The Invisible Side of Design | Hacker News Reader

The Invisible Side of Design

speakerdeck.com

90 pointscwan24 comments

My favourite quote: "Some things are so well designed that we don't notice them anymore."

Also, note the site where they shared these slides. It's not slideshare.net, it's speakerdeck.com. It's easy to guess why they went with speakerdeck.com... Compare to

http://www.slideshare.net/bud_caddell/how-do-you-design-for-...

IIRC, I read this (or something very similar) in Don Norman's book "The Invisible Computer".

It is a common and popular observation, so it gets mentioned in virtually every book (or a documentary) on design.

Unfortunately there are still too many good traditional designers (who hopefully understand this observation) that are unskilled at interface design, and too many good interface designers unexposed to the history of design theory.

I loved that "well designed" example, because the mug in the photo looked to me rather poorly designed. It's very pretty, but the handle looks uncomfortable.

When I hold a mug with that handle shape, I heck of a time holding it steady. I have to use a very firm grip on the handle which is a bit tiring.

I don't mind high level overviews of concepts if they manage to successfully lead the reader to the core of the idea. However, this slideshow was not effective at communicating anything to me. At some point during the second half of this "presentation" each slide seemed to have some vague phrase or sentence that was followed by 3-5 screenshots with no explanation of what the relationship was to the context the screenshot was given in -- I started to wonder if substituting those screenshots with random ones would have any impact on the value of the presentation.

If anything, I think the awful slideshow "player" UI on this website did a better job at explaining the lack of "invisible design" than the slideshow did. I spent almost a minute trying to find a play button, because from the look of the UI I was expecting a movie. When I hit the fast forward icon I thought it just took me to a preview screen for another unrelated video.

I understand how that may seem like an overreaction given that we're used to losing more time on more meaningless things, but a good UI should only take a split second to understand.

<off-topic>I like how the site speakerdeck.com make it simple and amazing.</off-topic>

Ticks me off, however, that they litter the browser history with a tons of pages, but make it impossible to use them for anything, i.e. pressing the browser back button doesn't do anything (Chrome 14.0.835.202 on Mac OS X).

I'm a tab junkie. Everything not within the same domain typically goes into a new tab. I know what you mean though. You would have gone nuts at that HTML5 history game

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/first-ever-browser-addres...

Funny how they speak about not getting stuck in the "design trends trap" while using a slab serif font and 1px drop shadows under the text...

Interesting stuff otherwise.

I think a fair response to that is to distinguish between the micro and macro. Choice of font is arguably a micro-level trend; the presentation is dealing with issues on the macro, whole-of-page scale.

The presenter of course has to choose a font, and he can be forgiven for not choosing Times Roman, Courier or Tahoma. What he did choose is a font that, while currently in vogue, is still eminently readable.

As for the drop shadows, they also aid readability within the context of the chosen aesthetic. (And they're definitely not 1px -- probably closer to 5px by the time it's scaled up for a high resolution projector -- the shadows are proportional and appropriate for the weight of the strokes.)

What would you rather have him use? Papyrus? :) And 1px drop shadow is there for contrast to improve legibility of light on bright, not because it's trendy.

> Papyrus?

Trajan!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t87QKdOJNv8

Just to clarify my point: I pay a lot of atention to typography, and I believe it's exactly one of those invisible but crucial design choices.

There are tons of fonts that are very legible, but each of them conveys a different message. And choosing a slab serif font in 2011 just says: I'm going for the no-brainer choice, because slab-serif fonts are cool and trendy in 2011. And the same goes for drop shadows.

I was expecting more creativity from people that warn you not to fall in the trends trap.

But yes, it's perfectly legible and does the job. Just not creative in 2011.

repeatable "inspirations", design trends, and cliches all seem like a bad thing when you talk about it from a pure design perspective. but that is the primary difference between print and web design. web design is not just about making something look pretty, you are designing a user interface. and the most important thing in UI design is to use recognizable widgets, so that users know what to do and what to expect without any instruction or learning process. your awesome organic and original design might look great, but if people can't figure out how to use it it's all for nothing.

i think it's telling that the first few examples of "good" design are all non-interactive.

Talking about not being too much inspired by others, I'd love to know what colours were used all over these slides. This blue background is beautiful, add to that the cute green and white text..

> I'd love to know what colours were used all over these slides.

#1F282D, #F1F399, #BE4B14, #0164C9, #229214, plus a curious smattering of #FFFFFF and #000000.

I think it serves a great purposes; clearing out some myths about design. There are too many people right now believing design is nothing more then beauty. It's about form and function which beauty follows when designed correctly - not the inverse.

A great presentation to keep, always useful!

Anyone know what software he used to create the slides? They're beautiful, and i'm 100% sure he didn't use powerpoint!

Actually, I'd say it's entirely possible he used PowerPoint. A lot of designers will simply prepare their slides in a design-focused app such as Illustrator and then export them as images to the presentation app.

Wow, that sounds painstaking. Although you're probably right, you'd need to be working in something like illustrator to get results that look that nice.

I think you'd be surprised. The latest PowerPoint versions are surprisingly powerful. Duarte Design did some work with it to demonstrate it's power.

However, I would acknowledge that it's painstaking to make a deck that pretty because some of the elements like fonts are not built in and PowerPoint's interface doesn't necessarily make it straightforward to change the elements that make this deck stand out to you.

This presentation sumaries the capstones of design nicely.

One point I wildly disagree with: That design is not nearly half cultural pulse. To ignore the very real pull of culture, and to do your own take on it, is to build unsellable design. Moreover, customers hear this cultural leitmotif and respond because they get the reference. This is the true balance of great designers. Finding their part in the chorus.

Imagine we're talking about clothing design. It is a large formal event, a wedding or professional conference. Everyone wears the same thing out respect for the idea. If someone were to come in with a red tuxedo it may excite a few, but the last thing you'd call them was a creative visionary. Moreover, this event requires pants - and to not do so is bad news.

"Imagine we're talking about clothing design. It is a large formal event, a wedding or professional conference. Everyone wears the same thing out respect for the idea. If someone were to come in with a red tuxedo it may excite a few, but the last thing you'd call them was a creative visionary. Moreover, this event requires pants - and to not do so is bad news."

Well, unless you're Karl Lagerfeld.

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