The Laws of Design: From Principle to Practice

Given at the DC Design Talks in February of 2008 in Washington DC.

Transcript

1. The Laws of Design: From Principle to Practice Patrick Haney
2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cc_chapman/1361197165
3. http://www.flickr.com/photos/extraketchup/749317332
4. Design principles are universal
5. “Like all man-made ‘laws’ they do not exist in the absolute sense - to break them is no sin.” John Maeda, on his Laws of Simplicity
6. Fitt’s Law The time required to move to a target is a function of the target size and distance to target
9. Make clickable areas BIGGER
12. Hick’s Law The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increase
13. http://www.flickr.com/photos/oobrien/7597395/
16. Design for error. Donald Norman, Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones
17. Affordance A property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function
22. Chunking or The Magic Number 7
23. Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. #2: Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda
25. (703) 555-9682
32. Closure No, we’re not finished yet.
37. “Suggest” the box. Dan Cederholm
42. Signal-to-Noise Ratio The ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in a display
43. “There is no such thing as information overload, only bad design.” Edward Tufte
46. Color More than just a way to make your design “pretty”
49. Legibility The visual clarity of text, generally based on the size, typeface, contrast, text block, and spacing of the characters used
51. Accessibility Objects and environments should be designed to be usable, without modification, by as many people as possible
52. http://www.flickr.com/photos/oobrien/7597395/
57. Iteration A process of repeating a set of operations until a specific result is achieved
58. “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign” Cameron Moll
61. Questions?
62. Thank You. http://patrickhaney.com