Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, is an interaction designer that specialises in the usability of the web and was named ‘guru of web page usability’ by The New York Times. Nielsen is responsible for the usability engineering movement improving interfaces to be more efficient and owns many patents on ways to improve the usability of technology. Jakob has criticised usability of the 1st gen iPad and Microsoft’s Windows 8 user interface with both company’s addressing some of theses issues ring mended shortly after with new releases. Due to his contributions to the field of usability and design, Nielsen has received a number of awards such as “World’s Most Influential Designers” in 2010.

Jakob Nielsen created outlined framework for the design of user interfaces in Nielsens List of Ten Heuristics which were published in his book Usability Engineering from 1993.

Don Norman

Donald Norman, also known as the ‘Godfather of UX’ is an award winning author and professor for his contributions toward the field of human centred design and user experience. He is co owner of the Nielsen Norman Group which aims to educate others on UX and using psychology to create solutions for everyday issues. It was from his book “User Centred System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction“ that the term User Centred Design became popularised. He is also well known for his book “The Design of Everyday Things“.

 

Tim Brown

Tim Brown is a British Designer who has published many books on design and is well known for his contributions towards ‘Design Thinking’ which developed the outlook on how design shapes a users experience. In 1991 Brown founded IDEO which created everyday products but with the users experience in mind and how design correlates to this experience. Although he was initially based in the UK, IDEO was moved to the US and began contributing towards the design systems that were set up schooling, business, technology and healthcare sectors. IDEO is responsible for the first Apple Mouse  and the most important product that they developed was the portable defibrillator.

Susan Kare

Susan Kare, known as the woman who gave the Macintosh a smile, is most well known for her work on the interface designs and icons she created for the Apple Macintosh. Many of these icons have become synonymous with words or options on computers that we still use today such as the floppy disk for saving, the trash can to get rid of files, the printer symbol to print things and the paint bucket. As resolution back then wasn’t particularly good, each design was created using pixels which and she took inspiration from her mothers cross-stitching patterns when constructing the pixel art. Kare created these icons on grid paper and began experimenting in this medium as there was no digital programmes created at the time where she could do so. She was also responsible for the sans-serif ‘Chicago’ font that was featured on the first Macintosh which gave it more of a modern feel and this was done so as the font would be more legible even when the computer was on ‘Grey Mode’. This typeface was replaced in 1997 with ‘Charcoal’ but was brought back soon after, in 2003 for the 3rd Gen iPods.

Jon Hicks

Jon Hicks is a graphic designer, born in England in 1972. After studying wildlife and technical illustration, Hicks went onto be a freelance graphic designer where he founded Hicksdesign. Hicks has worked with some major brands such as Spotify, Skype and Dyson and mainly works on creating logos, establishing a brand identity and web design. When working with Spotify, he developed a new set of icons, some of which have been a major source of influence in many of the icons redesign that are still used almost a decade later. Jon is most famous for his part in the creation of the Mozilla FireFox logo.

Una Kravets

Una Kravets is a Brooklyn based, front end web developer, most well known for her work with aiding the ability to style the web with the creation of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Kravets began her carrer as director with Bustle Digital Group and for a short time developed user interface at IBM design. Currently, she works at Google as a developer continuing her passion for CSS and creating more visually appealing web design. I couldnt find much information on Una Kravets other that from an about me section on her own website dedicated to web development and design.

Michael Beirut

Award-winning graphic designer Michael Beirut is most well known for his innovative design projects such as creating The New York Times logo, rebranding Mastercards logo, and even worked on the graphic design of Hilary Clintons presidential campaign while being partnered with the design firm Pentegram.

Vic Bell

Vic Bell is an English brand designer and illustrator with over 10 years of experience and has worked with major companies to create logos, icons and brand identity, for the likes of Uber and Teamwork as well as with popular designer brand Burberry. She was previously employed by Nooklyn, based in New York but is currently positioned as senior illustrator for Gitlab.

Sara Soueidan

In 2015, Sara Soueidan was nominated for Developer of the Year award. The Lebanese web developer and freelance designer holds a Degree in computer science and promotes improving user experience as well as advancing web accessibly and responsive design within many different platforms and devices. In an interview she explains how her love for web design with she was introduced to HTML in 8th grade. Since then, she has worked with Netflix and Bosch as well as receiving acknowledgement from technology giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. Soueidan also transfers the skillset to create and teaches others the importance of responsive websites through her book and many shows where she has appeared as guest speaker.

Jeffrey Zeldman

American web designer and entrepreneur Jeffrey Zeldman is renowned for his contribution toward the creation of the World Wide Web and the very first Space Jam website that he designed himself. Zeldman is involved mostly with web design and development and has published many books on these topics, most notible being ‘Designing with Web Standards’ which is considered to be the Holy Bible of modern web design which changed the entire industry. During a time were web pages could only be loaded by certain browsing applications, Zeldmans developments in HTML now meant that web pages to be accessed by many different browsers which was a breakthrough during the time.

 

 

 

Sources 

https://www.ideo.com/people/tim-brown

https://www.ted.com/speakers/tim_brown

https://hicks.design/journal/spotify-iconset

https://hicks.design/about

https://una.im/about/

https://www.sarasoueidan.com

#https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/18-24-october-2021/don-norman-godfather-of-ux-bad-design-is-bad-for-the-planet/

https://medium.com/fgd1-the-archive/original-macintosh-icons-susan-kare-1984-14ac5112c172

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-susan-kare-designed-user-friendly-icons-for-first-macintosh-180973286/

1https://www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/susan-kare

https://www.pentagram.com/

https://alistapart.com/author/zeldman/

1https://studio.zeldman.com/