A lot of fonts these days come with 4 different styles of numerals/figures (http://fontfeed.com/archives/figuring-out-numerals/). Typographically each has its different uses: inline with lowercase letters you usually use proportional oldstlye figures, while tabular ones are reserved for numerical data like dollar amounts and things. If you dislike the default figure style of a typeface you should see if they have different ones available via OpenType features.
Yeah it's more of an insight into the design process than any sort of 'plea'. It should also be noted that for their previous game, Puzzlejuice, they also released all the emails/prototypes/images that documented the process, so it's likely they would have done the same for Threes even if it hadn't been cloned many times over. The response to the clones and rip-offs is just a tacked on part at the beginning because they feel strongly about it.
They mention that. "But why is Threes better? It’s better for us, for our goals." and then later: "that’s what’s better to us as game designers. We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever."
> As a result, many of the people coming out of professional design schools, trained in the esthetics of flat, non-interactive design see themselves as 'above' all that 'computer stuff'.
I feel like this doesn't happen so much anymore. At least from recent graduates of top NYC design schools, you'd be hard pressed to find a communication designer / graphic designer who isn't worried about having to learn HTML/CSS because "print is dying".
I don't know how true that is. There are a lot of things in expensive fonts that provide intrinsic quality: more character sets (greek and cryllic for example), openType features like conditional ligatures, more kerning pairs, extra weights, small caps, hinting, etc.
My personal rule on carousels is that they're okay to use if you don't care if your user only sees one of the slides. But if that's the case then you might as well just not have a carousel in the first place.
It's a good thought, but it's named wrong. Emphasis on 'psds vs not psds' makes it seem like it's about the tools, but it's not: it's about the process.
Most of the problems stated in the article can be solved by simply not outsourcing design and doing it in-house. After that, all you have to do is learn how to iterate quickly.
Designing for software products and designing for marketing/advertising are very different processes because they have very different needs. Software goes out and is updated as it lives and is used. Ad campaigns and branding materials very rarely are. I think the big thing here is that we have to recognize that, and not try to do all design in the same way.
I guess what I was referring to was more that, if you wanted to measure someone's musical ability, you can look at the hours they practiced as something that correlates. Which is what the researchers did. For skills like creativity or critical thinking, what hard number would you look at? I don't know, and I have a feeling that if you looked at time spent, you wouldn't get these same results.
Cool, but I don't know how this applies to things that aren't as measurable as musical ability. What about more intangible things like creative or critical thinking? Also, the violin hasn't changed in hundreds of years, which means the value of the time you spend getting good at it will never depreciate. How does that change with something like computer programming?
I don't think the application of this technology would be the way it is on this page: likely it would detect your face and then set the text accordingly, and then leave it alone. A constantly changing text size is bad interaction anyway.
there are a few reasons I can think of to use tiny type. For one, designers who are used to print might not understand that things should be bigger on the web, because you generally read websites at a further distance. Second, most fonts aren't designed for screens; and thus don't look good at larger sizes. 18pt for a font designed for body copy in print can be jarring sometimes. Lastly, and this might sound silly, but smaller type leaves more room for other stuff. Some people think scrolling is a pain.