On Design Theft

Back when I was doing design work for clients, it seemed like my work would get re-purposed by fledgling and not-so-fledgling designers every month. Sometimes I'd get a tip in my email about a theft that someone saw, or sometimes the offenders would link the assets right off my client's website, but regardless of how I found out about the theft, it'd piss me off more than anything else. I was the one who opened Photoshop, I cranked through iteration after iteration, I thought of execution details in the shower, I stayed up late at night, and then someone else just takes all that work and passes it off as their own. Sure, usually there were some slight modifications, but designers can always tell when someone else is using their design. It's sort of like a parent being able to identify their baby's cry while all the other babies are crying as well.

Lack Of Understanding

A few friends and I were the co-founders of 9rules, one of the largest independent blog networks of its day. I designed the fairly well-known (if you had a blog back in the mid-2000s!) 9rules leaf logo, which, to this day, is still the only good thing I've ever made while using Illustrator. For some reason, this was my most copied design ever. Toyota copied it for a yearly conference they run. Hell, it's even used as the logo for a mall in South Africa.

The dumbest thing about using the 9rules leaf logo for something other than 9rules is that the logo had a specific meaning. We had 9 principles we followed with the startup so there were 9 leaves. The design was meant to resemble a '9' and an 'r' side by side. The colors meant something, too. The logo represented our startup, it wasn't some arbitrary swoosh or vector swirl, we spent a lot of time on it and it was unique to our business.

When companies steal a design made for something else, they skip the part where they toil over the design and develop a deep love and appreciation for it. In 2009, Jason Fried wrote a blog entry about why you shouldn't copy them or anyone else. Here's a snippet.

"Here’s the problem with copying: Copying skips understanding. Understanding is how you grow. You have to understand why something works or why something is how it is. When you copy it, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath."

Copying someone else's designs, the way Samsung did with Apple's interface and industrial designs, skips over the whole part about why they were like that in the first place. Why did a designer throw out 20 iterations and pick the 21st design to be the one to ship? What led them to the those specific conclusions and insights? What down-the-road thinking influenced the design? Samsung doesn't know why Apple went with a homescreen with a fixed row at the bottom, they just know that the iPhone is hot and they want all their phones to look like the iPhone in the eyes of consumers. That's why they stole Apple's interface designs: to short-circuit the innovation process and jump straight into the line ahead of everyone else.

I really don't care about patents or trademarks or trade dress or any of that. To me, a designer, it's just about honor. Deciding to use someone else's pixels as your own is not just lazy, but it's dishonest. It's a slap in the face. And that's why I'm glad Samsung owes Apple over a billion dollars, because so much design theft happens in the world, it's about time someone or some company got knocked down a few pegs because of it. This victory isn't just a victory for Apple, it's a victory for every designer who has been ripped off by people who didn't care or thought they could get away with it. Tonight it's clear that sometimes they can't.

Making Rounded Rectangles Look Great

Great product design involves thinking about what features to prioritize, planning the user flow from screen to screen, getting user feedback and lots more, but at the end of the day, someone is going to be in Photoshop pushing pixels. The final visual design of a digital interface isn't going to design itself, and when a designer is crafting the look and feel, here are some elements they're typically designing:

If you really think about it, most interfaces (especially for iOS apps) use tons of rounded rectangles in different shapes and sizes. Long and skinny ones with lots of shine. Squarer, flatter ones with some texture. Smaller, slightly inset ones with photos inside. The list just keeps on going. I actually joke around with friends that my main job is making rounded rectangles look great, so I thought it was time to show off some common techniques.

Drawing Them

spacer It's important to keep your elements in Photoshop in vector format as long as you can because they can be scaled and re-styled easily. To draw a rounded rectangle, I use (gasp!) the Rounded Rectangle Tool with Snap To Pixels turned on. This is incredibly important or the edges of your shape will lie on a half-pixel and look blurry. There are some other ways to draw rounded rectangles in Photoshop (which Marc Edwards has conveniently outlined) but I typically stay with the vector shape tool because it's easy.

If the edges of your shape aren't sharp, then strokes/gradients/highlights/shadows you add later won't be perfect.

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Up or Down?

If your goal is to craft subtle and realistic user interfaces that look and feel like real world surfaces, you'll be making a choice: is this element popping off the screen (convex) or indented into the screen (concave)? Buttons are convex whereas large panels containing text and other elements are typically concave.

