I accidentally discovered the other day that you can bold words and sentences in your text messages. It’s rather simple really, in whatsapp, while typing your message, add a star before and after the the word you wish to bold. It will not display bolded until you send. Do the same for sentences, add a star at the beginning of the words you wish to bold and the end of the sentence. Simple, bold, text messages.
2 out of 3 device updates from Apple
I was pleasantly surprised today to see a few device updates from Apple. I called two of them out in my previous post just over a week ago. Pretty damn impressive. The keyboard and mouse have lithium-ion batteries which are recharged by usb to lightning charger. The devices aren’t hugely different, but glad I won’t have to keep buying more batteries.
Go check out the new Apple Accessories
3 device updates I’d like to see from Apple
I’m always hugely impressed by the advances in design from Apple, the latest including the Apple Pencil for the iPad Pro, the iPhone 6s and the new Apple TV, to name a few. But there seem to be a few opportunities missed, and not only in the past year, in the past few years.
Keyboard and Mouse
I love my magic mouse, and the tiny bluetooth keyboard is dead sexy, but both have a monster flaw. They are still powered by batteries. It seems sensible to me to include a Lightning connector to charge these devices. Not only would it save us money on batteries, the frustration of running out of power and the bulkiness of these devices. The mouse and keyboard could slim down and charging would be a breeze.
Display
With the advances in touch technology, I am always disappointed that Apple has not released a touch screen for their iMac, MacBooks and Thunderbolt displays. These are all incredible systems and pack loads of features and power, so supporting a touch screen doesn’t seem too much of stretch given the success of their current mobile touch devices.
Storage
I understand cloud technology and I certainly understand that in first world countries wifi and data aren’t costly and in huge abundance, especially to the wealthy who can afford an Apple device, but for the rest of us, using the cloud is not a reliable option. I have uncapped ADSL at home, and I have not been able to upload my iTunes library and downloading is not even an option given how much data costs. Their needs to be larger storage on devices as currently I cannot even keep music on my MacBook if I still want room for my work. If storage on the device is not an option, then better, faster external devices need to be created, so I can keep my iTunes data on an external drive, but stream it as conveniently as if it was running off my device.
I have loads more things they could improve on, but given how awesome their devices are in general, I think this is all I could expect to improve on for now.
2015 Web Design Trends
I recently taught a web design fundamentals course and at the end I shared some of the most common web design trends I have noticed during 2015. I have not and will not attempt to predict what will come, but there is certainly two obvious directions we seem to be going into. Firstly there’s the rich multimedia experiences, that care less about download speeds, but offer visitors something entertaining, something like Flash websites used to do, before Steve pulled the plug. I have a huge amount of respect for the efforts these teams have gone to, given how difficult this is to do with todays technology. The second trend is just he opposite, super simple sites that focus more on content, speed and minimalism. I recently re-designed re-aligned my personal site and unconsciously added a few trends without even realising it. I simply had no consistent images I wanted to use, so I decided the use of colour, large fonts and minimalism would suit me better. Hope you like my list.
Hidden Main Menus
With only a hamburger menu on the right hand side, the navigation is hidden, only on selection to reveal a full screen navigation that is hard to ignore. I’m sure there are other’s who may have done this before, but I first noticed that Teehan + Lax were early adopters of this technique.
Make it Big
Large full screen backgrounds are nothing new, but large fullscreen videos that seem to load relatively fast, are just epic.
Multimedia Experiences
The team at ultranoir have crafted an amazing online experience, the likes of which I have not seen since Flash ruled the rich media experience online.TimeSifht165 is a Digital & Interactive Fan Artwork inspired by the exceptional story of a unique French car : The Delahaye 165s and the amazing thing, is you can drive the car with your desktop keyboard or through your phone.
Patterns
I’ve started spotting patterns everywhere as a way of breaking the large device focussed stereotype layouts that were all of the web over the past couple of years. They re not only gorgeous, fill the screen, but they can be interactive. The light vector graphics also help with speed, but still offer a richer visual appearance.
Typography Microsites
It’s interesting to see a font get an entire site dedicated to it. Font microsites are popping up everywhere and none as slick as the FS Millbank microsite, which is gorgeous on any device.
Flat Design
Flat design is everywhere and with SVG being the preferred image format, I doubt flat design is going anyway any time soon. Love it or hate it, it makes sense in our multi device world where speed and vectors are king.
No more Boxes
It’s fantastic to see html sites breaking out of their grid like structures and telling stories in new ways. Again similar to how Flash sites were built, this is another tribute to the interactive era of the past, or maybe the beginning of an exciting future.
Simplicity
Simple, clean, content focussed sites that purely drive the message home make sense when we consider how despite faster internet bundles, the internet just seems to be getting slower.
No header background
Almost every template you find these days has the same large image background, and while we love the large format video experience, sometimes it’s simply lovely not having a large image in the background. Another great example of simplicity.
Very Large Typography
Someone commented during my course that this site reminds them of the mad men era ads, where there was a huge focus on copy driving the campaign message home. With the use of web fonts, we can pretty much use any BOLD font we like and do something beautiful with words and type.
Speed & Performance
I love how Google have stated that performance is a feature. Speed is super critical to users, UX people cannot stress enough the importance their research has identified speed as one of the most important things to users. But it’s more than that, with pages filled with all sorts of animation and other functionality, how fast these services perform is equally as important. People want a fast, smooth experience and taking into consideration speed and performance will ensure your site is a hit, not only with users, but with search engines too, who now rank you on both speed and performance. I think this will be the biggest trend going forward and as you might have noticed with the minimal websites above, simple is influenced by speed.
