“Make the logo bi… exactly the same size.”
You know when a new boss takes over a company and the first thing they do is declare an immediate rebranding? It turns out that the monarchy has been doing that for generations.
A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.
I really enjoyed hanging out with Paul at Indie Web Camp in Nuremberg last weekend. And I like the iconography he’s proposing:
This design attempts to bring together a set of icons that share the concept of a node – a line and a point – and use this to add counters to each letter shape.
I was talking about this with Léonie just yesterday. I, for one, would love to have CSS speech support. You know who else would love it? Content designers!
In these days of voice interaction on every platform, there is a growing expectation that it should be possible to design that experience just like we can the visual experience. In the same way an organisation chooses a logo and colour palette for its website, it stands to reason that they may also choose a particular voice that represents their brand.
It’s wild that there’s no way to do this on the web.
A free PDF with five articles:
Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!
A case study with equal emphasis on animation and performance.
How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?
Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.
What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.
This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.
Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.
The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).
What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.
Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!
Brand identity in sci-fi films, like Alien, Total Recall, Robocop, and Back To The Future.
This makes for a nice companion site to Sci-fi Interfaces.
A font made of corporate logos.
I’m impressed by Mozilla’s commitment to designing in the open—one of the hardest parts of any kind of brand work is getting agreement, and this process must make that even more difficult.
I have to say, I quite like both options on display here.
Rob attended the excellent Ampersand event last Friday and he’s made notes for each and every talk.
Some lovely branding work for the UK Parliament, presented very nicely.
Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.
FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”
I think Khoi might be on to something here …but I also think this change in priorities is no bad thing:
Consider the macro trend of these brands all visually converging alongside the industry’s current mania for design systems. That juxtaposition suggests that we’re far more interested in implementing ideas than we are in ideas themselves.
The slides from Yesenia’s talk on scenario-driven design.
Following on from Ruth’s piece, here are some more thoughts on sound in UI from Roman Zimarev, the creator of icon sounds.
He makes a distinction between notification sounds and interaction sounds, as well as talking about sound identity in branding.
Smörgåsbord Studio created a design system for the Welsh government, including the typeface Cymru Wales Sans from Colophon.
The accompanying video lists the design principles:
- Elevate our status
- Surprise & inspire
- Change perceptions
- Do good things
- Be unmistakably Wales