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On the left is a convex button that is designed to look like it's bulging off the screen. It appears bulged out because it's made to appear just like a convex object would appear in real life if it had 90°, top-down lighting. That means that 1) the light catches the top of the object and adds a lighter stripe of highlight, 2) as the bottom bends back down towards the screen, the light is blocked and it gets darker (light-to-dark gradient), and 3) it casts a very subtle shadow, indicating that it's sitting on top of the surface. This specific combination of highlights, gradients and shadows is the most basic way to make a rounded rectangle appear bulged out and convex.

On the right is a larger panel that is designed to look inset into the screen. The fill color is a mostly-transparent black, it has some inner shadows, and then a thin white drop shadow at the bottom. If we analyze this using the same lighting conditions as the previous example, it's made to look sunken in because 1) the edges or lips of the shape are at the surface and cast an inner shadow inside (these edges block light like an awning off a building blocks the rain, causing a shadow) and 2) as the bottom edge of the shape comes back up to meet the surface, the light catches that lip and causes an edge highlight.

Download this PSD here.

Pictures

Most iPhone apps that display profile images have them look slightly sunken into the surface or popped out and semi-glossy. This is achieved with mainly the same techniques from above, but for the glossy one I added a diagonal gloss line (a white-to-transparent gradient cut into a triangle) as a separate layer.

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Download this PSD here.

Mixing It Up

Although there are distinct elements common in most convex-or-concave elements, there's no special formula for how to accomplish these effects in Photoshop. I typically tweak size and opacity sliders on Inner Glow, Inner Shadow, Stroke and Drop Shadow layer styles until things look good. Other people are Bevel & Emboss specialists. Here are some more examples of rounded rectangles styled in some different (but reusable!) ways.

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Download this PSD here.

Scratching The Surface

These are just some of the myriad ways you can style and use rounded rectangles in your interfaces. If you really want to see some creative designs, check out some icon designs on Dribbble. All it takes is some imagination and experimentation, and you can use gorgeous rounded rectangle designs throughout your interface.

Ketchup Bottles & The Physicality Of Design

At lunch earlier today I snapped a picture of the top of a Heinz ketchup bottle.

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It's not remarkable, but it caught my eye because the look of the embossed text in the cap is exactly the look that so many designers are trying to replicate these days, myself included. What look is that?

The emulation of physicality.

A current trend in the design of digital interfaces is to subtly hint that the objects on the screen have weight, volume and surface undulations like they would if they were manufactured and held up in front of you. This is why Apple puts defined, shiny gloss lines on buttons and toolbars: because they're emulating a plastic lens shape and how lenses interact with light. Lenses refract light in precise ways and the specific coloring, gradients and glows used in iOS toolbars and buttons were put there specifically to make them look more like a long, plastic convex-on-both-sides piece of glass instead of just pixels on a screen.

Imagine if the iPhone's interface were manufactured and put up on a wall. There'd be realistic textures like linen, leather, shiny plastic and matte aluminum. These textures wouldn't all sit at the same distance from the surface, they'd be staggered — some elements indented, some elements poking out — because the real world isn't flat. Everything is either convex or concave, shadowed or highlighted. Just look at how many angles and surfaces a simple light switch has. Convex, bubbled text that casts a shadow. Indented, shadowed crevices. Light-to-dark gradients on surfaces.

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And people all over are putting realistic switches into digital interfaces. They're trying to emulate the highlights, shadows and gradients that a real switch has when lit from above. Indented buttons, convex panels, glossy shines, textured mattes, embossed text, and it goes on. These are the elements that interface designers use to make their products appear touchable, tactile and hefty.

Now this physical emulation of real objects can be taken too far, but just like with everything else, moderation is the key. Some of the top apps in the App Store use these exact techniques to great effect. The leather and embossed buttons in Camera+. The indented and matte tweet actions row in Tweetbot. The textured opening screen of Path. You may not immediately notice these little details, but they make digital interfaces appear more valuable, like little hand-crafted executive paperweights: expensive, heavy and solid.

The pixel-perfect emulation of physical surfaces and lighting in a digital interface is the secret weapon of interface designers. Little touches like panels that are slightly indented and shadowed, subtle cloth-like texturing, and white highlights on embossed label text may not be immediately perceptible, but they add a richness to the overall experience that most apps just don't have.

Twitter For iPhone Takes A Step Back

Today, Twitter unveiled redesigns for their website, iPhone and Android apps. As a long-time Twitter user and Twitter app aficionado, I've come to expect a certain level of thought & polish in everything Twitter does, so I'm sad to say I'm not a huge fan of their new direction.