Reducing phone reach
If you’re like me, you reach for your phone without even thinking about it far too often, mindlessly switching between apps, distracted by the latest photo, video or micro writing. I can’t remember whose article I was reading, but some guy mentioned that one of the best things he ever did was take his wife’s advice to remove his Facebook app from his phone. I didn’t reach for my phone straight away, but it didn’t take me long before I found myself mindlessly scrolling through my Facebook feed, so I decided to take it off.
Facebook isn’t an app I save many stories, thats something I do on Medium and Twitter a lot. But I tend to just end up with a bunch of articles I bookmark or favourite and never really get round to reading. With Facebook off my phone, I still got hugely distracted by these other apps, and while I thought it was harmless, I realised I was holding up people wanting to use gym equipment I was on, while I was fiddling with my phone between sets. So I made a conscious decision to remove Medium. But I was not ready to say cheers to Twitter, it’s my realtime news, how could I possibly remove that?
A couple of irate tweets later, I realised that I have another bad habit, besides favouriting tweets I want to read later and never do, I tend to tweet on the fly and post stuff with little or no thought. Thats risky stuff, so I decided to take Twitter off my phone.
Instinctively I still reach for my phone, but with Instagram being the only social network I still have on the device, I tend to spend less time looking down and it has not only allowed me to be less distracted, but it is saving my battery life. I will confess that I spend most of my day in front of at least one screen or another, and I certainly still visit these sites (I am experimenting with not using Facebook at all, however thats a future post) and I still use apps like Instagram, but still this is a small victory, I really do reach for my phone a lot less.
Non-responsive web design
I’m sure you have all heard the buzz words, responsive web design (RWD), adaptive or responsive sites. But incase you have been living on the moon.
Responsive web design is fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. It was first defined in an article and a book by Ethan Marcotte.
To me, this term is already old school. If anything we should be talking about, non-responsive web design … websites that have not adopted RWD principles. To me simply, sites are responsive. We are so past the desktop browser being the only way to view a website. So please, if you haven’t already, do your people a favour and make sure you don’t have a non-responsive web design.
Material Wealth
If you are interested in learning user interface and user experience design techniques, then a good place to start, given the wealth of useful knowledge shared, is the Material Design site by Google.
We challenged ourselves to create a visual language for our users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. This is material design. This spec is a living document that will be updated as we continue to develop the tenets and specifics of material design.
I consider myself fairly seasoned when it comes to interaction design, but if for no other reason than learning how to articulate the points made, Material Design has plenty of learnings, information and inspiration.
Apple – The Song
[youtube id=WRsPnzcZ1VY mode=normal]
Today Apple reminded me of what I aspire to achieve. There holiday campaign left me with goosebumps and this is what I hope I can make people feel when they experience my work. Thank you Apple, as always, you gave me something I didn’t even know I needed.
Handoff
On Monday 2nd June, Apple announced new operating systems for their computer and touch devices, OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. There are many new features, but something that stood out for me was Handoff.
Now your Mac knows the last thing you were doing on your iOS device and vice versa. So you can start something on one device and instantly pick it up on another.
With the ability to start surfing a website on your desktop and then immediately jump onto your iPad, responsive design has never been more important. This experience is going to become seamless and I’ll bet we’ll all wonder how we ever lived without this feature, but if your site is not properly responsive or dare I say, it’s not responsive at all, the users journey might be cut short. So any developers who have not yet learnt responsive techniques and to any site owners who have not made an update, perhaps it’s about time.
The better part of 2013
Just about every person I talk to had a pretty rough 2013 and they’d just like to put it behind them and are hoping for a better year in 2014. I certainly had a challenging year and I could rant, but I’d rather attempt to highlight the most memorable moments of 2013.
I got out a bit and was lucky enough to see some of my favorite bands and entertainment. In February I watched the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rodriguez. I got covered in colour during the We Are One (Holy One) colour festival and thoroughly enjoyed my first Roller Derby. Drove out to Pretoria to a Lego fair which inspired me to start working on a minifigure installation. I painfully pedaled my way through the Joburg city one night at Critical Mass.
I’d like to remember the people we lost and celebrate their life. From our president Nelson Mandela, to celebrities like Paul Walker and everyone’s favorite gangster James Gandolfini. You were inspirational and you will be missed.
RIP
This year we used the word selfie more times than we probably should have, and all due to the smashing uptake of Instagram, currently my favorite social network. Coca-Cola’s Share-a-Coke campaign was brilliant and while I’m still waiting to get my hands on a bottle of Coke with my name on it, it’s just been brilliant. Apple announced the release of many new upgrades to their products and I’ve not seen nearly as many people upgrade to iPhone as they have the 5s, I actually do not know how I lived without the fingerprint scanner before.
#ShareaCokeza
I started the year strong, still dropping the weight and very quickly fell ill, but in the hands of the professionals I’m one organ less, but recovering nicely and getting back in shape again. I have gained a significant amount of muscle mass and I’m feeling great. I got a lot of ink, and most importantly started my back piece, which I’m hoping to complete in 2014.
We have watched some of the most amazing TV series this year, everything from Breaking Bad to Walking Dead has people talking and could very well see the revival of live TV. New series such as Ray Donovan, House of Cards, The Blacklist and Mob City have been great additions while we wait for new Game of Thrones and some final seasons of Mad Men and Californication.
I’m looking forward to 2014 and hope that it brings us all a whole lot more success, health, happiness and more of the good times.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!