Some are practical, some are poetic; all pay homage to the wonderful complexity of designing things for our fellow human beings.
- The angular size of legible text
- How to use yellow as a brand color
- The best patterns for displaying tables on mobile devices
- How to train a client to give you good feedback
- What your users would be doing if they weren’t using your app
- How long a hoverstate animation should be, in milliseconds
- What ‘chart junk’ is
- The biggest thing slowing down your website’s loading time
- What top-down lighting bias is
- Hanging punctuation
- Why certain colors clash
- The market rate for usability testing participants (60-minute session)
- What the best design of 1000 years ago looked like
- How to make a design that will be understood 10,000 years in the future
- How websites make money
- How your client’s website makes money
- Why painters never use black
- The appropriate number of characters per line for body text
- How to create an error message when your brand color is red
- When to use a grid system
- When not to use a grid system
- When to center text
- When to right-align text
- When to use a didone
- When to use a slab serif
- The minimum tap target size on both iOS and Android
- A handful of patterns for showing search results
- A handful of patterns for filtering search results
- The screen sizes of popular mobile devices
- What percentage of people look at your site on mobile
- Why Gmail bolds your search term in its autocomplete dropdown, yet Google Search bolds everything but your search term in its autocomplete dropdown
- When to use a bar chart, line chart, and pie chart
- The difference between saturation and brightness
- The font on the plaque that Neil Armstrong put on the moon
- What’s on the plaque of the Pioneer spacecraft
- The difference between inductive and deductive reasoning
- Why humanist fonts often feel warmer and friendlier than other sans serifs
- The 3 most popular fonts on Google Fonts (for the masses)
- The 3 most popular fonts on Typewolf (for the trend-setters)
- All the keyboard shortcuts on your favorite design app
- How to design matching icons
- The dimensionality of color
- The default text size on most web browsers, iOS, and in Material Design
- How to create an entire UI using just one color
- How to create an entire UI using no colors
- Why fonts with high x-heights are more legible
- At least 5 methods for putting text on top of images
- The WCAG recommended contrast ratio for body text
- The WCAG recommended contrast ratio for headline text
- What Leonardo DaVinci recommended as the first practice for beginning artists
- The most useful blend modes
- The principles of good composition
- Where to find photography that doesn’t look stock
- Four reasons a user’s search query might not turn up any results
- How to write an error message
- How to write a call-to-action
- How a screen reader works
- And how many people use one
- What not to put in your design portfolio
- How to present a design
- What “satisfice” means
- Which is more important – aesthetics or usability
- What a poisson distribution is
- Jakob’s Law
- Browser dev tools
- 3 reasons not to use “carousels”
- What the Law of Locality is
- The difference between a friend and a facebook friend
- How PageRank works
- The explore/exploit tradeoff
- The different types of mobile keyboards
- The psychology of road rage
- 10 controls you can use instead of dropdowns
- What complementary and substitute goods are
- What screens want
- Why you shouldn’t listen to your users
- How to run an A/B test
- When to not run an A/B test
- How to write
- How to edit
- How good online communities go bad
- The 80-20 rule
- How to make a half-decent logo
- Why games are fun
- Why gambling is addictive
- The only 5 typefaces Massimo Vignelli said he needed
- At least two dozen fonts on sight
- Where to find good inspiration
- Why menus in fancy restaurants don’t list cents on their prices
- Five ways to reduce clutter on a messy page
- The zero price effect
- The differences between Helvetica and Arial
- Five alternatives to either
- How to ask questions without biasing the answer
- Desire paths
- How it would work if it were magic
- Maker’s schedule vs manager’s schedule
- Who your ideal client is
- The tradeoff between line height and line length
- What you wouldn’t design, even for all the money in the world