Low Information Density

Mobile phone screens are small so each pixel is incredibly valuable. Horizontal screen real estate is even more valuable because you have fewer pixels on the horizontal axis than you do the vertical if you're holding your phone in portrait orientation.

Apple provides UITableViews two main display modes: plain and grouped. Plain rows extend to both edges of the screen and are primarily used when a lot of information needs to be displayed like in Mail, the App Store, Facebook, Music and all previous versions of Twitter for iPhone. For reasons I cannot explain, the latest version of Twitter's iPhone app uses the grouped style that doesn't extend to either side of the screen. This automatically introduces 10px of padding on each side which cuts the horizontal resolution down to 300px, leaving 20px less room for each tweet. Since the primary focus of Twitter is to, wait for it, read tweets, this is not a good thing. In fact, this coupled with the removal of the text size setting causes the new version to show fewer tweets per screen compared to the old version.

Twitter yesterday is on the left, Twitter today is on the right. I scrolled to the same spot in both apps to make the row height comparison more obvious.

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And I can't exactly put my finger on it, but the new grouped tableview style makes the interface feel more claustrophobic, more boxed in and constricting. Because of this change it no longer feels like you're in Twitter, it feels like you're just watching Twitter, or viewing Twitter's website inside the app. Margins on either side of an interface are for the web. This is an app, and apps need to expertly use the few measly pixels they have.

Forced "Discovery"

A main focus of this redesign is the new Discover tab which 1) shows random things to you, and 2) cannot be hidden. Seriously, I can't make heads or tails of what it's supposed to be showing me. I think it's a personalized-social-graph-recommendations-search thing all jumbled together. Unfortunately, using search and/or giving a shit about hashtags is at the bottom of things I use Twitter for, mainly because the trending topics are dominated by stupid rap music memes or Justin Bieber fans. Here are some of the most popular trending topics this past year: #aintnothingsexyabout, #4wordsaftersex, #BestSexSongs, #secretturnon, #youknowitslovewhen, #muchlove, #IsmileWhen, #yougottaloveitwhen, #youdeserveashoutout, #ItsMyAddiction, #WhatNotToSayAfterSex, #sevenwordsaftersex, #thingsblackgirlsdo, #thingsblackpeopledo, #doesntmeanyourblack and #NotAllBlackPeople so please excuse me if I don't trust Twitter to bubble up and show me interesting, recommended, personalized content.

Removal Of Gesture Shortcuts

My primary usage of Twitter includes the following:

When I wake up in the morning and check Twitter, these are the actions I take. I see tweets with links and I check out the link. I see mentions and I reply back. The way that I accomplish these tasks is through the use of gesture-based shortcuts that I've come to know and love, and, unfortunately, the shortcuts I use to quickly accomplish these two tasks are now missing and I have to tap more times to do it.

Previously, to view a link inside a tweet, I'd tap once on a tweet, then tap on the link to view the webpage, then swipe back in the navigation bar when I was done. In the new version of Twitter, it takes the same number of taps to get to the webpage, but it now takes 2 taps to get back to the spot in the timeline where I was previously at instead of a single swipe.

To reply to a tweet from the timeline view, you used to be able to swipe on the row to expose the action icons allowing me to swipe-then-tap to initiate a reply. In the new Twitter, this gesture has been removed so I need to tap on a tweet, wait until the next screen loads up, then tap on the reply icon on that screen to start the reply. Then, after I post the reply, the new version of Twitter brings me back to the single tweet view forcing me to tap one more time to get back to the timeline. On the old version of Twitter, as soon as the modal tweet window is dismissed, you're already back in your timeline. More taps, more waiting.

Removal Of Features

Removing features from an app once they're in place and being used is a tricky decision. On one hand, it can make your overall product simpler and cleaner but on the other hand it pisses off people who were using those features. The latest version of Twitter for iPhone ditched a lot of existing features and it's already causing some consternation. Here are a few features that are no longer available:

This is a fairly long list of things to remove, and I'm sure I still missed a few. I'm already really annoyed at seeing full names in my timeline and having a larger text size means fewer tweets shown on the screen at once.

Things I Like

The new Twitter for iPhone isn't all bad, there are some significant additions that I'm a fan of. I like the Interactions area which shows favorite, follow and retweet activity. I like the favorite and retweet counts on the individual tweet screen. And, although the padding on the outside of tweets is a bad thing, I do like the slightly-tweaked padding on the inside of tweets and the removal of the gradient.

