March 12, 2012
9:30 panel: Mike Kruzeniski, Creative Director for Microsoft gave a steller Saturday morning presentation for How Print Design is the Future of Interaction. He started with a great history of UI design, and then incorporated best practices of print design, as now applied to web design.
Key learnings:
- Icons are only useful if everyone understands what it means. This is a great principle to follow.
- Grid based designs speed up your development systems as we as increases the user experience. It helps form the appropriate amount of white and negative space. We’ve been a huge fan of a modified version of the 960 grid system for our web designs.
- The Flipboard RSS reader provides a print page like interface and provides a cleaner RSS reader experiencee.
In summary, Mike spoke often about Paul Rand’s quote regarding how bad design is now become common design. This is a quote that you should show clients whenever they want a glossy or reflection-like layout, circa 2008!
