More photos from Kiev.

Listed building:

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A memorial plaque:

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A museum:

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Hand-written posters:

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Hardware store:

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A hairdresser’s sign:

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Another one:

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Some kind of a special kind of house:

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Don’t park here:

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A cafe:

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M & M:

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Nice curves:

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A clothes and vinyl shop:

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Nice layout:

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Sometimes you paste a text from somewhere, and it’s all upper case, and you want to make it normal case. Few people know that changing text case is a built-in feature of every text field on a Mac, like cut, copy and paste.

Edit → Transformations → Make Lower Case:

See also: Quickly convert any text to plain text.

A web application’s front end (what the user sees) and back end (what happens on a remote server) are often developed separately. If the back end of some feature is not ready yet, the front-end developer is very limited in what they can do.

I’ve designed the user interface for Mimic 2.0, a web developer tool for mocking server responses in a browser. With Mimic, you can develop as if the server was alive. It’s very easy to set up a simple mock. Say, you want to pretend the server responds with a line of JSON:

It lets you set up very advanced mocks, adjusting HTTP headers, timeouts and what not:

The great thing about Mimic is that you don’t need to set up a local server and change request URIs in your application. It works with the existing applications as they are, right in the browser. And you don’t even need to install browser extensions: you just link one script to your application and that’s it.

Read more about the user interface on the project page.

A characteristic Kiev street name plate looks like this:

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There is a bulb inside, sometimes:

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An old one:

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An ugly soviet one:

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The ones on Khreshchatyk look more like car license plates:

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There is also a blue design:

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And also there are these weird boxes at the entrances:

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More pictures from the same April trip to Kiev as the recent yards.

Nice yellow trolleybuses:

Not as nice:

Jitney stops list:

A stop:

Metro ticket hall:

Inside:

Turnstiles:

A poster:

Map booklets:

River station:

Anything goes to protect your parking stop. Bottles:

Planks:

This is a different kind of transport. They attach you to a cable and you fly to the island:

Looks cool:

Here are some pictures of beautiful Kiev yards.

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Many of the things I do are considered a job of a “UI/UX” designer. But I haven’t ever called myself one.

That’s because the term “UI/UX” is badly designed: it’s tasteless and vague.

Tasteless

The abbreviations are used in science and tech, but when normal people talk, abbreviations are out of place. A good user interface is humane.

The way this abbreviation is constructed is wacky. First, it includes the word “user” twice. The good designer would not put a word twice where once would suffice. Second, it abbreviates “experience” with X instead of E. This comes from cheap marketing, where X used to sound “cool” and “trendy”. When a designer uses it, I feel like they disrespect the user and have shallow knowledge.

Vague

There’s a “/” in the middle, whose meaning is unclear. A slash usually implies an exclusive or. So does this mean “UI or UX, but not both”?

Good writers use conjunctions, not slashes. A slash is a way to slam two pieces together without thinking what sense the combination makes. This is not how you design a good user interface though.

The lack of taste and inability to communicate well are not the qualities of a good designer.

See also: Guy English on UX