Typographic trends, a “cool” typeface, and a building-block font designing tool. — Remember that Cool S that you used to draw on your desk in middle school? It has an entire font that you can download for free. Five typographic trends for 2023 from the It’s Nice That blog. These are trends that you wouldn’t find in your typical Figma project. Highlights include Hallucinating Type by Rajshree Saraf. A project that uses augmented reality to display type. Don’t let the buzz-word fool you, it’s worth the click.

On one end of the spectrum we have Ezra Klein and guests talking about a skeptical take on all this AI stuff, and on the other end we have a Learn Prompt Engineering guide that touts that “AI is currently revolutionizing many industries, including journalism, healthcare, and education.” Both interesting to take in no matter where you place yourself on this spectrum. https://learnprompting.org/docs/intro

My plan is to share the interesting design-and-tech related things that I come across every week. From documentation to real-life examples of great — or terrible — design. Stay tuned for a weekly digest. A comprehensive guide on styling websites for RTL (right-to-left) languages by Ahmad Shadeed https://rtlstyling.com/posts/rtl-styling The section on Bias Free communication on the Microsoft style guide https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/bias-free-communication

You may have heard of accessibility as being referred to as A11Y. A11Y is what’s known as a numeronym. The first and last letters of “accessibility” are preserved, replacing the remaining letters between with their sum total of 11. Digital accessibility is much more than just making your website or…

Users generally want to be in control of the system that they’re using, but sometimes it’s alright to put on auto-pilot and let it do the work for you. With most systems, the more advanced the user, the more finite control they want. A professional photographer will use the manual…

Imagine you were designing an app that did a thing. And the only UI component of that entire app was a button that said “Do The Thing“. Your users would push it, the thing would happen, and that would be it. The end. It would be effortless. But ease-of-use is…

As a UX/usability designer, one of the things that I always consider when designing interfaces and experiences is what’s known as Information Architecture (IA). IA is an important part of designing any information system. It is the scaffolding that supports the usability of that system. I’ve always considered maps as…

A TLD is a Top Level Domain. It refers to the part after the last period of a domain name. eg., .com, .ca, .net, .org, etc. The world is running out of domain names. Many of the common words and 2-and-3 letter domains with common TLDs being bought more than…

One of the more difficult parts of a usability designer’s job is empathy. The ability to think like the user, feel what the user is feeling, and be able to predict what your user will do, then reflect that in the interface and experience. If you’re a software designer, you’ll…