cooop

Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. Is anyone aware of the technologies or behaviours at the time that inspired the novel?

I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that culture was very different then and have been always been curious as to how he came to his prediction.

Inspect element on it ;)

I've never been to SF, but I'd imagine that the tag's popularity lies in its irony, not the fact that it's a hard hitting sociopolitical statement.

A large aspect of design that separates great professional designers from amateurs is very hard to teach. It can be described as training your eye and developing your taste. This simply comes from repetition and practise. Ira Glass articulates this well describing the creative process — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY

Another aspect of design is the mindset and mentality required when looking to solve a problem. Something I feel often gets overlooked in the software world, where culture is generally engineer focused. IDEO pitch this in as 'design thinking'. While I'm not so keen on the term they do a good job of communicating the importance of certain mental traits that designers possess that are key to the design process.

Sketch. Considering a user flow/feature or user story? Sketch out 50 ideas, explore and exhaust all possible scenarios, no matter how achievable, obvious or silly. Get it down on paper. I often think that getting the idea down on paper allows my mind to forget on it and move on to another potential solution. Try to not let your technical expertise constrain this exploration, that'll come later as you whittle your ideas down.

Personally, if I have the time I quite like to produce hi-fidelity sketches. It may seem frivolous when a quick sharpie sketch will do, but as I spend time sketching I find the thinking time valuable and often find myself with another piece of paper jotting down notes/ideas etc.

Learn to draw — I believe designers should sketch and draw. There are so many lessons to be learnt that translate to what we do when designing interfaces. It provides a foundation in understand proportion, lighting, white space, suspense etc. It's also an exercise in discipline and training your brain to accurately produce the image in your minds eye.

> The letters are hanging in the air, i think a good demonstration would show the baseline of the letters to coincide with the line pattern!

Why?

Like OP has demonstrated, this isn't how CSS works.

To do so because this is how things are done in print is backwards.

You could argue letters sitting on their baseline feels nicer to you, though I'd argue this was form over function.

Nice work, OP.

> I'd like to learn more but the religious aspects are a turnoff.

This is a shame. Within the frivolous details we debate so much religion holds a wealth of wisdom and value that anyone can apply to their lives and benefit from.

I took a similar stance when getting into meditation. I was looking for a way to deal with stress and I was certainly not "religious". I quickly found that modern/western Buddhism is stripped free of a lot of the Asian cultural traditions that I perceived as religion.

This generalisation of interface visual styles being either 'flat' or 'skeurmorphic/not-flat' concerns me.

I've experienced interfaces both good and bad that sit at either ends of the spectrum. It's hard to say which is better than the other because in reality most interfaces seem to land somewhere in the middle.

I find the whole debate rather shallow. As designers we should be educating others that a style is the result of a variety of factors such as branding, fashion, originality, time constraints, content, function, hardware, software etc etc.

I've already been asked by clients for "flat design" and it makes me cringe every time.

Good call. I intend it's use to be temporary for that reason e.g. quickly scribble down a phone number/website/name etc to refer to asap.

Forgive me for the shameless plug...but thought this might be useful for other HNers and related to OP.

I put together a little project that uses the browsers localstorage so you can jot notes down and come back to them, I find it useful as I'm always in the browser, hope you do too: http://a5.gg

Both, I guess.

Any reason why? Or is this a spam account?

Put this together this afternoon.

I've been after something to quickly jot down the odd piece of information that I can access later in the day when browsing the web.

Hopefully you find it useful.

Criticism/thoughts/ideas greatly appreciated.

I should add, since all the hard work here lies in the work of others here — garlic.js is a great plugin for handling localstorage.

Cheers

Jason

Yea, that's totally our fault. We added an email signup form, but screwed something up. It should be working now!

Ah, that sucks. Sorry about that. We haven't run into this.

This may be due to your PDF export settings or the library we're using to render the PDFs.

We'll look into it.

Definitely a feature we have planned for the near future as well as some handy pro features.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'd be interested to hear what novels others think should be read and why...

How in this context is 'flat' honest? Honest to what?

These guys are confused, they're lying to themselves.

Honesty in the context of industrial design takes into account the materials, manufacturing and physical form.

And in graphic design, respecting the limitations of print.

Pixels are intangible. The 'honest' that's respected within industrial/graphic design, fields that have influenced this new 'flat' digital style do not translate due to the fact that pixels are intangible. The ideals that defined the modernism movement were based on the tangible.

What if a "non-flat" design improved communication/interaction? E.g. I touch this button therefore using 3D to communicate such interaction would make sense.

The designers that promote these ideals are confused.

Honesty for me in this context comes down to the HTML/CSS/JS crafted to create these visual and interaction elements.

Duck.com redirecting to Google sucks.