Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
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Posts about design
October 8th, 2011

decodering:

16 Pixels for body copy. Anything less is a costly mistake.

As a farsighted web designer who routinely bumps up the text size on every single website, I beseech you, fellow designers, check out this article, or Wilson Miner’s excellent article on the subject, Relative Readability.

September 28th, 2011
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

From Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes. I wonder if SJ amended this philosophy at all when he re-joined Apple.

August 23rd, 2011

Recently, in our industry, I’ve noticed a disturbing increase of the term ‘Visual Design’. It’s often used to describe a job title, or a step in a UX design process; ‘we’ve done the strategy, the product definition, the prototyping… now, let’s make it pretty with some visual design. We need a Visual Designer to do that’. This confuses and bothers me. So, rather than have a weekly debate about it on Twitter, I thought I’d pen a few words here to make my point.

…honestly, I don’t know a single good designer who would call themselves a visual designer, or what they do as ‘Visual Design’.

Mark Boulton, Visual Design is not a thing. I couldn’t agree more. This quote’s final sentence is exactly the conclusion I’ve come to recently, which is that every great designer I know would never simply call themselves a visual designer, or a UX designer.

August 22nd, 2011

Stanton & Company, by OCD | The Original Champions of Design. This is one of the most perfectly kerned bits of type I’ve ever seen.

August 18th, 2011

soxiam:

Responsive, grid-based layout design

bobulate:

Eno on unadventure:

“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. “I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”

August 11th, 2011
August 8th, 2011

Unused Rand logo for Ford, via Paul-Rand.com :: Identity

August 4th, 2011
When you look closely at auteurs, what you often find is that their real genius is for the the assembly of creative teams, trusting the right people with the right tasks at the right time. Sure, they make the final decisions, but they are choosing between alternatives created by others.
July 19th, 2011

As a technical woman, this is your introduction and the first thing you have to learn is how to get back up and walk right back into a situation where the likelihood of getting punished for participating is one. How you choose to react to this determines the rest of your career in technology. If it’s too painful you’ll retreat to management, if you can tough it out your career will be limited because the very tools you develop to survive have other social consequences.

…Overall it’s awesome to encounter other women because while you grow accustomed to quirks of a room full of men (the jostling, the chest beating, the pissing contests, the egos, etc.), it does get old. When another woman is thrown into that mix, you get to avoid the old script and reevaluate the dynamic so it’s more interesting. However, you and everyone else is accustomed to women in the facilitator manager role, not in the making technical decisions role. Typically your collaborative and directional contributions almost always fare better than your technical contributions. If you pay attention to those social cues, you may start to subtly pull yourself out of the rough and tumble technical decision making and retreat into the facilitation role. If you ignore the social cues, you have to assert yourself aggressively into the technical conversation and take some lumps. If you choose that aggressive path, you wil be even more alone because those likely less technical women in the room with you don’t have the expertise to back you up.

July 18th, 2011

Simon Wistow casually tossed me his copy of Lucky Peach last night. I couldn’t put it down for an hour. Amazing design, well-written articles, and ridiculous-sounding recipes. I often find it hard to read McSweeney’s publications, but this one was genuinely accessible.

July 13th, 2011
However, while surfers may be more trusting, online shoppers are 30% less loyal to online businesses than in 2007.
Author of the study, Dr Brent Coker, said the increase in online consumer trust is largely linked to the visual appeal of websites. “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence. As the internet has become prettier, we are venturing out, and becoming less loyal.”
“With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates agreater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.
July 8th, 2011
Have the UX team responsible for writing the PRDs. Product Managers should write MRDs, which do not go into detail about the feature/product. They should focus on the “problem they want to solve”. It’s the UX teams job to figure out how to solve the problem and document it.
June 18th, 2011
The majority of iteration should be done in the privacy of your own head.