I think the new app will be more inviting and accessible to new users, but I don't like that this comes at the expense of the user experience and existing gesture shortcuts. There's a way to make both novice and advanced users happy, and I hope Twitter 4.1 does a better job at appealing to all sides of their userbase than 4.0 has done.

A New Flyosity.com

After months of off-and-on work, I'm happy to finally show off the freshly-redesigned Flyosity.com.

Here's a quick list of what's new:

Thoughts On The New Design

The previous design looked faddish and I stopped liking it almost instantly after it went live. Too blue, too bubbly, too a lot of things. For this design I wanted something that would stand up and look good awhile from now, not fall on its face and be dated in a month. But at the same time, I wanted to keep the elements of the previous design that I thought worked well, namely, the typography design for an individual article. The column width is the same, the fonts are the same, and the spacing is nearly the same, but the chrome around it is now cleaner and more subdued.

Up to about a week ago, a lot of things on the page animated into position; logos fading in, navigation sliding across, etc. After taking a hard look at it, I decided to remove the superfluous initial animations and take the experience down a notch into a more subdued feel. I love animation, and I really love CSS3 keyframe animation, but I don't want people to be distracted if they're here on my site to read an article, especially if they came here via a search engine. So, I took it all out.

One design concept I really liked about the previous site was that nearly every section of the site had its own feel with a slightly customized version of the main layout. I wanted to retain that same feeling with the redesign, so you'll notice that my portfolio, services page, about section and contact form all have a look that's unique compared to the other main sections. Personal sites can get rather tedious so I wanted to make sure visitors were greeted with a little bit more personality than they were expecting.

Services

I don't take on much client work, in fact, I haven't said "yes" to a project for a number of years until very recently. The reasons for this are numerous, but primarily it's a matter of time. I have a fun full-time job (that I don't plan on quitting) so outside of work if I'm using my computer I'm typically working on Design Then Code or various unfinished apps. However, outside projects can be fun if they're the right kind of project, so I'm taking a bit of a leap and plan to take on a few, small projects throughout the year. My new services page outlines the type of things I offer as well as my current hourly rate.

And Finally

As someone who doesn't blog as much as he should, I believe I'm contractually obligated to say that this redesign will make me want to write more. I hope that's the case, but please don't hold your breath!

And, oh yeah, there's a tweet button now at the bottom of all entries. I hear it's what the cool kids are doing.

Android's Touch Responsiveness Is Terrible

On mobile devices, there is absolutely no room for error. No room for blurry pixels, no room for confusing icons, no room for user experience mistakes, no room for sluggishness. The entire device is one big constraint: a flat piece of glass that accepts touch input with a few millimeters of metal chrome around it. That's it. All you have is the glass and how things behave under the glass.

If things under the glass move as you move your finger, the illusion of direct manipulation of a digital interface is created. If you move your finger and, then, a split-second later something moves in response to your movement, that breaks the illusion. Apple has fully understood this from the beginning, and the iPhone has always responded to pinches and flicks with nearly 1:1 accuracy, especially in the browser, which is where iPhone users (myself included) seem to spend most of their time.

Android, on the other hand, has always felt laggy to me. I've used the Nexus One, all the carrier versions of the Galaxy S, the Nexus S, HTCs, Droids, the list goes on, and none of them have felt right-on-the-button perfect when I move my finger around on the screen. I move, the phone processes some things, and then the interface moves. This has been the Android way since Android's inception. The built-in browser is the most egregious example of sluggishness, especially when pinch-zooming or double-tapping. Check out this video of an iPhone 3GS vs. a Nexus S. Astoundingly, jaw-droppingly bad.

Now with this in mind I just saw that the Galaxy Nexus, the new supreme king of Android phones, has been unveiled. This Is My Next has a hands-on review and this is the single line that stood out to me:

The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since its inception is still there, which is not a heartening thing to hear when you’re talking about a super-powered dual-core device like the Galaxy Nexus.

Pervasive lag? On a mobile device that's running the very latest Android version? Powered by one of the beefiest mobile processors in the world? Samsung's cream-of-the-crop phone running Ice Cream Sandwich is still, still laggy?

Totally fucking unacceptable.

Imagine if your mouse cursor couldn't keep up with your hand movements, or if letters didn't appear on the screen until a moment after you pressed your keyboard. That's how egregious of a user experience problem this is. If a user interface doesn't respond as quickly as possible to a user's intentions and movements, it's a pile of rubbish. Immediate touch response has been solved by Apple for years, why can't Google and Samsung and Motorola and HTC solve it as well?

