Week o2
Jakob Nielson
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Dr. Nielsen established the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.
Usability is defined by 5 quality components:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
- Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
My take on Jakob Nielsen is that he is pretty much a guru for web usability and other areas such as ux design. I watched two of his keynotes , ‘Vocabulary Inflation’ and ‘Augmented/Virtual Reality vs. Computer Screens’. Both I found quite interesting as they were both good insights into the usability of the web now and how the industry works.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/ar-vr-vs-screens/
John Hicks (HicksDesign)
Hicksdesign is the creative partnership of Jon & Leigh Hicks, working with clients globally design since 2002 from our studio in Oxfordshire, UK.
Mostly known for their logo work for Firefox, MailChimp and Shopify, skills cover a much broader spectrum of services and mediums.
Services
Web and Product Design
From low-fidelity wireframing and prototyping to a final coded design. They work directly in the browser as much as possible with design tools such a Figma). Also setup sites in Statamic and Kirby and work alongside front-end developers to provide a complete service.
Brand Identity
Refining and updating existing logos to increase effectiveness without losing brand equity.
Iconography
This is a speciality of theirs, with working with brands such as Skype, Spotify and Dyson.
They also can work in traditional print publishing.
From looking at their work I really like Iconography. Their icons are simplistic with the right amount of detail so thy are easily identifiable. I think as I continue on in the course I will refer back to Hicks as future inspiration.
reference websites – https://hicks.design/
Tim Brown
Tim Brown is a designer, author, speaker, and maker of tools, with a special interest is typography.
Brown has been designing websites and practising typography since 2003. He is ‘Head of Typography’ at Adobe helping people find, organise and use different fonts. Alongside this , Brown has wrote the book ‘Flexible Typesetting’ on how to make websites and apps look better and how the web has changed typography.
For me personally from looking at what Tim Brown does , I wasn’t too interested on is book and thesis works, but I did continue research onto his twitter and found some of his design work he’s done at home due to the pandemic. I really liked his letters he did , I think it’s a cool way of exploring different letter types through designing your own with there own characteristics. Same with the below pattern I found of his , very graphic but also very elegant. I also included this pressure exercise he did as it reminded me of the work I was doing for ixd101 – point, line and plane. I think if i were to go down the route of specialising and looking more into typography then Brown’s works would be a good starting point of reference.
reference websites- https://tbrown.org/
twitter – @timbrown
Week 03
Una Kravets
Una Kravets is a Brooklyn-based developer who’s is as a Developer Advocate at Google Chrome. Previously was the Director of Product Design at Bustle Digital Group and worked on building maintainable design systems as a UI Engineer at both DigitalOcean and IBM Design. I found Una’s Github to try to see what work she did that I would find interesting, she has a repo up on a set of Instagram like filters which I found was a cool concept and I also looked into her youtube page and found her videos to be quite useful for knowing about industry and different tips on different code etc. Also on her Github I found a repo that had links set up with html and css sources in it that you could use for different effects for your webpages , which again for a student is quite helpful to refer back to if I ever need to add any specific effects into my webpages.
reference websites – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJnidRIv3o1hf_YBWjKFljg
https://una.im/
https://github.com/una
Sara Soueidan
Sara Soueidan is an independent remote lead design engineer, author and speaker based in Lebanon. Sara has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Sciences but everything she mostly knows now is self-taught. Sara works in writing CSS, SVG, and presentational JavaScript that powers Web user interfaces. With a focus on responsive design, semantic markup, accessibility, and performance. Again I found it difficult to find an interest point with this profile but I did find some examples of the websites Sara has built which I liked.
reference website – https://www.sarasoueidan.com/about/
Vic Bell
Vic Bell is an Illustrator , Iconographer and a Brand Designer
reference website – https://www.vicbell.co.uk/
Week 05
Abstract Series
Week 06
Pentagram Design Studio (Giorgia Lupi)
IDEO
UsTwo
Week 09
Offset Dublin Archive