The vanishing designer An Article by Chuánqí Sun uxdesign.cc Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony. The same, the same, the sameDesign as an engineering problemThe heat death of designDesign with courage uxmonotonycraft
Beyond Artboards An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs. Can't developers just see?We are the ones who paved the pathUntil we get there processinterfacesdesign
Functional Prototyping. A Missed Opportunity in Web Design An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com Prototyping allows engineers in various industries to “fail fast, fail cheap”, “select the best from the pool”, and “bring in the reality”. prototypessoftware
Don’t Be an Ostrich An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com You just handed off a major redesign. Three months of research, twenty-seven major revisions, and hundreds cups of coffee have all culminated in this pinnacle of glory. It’s finally done! Except it’s not. It’s not, even after you have answered every single question the developers have about your red-line. It’s not, even after you have addressed all the technical constraints developers encountered during the implementation. It’s not, even after you meticulously documented all the patterns and styles into a library for reference and reuse. It’s not, because neither you nor the developers have talked to a real user. At the bottom of your heart, you are secretly wishing: My design looks great on paper, so let’s keep it on paper. You are an ostrich. Post-occupancy evaluation
A case against "pixel perfect" design An Essay by Chuánqí Sun uxdesign.cc I feel the push for the “pixel perfect” design has largely overlooked many of its practical, social, and ethical implications. We are working against the grain of the woodGood design is practical design
Input as collage An Article by Austin Kleon austinkleon.com Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work. Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix? The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media. ...There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together. creativityintent