Introducing Nice & Mean: My 10-Hour iPhone App Experiment

Some teams spend a year or more crafting an iPhone app that uses every ounce of their good taste and development talents. These apps are big gambles and a big payoff is needed to justify all the expense and self-sacrifice.

Other teams crank out apps every few weeks, throwing the proverbial app at the wall to see what sticks. To be frank, most of these apps are ugly and useless and they bring the overall bar of the App Store lower and lower. Unfortunately, some huge successes in the App Store have fell into this category: apps that nearly every developer has taken a look at and said, "I could build this in a weekend!"

The most recent trend-cum-scam in the App Store is the faux security app where you build background images that look like an Android lock screen graphic. These apps just make images, they don't really do anything related to security. Tens of thousands of people have bought these apps under the guise of enhanced security but, inevitably, leave low-star reviews when the app doesn't actually do anything it says in the description.

Which brings me to Nice & Mean.

10 Hours, 1 App

After discussing these Android-lock-screen-maker apps with my friend Kyle, I told him I wanted to do a little experiment: I wanted to build an app in about 10 hours that was made "for the masses" to see how it might do. I don't know why, but the first thought that popped into my mind was an app that showed reaffirming, positive messages to the user after they press a big red button. Very exciting. So I started working on it and I gave myself a maximum timeframe of about 10 hours to design it and code it.

After the design was done and the app was mostly developed, at about 2am one morning, I woke up with an idea. Why just show nice phrases? Why not show mean ones, and do the whole yin/yang good/evil thing? It adds a new dimension to the app and it might expand the audience to a wider demographic. So after a little bit more time than I had originally planned for, I had a finished app. Two sides, each has a big red button. One side tells the user Something Nice, the other tells them Something Mean. The icon uses the well-known greek tragedy & comedy masks.

May I present Nice & Mean, an app that can brighten your day (or ruin it!) depending on which side of the app you use. Find Nice & Mean in the App Store.

An Experiment

I have no idea what to expect. It could sell 10 copies, 100 copies or 10,000 copies. People might love it, they might hate it, they might think it's dumb or they might think it's hilarious. All I know is that even though it's a simple app, I put a lot of thought and polish into it. I don't know how it will sell, but I do intend to write a follow-up after a few weeks.

Stay tuned.

The iPhone 5, 4S, iPad 3 And More

This is based on speculation and my opinions on the future of Apple products. I know people at Apple but they don't give me any information.

1. 15" & 17" MacBook Pro refresh. The next iteration of these two laptops will include a removal of their optical drive to decrease thickness and overall weight. They won't have soldered on flash memory like the MacBook Air but I bet an SSD drive will be the standard configuration.

2. 13" MacBook Pro will slowly fade into that good night. The "Pro" line will be mostly designated by size and a 13" MBP is the odd-man-out.

3. 11" & 13" MacBook Airs will be Apple's bread and butter laptops and will get faster processors and better batteries as time goes on. No PC manufacturer can beat Apple on the price of an "ultrabook" even if Intel dumps tons of money into the arena. The Airs are selling like crazy so I can see Apple doing nice updates every year or so.

4. The iPhone 5 will come out in October and will be thinner, have a larger screen (but same resolution), and will be much speedier than the iPhone 4. Hopefully with more RAM, too. The screen will be closer to the right and left sides of the phone and will take up a greater overall surface area compared to iPhone 4.

5. An iPhone 4S will be released at the same time as iPhone 5. This will be made of slightly cheaper components so Apple can sell it for $99 on a 2-year contract. Mostly same dimensions as current iPhone 4 but potentially with more RAM or a faster processor. The big deal is this will be sold to Chinese carriers.

6. How many times does Apple have to say that this year is "the year of iPad 2" for people to understand that an iPad 3 won't come until next year? iPad 3 will have a screen with 2048x1536 resolution at the same physical dimension as the iPad 2. Form-factor will mostly be the same except the home button will look more closely like the upcoming iPhone 5's wider button. It'll likely have more RAM and a faster processor. It could also cost more than existing iPad 2 and then Apple could keep making iPad 2s but price it $50-$100 lower per model to stay attractive at the low end and kill Android tablets that try to undercut.

7. Mac Pro gets killed and replaced by a new type of desktop machine or configuration, perhaps just some Mac Mini-like boxes Thunderbolted together for hyper-fast processing. Apple is caring less and less about the professional end nowadays and more about the prosumer end so a product revamp here aligns well.

