By Simon in Members-only — Apr 29, 2023

Issue 45: UX patterns for square wheels

Why quantity is more important than quality; Collection of UX patterns of mobile applications and so much more!

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

Why quantity is more important than quality
The coolest alternative movie posters
Collection of UX patterns of mobile applications
How to remove retouch faces and turn photos into watercolors in Photoshop
Upcoming Figma conference
History of Latin type from Google
Online archive of the elegant vintage fonts
How to manipulate the graphs to support your narrative
New plugins for Figma
Quotes from "Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things" book by Donald Norman

Enjoy reading!

📚 Book quotes

This week I suggest you another book by Donald Norman "Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things" Review the quotes and decide whether to read or not:

Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative––to enable learning while traveling, or while in remote locations, or when one wishes to study a topic for which there is not easy access to teachers. Robot teachers will help make lifelong learning a practicality. They can make it possible to learn no matter where one is in the world, no matter the time of day

It is only at the reflective level that consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside. It is only here that the full impact of both thought and emotions are experienced. At the lower visceral and behavioral levels, there is only affect, but without interpretation or consciousness. Interpretation, understanding, and reasoning come from the reflective level

Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for example, can be beautiful. Ugly art can be beautiful

Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities

Because visceral design is about initial reactions, it can be studied quite simply by putting people in front of a design and waiting for reactions. In the best of circumstances, the visceral reaction to appearance works so well that people take one look and say “I want it.” Then they might ask, “What does it do?” And last, “And how much does it cost?” This is the reaction the visceral designer strives for, and it can work. Much of traditional market research involves this aspect of design

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful

Fire,” yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn’t open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward and must be pulled, not pushed? Highly anxious, highly focused people are very unlikely to think of pulling

When people are anxious they tend to narrow their thought processes, concentration upon aspects directly relevant to a problem. This is a useful strategy in escaping from danger, but not in thinking of imaginative new approaches to a problem

Usable designs are not necessarily enjoyable to use

Herbert Read thought we would need a mystical theory to connect beauty and function. Well, it took one hundred years, but today we have that theory, one based in biology, neuroscience, and psychology, not mysticism

You build up expectations of behavior based upon prior experience, and if the items with which you interact fail to live up to expectations, that is a violation of trust, for which you assign blame, which can soon lead to anger

Emotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems—the emotional system changes how the cognitive system operates. So, if aesthetics would change our emotional state, that would explain the mystery

Science now knows that evolutionarily more advanced animals are more emotional than primitive ones, the human being the most emotional of all. Moreover, emotions play a critical role in daily lives, helping assess situations as good or bad, safe or dangerous

Emotional Design | Book by Don Norman

Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac?

Nielsen Norman GroupWorld Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

🗞 News and articles

Table of contents. How to improve your visual design

A selection of notes by Anthony Hobday with basic tips for novice designers on how to improve the quality of their work. From them you will learn why a good design should be simple, why composition, typography and color are incredibly important, why you need to know the rules to break them, and much more.

Table of contents - How to improve your visual design

How to improve your visual design

History of Latin type

A fascinating series of Google Fonts articles about the appearance of the first European fonts and the Roman heritage, the impact of the printing revolution on font design, as well as the transition to digital, the popularity of grotesques, the general development of typography and much more.

⚡️ Briefly

Figma announced the Config 2023 conference, which will be held on July 21 and 22. Registration for the free online version is already available.

🧘 Inspiration

Branding

Stylish identity of mushroom manufacturer Mushroom Compadres with charming mascots, lettering and a warm natural palette.

Behance

Goldbird Hot Chicken. Stylish pseudo-vintage identity of a family restaurant serving chicken dishes. Inspired by the aesthetics of fast food restaurants of the 70s.