Simple tips to improve your UI design
The following are some tips I have found to be most impactful when either designing new, or cleaning up and modernising a user interface. These aren’t hard rules, I find that what ‘feels right’ can often better than sticking to rigid rules or systems, but these are a good guide. 1. Reduce borders The more […]
Align icons vertically to the center of the first line of text
I ran into an issue while implementing customisable text sizes into a UI. I had a Callout component which consists of a box containing an icon and a block of text – a layout similar to this: This component was built a few years ago and designed so the icon perfectly centered on the first […]
Building a wide-gamut colour picker
Now that browsers support wide-colour gamuts with P3, I have been wanting to build a colour picker that could select colours from outside the standard sRGB gamut. As the feature became more broadly available in browsers I’d seen a few examples popup from various people such as Gradient.style, the ColorJS.io picker demo, and OKLCH.com. However, […]
Nested corner radii
When designing a user interface with rounded corners you will likey run into situtation where you have nested rounded corners. It could be a button in a card or input, or a box inside a modal. What should the inner radius be? The easy way out is to just use the same radius, but it […]
Inspiring Inspiration #16
A collection of cool video, motion graphics and interface design.
Recreating the Apple Watch UI using a hexagonal grid
Building on the hexagonal grid from earlier, I have added a little JavaScript and have created an effect similar to the Apple Watch home screen UI. Below is a video of it in action, I am using IE11 (metro version) on a Surface Pro 2 which I found to be the most performant for this […]
CSS Diamond grid
Following on from the last post I decided to play a bit more with the hexagonal grid and created a diamond grid. It works similar to the last grid except it uses squares rotated 45 degrees, so it is basically a regular grid tipped on its side with even-odd number alternating rows. Here is a […]
CSS Hexagonal packed grid
Most grids are square packed – that is each cell is stacked like a block which is great, but if you are after something slightly different maybe you should try a hexagonally packed grid. I will show you how to create a hexagonally packed grid using only CSS. But first, here is the difference between […]
Inspiring Inspiration #15
A collection of cool video, motion graphics and interface design.
Javascript voice control
Since Chrome 25 we have had access to the new Web Speech API which allows us to create web apps that can utilse voice to text or voice control with a microphone. I have been wanting to experiment with this for quite a while so I built simple example to using voice commands to control […]