Life does not present you with a choice to be or not to be a designer.

Everyone always has to make design decisions. There’s no escape: whatever you do, other people will interact with your product or service. Your design decisions can be good or bad, but they cannot not exist. You have to make them, or you are stuck.

To make these decisions, you have to be competent. That’s why design is a basic discipline, as language is. Saying you don’t want to learn design is like saying you don’t want to learn to write. It’s bullshit. Kids should start learning design in primary school: it’s for everyone.

You can’t just make crap and say “hey, I’m not a designer”. There’s no such thing as “not a designer”. If you make crap, you’re just a crappy designer. Fix it.

As I’m sure many designers do, I have an Assets folder with a collection of small things you always need (mouse cursors, spinners, checkboxes etc.). There’s one thing that’s so easy to create from scratch that I don’t even bother to store it anywhere.

Let’s say you want to add a popup calendar to a date input. Here’s how you make a calendar icon for it.

Start with a 4×4 black rectangle (showing at 1200% zoom):

Make three of them in a row, with overlapping borders, like this:

Clone this whole thing and move 3 pixels down, like this:

Now clone this whole thing and move 3 pixels down and 3 pixels to the left, like this:

Done (don’t try to click, it’s just a picture):

Ben Brown asks if it is time for password-less login. Well, yes it is. It’s actually long been.

I think an even better solution would be to remove the password completely, allowing users to login with only an email address. Each time a user needs to login, they enter their email address and receive a login link via email.

That’s part of our usual process of removing mandatory signup. We try to convince all our clients to do this (see also: Interface is Evil). The thinking goes: password is not really needed to sign in: you can always click the “I forgot” link. So why not just assume that the user has forgotten their password?

This flip makes sense for almost every website. If users visit a site infrequently, signing in via email is not a big deal. If users visit a site regularly, then chances are high that they are already signed in and won’t see the form anyway.

In Bureausphere (it’s a kind of online designers club available only in Russian), we go even further. There’s no sign in or sign out at all. On the “me” page, if we haven’t recognized the user by cookies, we just ask for an email (I’ve translated this bit for this screenshot):

If we know this user, we just send a link to their page, and the link logs them in behind the scenes. There’s no way to log out. And if we don’t know the person, we still do the same: the page will be created on the fly as the user clicks the link in the e-mail.

There is one problem with this approach. While no user likes messing with passwords, people at least understand how the system works. So if we change it, even for the better, we must take into account that some users will be confused.

There are two stupid windows on a Mac that annoy the hell out of me.

This one appears on my main machine in a couple of minutes after I close the lid of my notebook:

It tells me that the remote volumes are no longer available, which I well know and don’t give a shit about. What am I supposed to do with this information? If I were using the volumes in any way, like copying a file, I would have noticed the problem long ago (as the file would stop copying, obviously).

Additionally, it has two buttons that do exactly the same thing: nothing. No matter what I press, the volumes are no longer available and I can’t do anything about it. What do you mean “Disconnect All”, it’s been disconnected several minutes ago, and we both know it. This window should be killed.

This second one appears one in ten times when I change something in iCal:

Now what is that? Not only are they dumping some cryptic server messages onto me, they are also presenting me with a choice. What am I supposed to do here? I don’t want to go offline, because why would I, and I don’t want to “Revert to Server” because I have no idea what it means.

“Revert to Server” is the default one, so it feels like it’s safe to choose it, but I’ve learned that it actually undoes my latest change. There’s no excuse for that: I’ve made my change for reason. Why would you even offer me the choice to undo it, let alone make it the default one? And “Go Offline” actually saves my edit and syncs it to iCloud (when it’s in a better mood later). Someone in iCal department should read Raskin and learn that user’s input is priceless, and it should always be saved by default.

Just change the button names to “Save and sync when possible” and “Forget what I’ve just done”, and it would be ridiculously obvious that this window, too, is useless and should be removed.

The dark secret of yellow is that there’s no such thing as “dark yellow”. Many designers have technical background, and so they fail to acknowledge this fact.

Let’s say we need to create a series of color buttons for some UI. I’ve started with a green one and then quickly made a blue one. Here are the buttons and the way they are constructed:

As you can see a blue button is just a green button with a blue Hue layer on top. And the Magenta button also has an adjustment Curves layer, because otherwise it looks too dark. The bottom two layers are all identical. The base one is a green fill layer with a gradient overlay for button not to look flat and a gradient stroke for sharp edges:

So you can make a button of any color by just adding a Hue and an optional Curves layer, and it will look OK.

Unless it’s yellow:

If we use this method to create a yellow button, it will look like shit (literally, sometimes). Let’s be honest, It’s not yellow, right? And no Curves will make it look good.

Here’s another take on the yellow one:

Now this is yellow. The button was re-made from scratch. The base layer is changed to yellow, but the main change is the  change in the gradient overlay:

It’s not black and white anymore, it’s red and white. The problem with a black and white gradient is that it will try to make a “dark yellow” color which is not yellow at all. The darker you want yellow to be, the more you should shift its hue towards red:

For the button’s body I’ve used a red gradient overlay, and it worked fine. As of the egdes, I’ve just hand picked colors for the new gradient stroke. I’ve also made the glare twice more intensive, because otherwise we’d barely see it. Oh, and the shadow of the yellow button is slightly lighter, because otherwise we’d percieve it as too dark.

Let’s take an eyedropper and see which hues are there now:

The yellow button has different hues, but looks good. So maths isn’t always your best friend, unfortunately.

I have to point out that every button can be made better by hand-picking colors instead of relying on maths. But while for most colors shifting hues works rather fine, for yellow it’s absolutely unacceptable.