If You Can Think, Design & Code, You Win

Earlier today I tweeted a link to Andy Rutledge's latest entry, "Web Design is Product Design" which, in the first line, offended at least 50 of my followers on Twitter:

A designer who does not write markup and CSS is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures.

The reason I know that this stirred up controversy is because I received dozens of replies, nearly instantly, about how much they disagreed with the statement. On the other hand, the tweet was retweeted over 70 times so that means a healthy number of people agreed with Andy's view of the web design profession.

So who's right? Is there a correct answer? I don't know, but what I do know is that designers who are also programmers are incredibly valuable so let's talk about why.

I'm the odd combination of both a designer and software engineer. I've been designing websites and software for more than half my life, and I've also been developing websites and software for the same span of time. In the early 2000s I helped start a successful design firm and a (mostly) successful startup, and as any entrepreneur can tell you, you have to be able to wear multiple hats and do a great job no matter what you're doing. Hell, I was even half-decent at cold-emailing companies and selling advertising spots. After the iPhone came out I learned Objective-C and the Cocoa APIs and now I also design and build iOS software. I work on web software during the day and mobile apps at night.

I design all day long, I code all day long.

But most people don't do that.

Most of my friends who are designers are pretty amazing at what they do. World-class icon artists. Apple Design Award-winning user interface designers. Terrific web designers. The crazy thing about most of my hyper-talented friends is that, for the most part, they were the ones who disagreed with the notion of designers needing to know how to code. They had well-written thoughts about the importance of specialization and how teams of individuals doing individual jobs worked well, and there's really nothing wrong with that.

My issue with this whole situation is that it seems that designers were against even learning, just a little bit, about how to be a programmer. It's like the mere notion of them stepping outside their comfort zone was an affront to their talents, when nothing could be further from the truth.

If someone is talented enough to do a great job within his or her skill set, then they're probably talented enough to learn a bit about someone else's job, too. Designers learning how to program. Programmers learning how to design. Product people learning how to actually design or build something instead of just writing about it. (I kid! Sorta.) Whoever you hand your work product over to, that other person's skill set is what you should learn about.

Do It All, Reap The Rewards

Almost everyone has read stories about businesspeople with ideas for products or mobile apps and "all they need are some programmers and designers" to make it real. Or perhaps about programmers who build amazing systems and prototypes but they lack the polish a designer can bring. Or how about designers who design immaculate interface mockups but need a developer to make them real. All these stories are cop-outs. They're tales of woe from people who lack the curiosity and drive to just Figure It Out™ and start learning a new skill.

Do you know who the most valuable software people are in the world? They're the ones who can think up great ideas, elaborate these ideas on paper, design the interface, then prototype and build the idea into a real thing. Idea to design to code to product. One person who can do it all. One person whose skills cut across job titles and areas of purview with an overwhelming drive to do the whole thing because that's just how they do things.

Who are these people? Who are these designer-programmer hybrids? Brandon Walkin, Kyle Van Essen, Shaun Inman, Michael Simmons, Andreas Illiger, Michael Villar, Ben De Cock, David Kaneda and Cathy Shive just to name a few. Also, me. We're out there and we're designing and building amazing stuff, mostly on our own.

I can't really speak for anyone else, but I'm guessing the common trait amongst us is that we're curious, almost to a fault. I'll read about programming languages, science, math, psychology, economics and space until the cows come home. I absolutely had to write software for the iPhone when it was announced so I had to teach myself C and Objective-C. Jesus, it was hard, but I did it. It took awhile, but now I consider myself a fairly competent Cocoa software engineer and I write & sell tutorials that try to teach others what I learned.

So do designers absolutely have to learn how to program to be a good designer? No, it's not a requirement. There are plenty of amazing designers out there who don't know CSS. But there are also plenty of designers out there who know CSS and advanced JavaScript. There are others who know CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and some SQL. And a few more who can setup and administer web servers. And a couple more who can write iPhone apps. And maybe a few more who know Java pretty well, too.

Can you be one of those people? Someone who is great at their main area of expertise, but also pretty good at other areas of expertise as well? Someone who can dream up software then design it, build it, and ship it? Yes. A thousand times yes. Like anything else, it takes determination, hard work, and lots of curiosity.

How Color Already Blew It

Human attention is a scarce commodity in this flashy, New Thing Comes Out Every Day™ world we live in. Startups that dominate the blog headlines one day may be all but forgotten a mere 24 hours later. This is especially true for mobile apps. If you're launching a mobile app, how do you stand out from the crowd and