, with options for multi-colour backgrounds as well. Usage guides and examples are also available on the site, to get you started. While they are available for free, we encourage you to contribute to the site if you find them useful, to make sure efforts like this aren’t just a one-off.
Dieter Rams: Ten principles for good design
Dieter Rams is a hallowed and well respected name in the annals of industrial design. As the website states, Rams became increasingly concerned with the state of the design world around him back in the 1970s. He came up with a list of ten guiding principles (or the ‘Ten Commandments’, as they are now known among his contemporaries), for proper design. It makes for fascinating reading, and the design examples used to demonstrate each point are stunning and to the point. They are a must read for any designer – budding or experienced.
A Readable Wikipedia
Wikipedia has become an ubiquitous name amongst the general public, known mostly as the Saviour for school or college going kids. For all its fantastic utility, it sometimes takes a discerning eye to question how the experience of using an everyday item could be made even more delightful. 1910, a fantastic graphic design and art direction studio, have come up with a mockup of a new, redesigned Wikipedia, which is as simple as it is extraordinary. By refreshing typefaces and web layout, they’ve managed to make Wikipedia looks as polished as the best blogs out there. They’ve gone into painstaking detail into their thinking behind the proposed redesign, and it makes for an incredible intellectual and visual experience. We heartily recommend it.
A Modern Designer’s Canvas
Andrew Clarke, of Stuff & Nonsense 5 fame, wrote a fantastic piece for Smashing Magazine on the process of design. File this one under long reads, because there’s a lot to go through, but once you start, you won’t even notice the length. It offers an insider’s view on how to create your own canvas, as it were. Clarke has prescribed a strategy that worked for him, included real life examples and his own personal experiences, all of which serves to make the process of design more accessible, even to a layman. On a personal note, I especially enjoyed reading the first part, on ‘Finding A Medium That Best Expresses Our Interests And Talents’, because I frequently find myself staring down the barrel of a deadline with very little creative energy left. You don’t need to be a web designer to appreciate the insights Clarke has to share. It truly is a remarkable article, and is a Magnum Opus for designers.
What we published this week
– Runtastic 5
– Suny – The UV Meter App
– Fantastical 2 for iPad – The Trifecta Is Complete
– Monument Valley – A Work Of Art That Happens To Be A Game
– Keep Track of What’s About to Expire With Expires
– Scanbot Scans Your Documents to the Cloud