It would be interesting and useful to know who the top 5, 10 or even 20 designers are and what they've done that's so impressive, innovative, useful or loved.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Sure, average people think design is purely decorative, but that does not mean that decoration is not a part of design.
What about their site do you find to be poorly designed?
Look at all of the unnecessary lines framing everything on the page. Instead of adding complexity that potentially confuses the user, they should have used whitespace to group elements.
They also use too many colors. Their use of color is distracting -- it does not add value.
I agree. My eyes hit the page and have no idea where I'm supposed to be looking. The white-on-black text that's interspersed with the images is also painful to read.
There are a lot of good and interesting ideas there. The problem, I think is that there are too many, and that leaves the page cluttered and distracting.
I visit Urban Airship and my first instinct is to hate how little padding there is between your iPhone image and the image right below it, which strikes me as overlarge.
I like some of Metalab's work, but it seems like most of their designs are just copies of existing ones. http://go.urbanairship.com/ is almost identical to Metalab's marketing site except a few colors have been changed
The Metalab people were involved in a dispute with one of the Tumblr designers on IRC the one time I entered the Tumblr IRC, so I've got a bias that comes from that designer ranting at them for an underhanded design, but I find that I really dislike the Metalab style. It's too undiscriminatingly open, and it wastes a lot of space doing/saying simple things. I prefer people who're capable of packing a lot of information into a small space and keep it looking good.
I have found the vast majority of my favourites through twitter. And they're amazing for showing off WIPs and sharing freebies with you. One of the below (I can't remember who) disliked the Wave interface so much they re-mocked it themselves just for fun.
With all due respect to the aforementioned people, but personall I think the real rockstars are the leading designers behind sites like Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, BBC and digg's Daniel Burka. Designing for such a large audience while still keeping an eye on a company's goals and vision is what really is impressive. Making something look good is the easy part -- making it work flawlessly in an pre-existing environment with an incrediblyt large audience is the challenge.
CNN are great at cross-linking and surfacing content, and the latest update is furthering that goal. Amazon...? Not so sure. They succeed despite their fugly, confusing UI rather than because of it.
Fugly is up for debate (one probably not worth having).
Confusing I'd like to hear your defense for. I don't personally find it confusing.
Regardless, what is a better measure for the success of a product's interface than its ability to support a company's objectives? Amazon's site is doing just that.
Exactly. Too many people think UI design is about making something look pretty, but it's not. Making something look pretty is a nicely added bonus, but before all you must help the user in doing what they want in a way that's efficient and effective, while still supporting the company's commercial goals. More than often it's an incredibly challenge to balance this properly, but succeeding in this is what, in my opinion, makes a great designer.
Amazon's design has undergone countless testing for each new UI aspect that gets added and there are case studies written on it. Some may find it confusing but it's more often than not there because it's increasing sales.
Amazon is fantastic, basically everyone in the industry that I know has been going there for inspiration first forever. Recently, Facebook has taken that place, and Google to some degree (although Google's case is a very specific one).
Wow, thats amazing. Its the last place I'd look for inspiration these days. Perhaps 8 years ago. It just doesnt make sense to regurgitate things that could be done better.
I find the whole UX clunky, especially the checkout process. Its trying to be too many things to too many people and have solved some hard issues - just not very well.
You're asking about UI designers and most people have provided links to Designers - two different beasts in my view.
I think stackoverflow if one of the best examples of brilliant UI I've seen recently - certainly one of the best I've seen on the web - but it probably wouldn't make my top list for beautiful design.
You're asking about UI designers and most people have provided links to Designers
This is the crucial point in this whole discussion. If the user has a task to accomplish, the user may indeed want the task to be accomplished in a beautiful environment, but most of all the user wants the task to get done. User interface design is first of all tested by seeing whether or not any typical user anticipated for the site or for the application can accomplish the task successfully.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadEdit: Oops! He's right, http://metalabdesign.com/
They are quite good.
"When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance." -- PG
http://www.metalabdesign.com/about-us/ is full of "cake decoration". Other than that it is nice work.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Sure, average people think design is purely decorative, but that does not mean that decoration is not a part of design.
What about their site do you find to be poorly designed?
Look at all of the unnecessary lines framing everything on the page. Instead of adding complexity that potentially confuses the user, they should have used whitespace to group elements.
They also use too many colors. Their use of color is distracting -- it does not add value.
There are a lot of good and interesting ideas there. The problem, I think is that there are too many, and that leaves the page cluttered and distracting.
Also, totally love Refresh Media - http://refreshmedia.com/ - they did http://bacn.com/ for us.
Jonas Rask - http://twitter.com/JonasRask
Jonathan Castro - http://twitter.com/DDrDark
MetaLab Design - http://twitter.com/metalab
Philipp Antoni - http://twitter.com/PhilippAntoni
http://shop.stylous.com/
http://subtraction.com http://cubancouncil.com http://madebyelephant.com http://jasonsantamaria.com http://markboulton.co.uk http://hicksdesign.co.uk
http://envato.com/
Particularly, I like their themes site:
http://themeforest.net/
Confusing I'd like to hear your defense for. I don't personally find it confusing.
Regardless, what is a better measure for the success of a product's interface than its ability to support a company's objectives? Amazon's site is doing just that.
I also find myself scrolling around and looking for stuff alot on amazon - too much recommendations and stuff...
I find the whole UX clunky, especially the checkout process. Its trying to be too many things to too many people and have solved some hard issues - just not very well.
Also Wilson Miner: http://www.wilsonminer.com/work/
And Greg Newman: http://carbon8.us/
Keep in mind that I don't know many designers, so I've pretty much just listed all the ones I know.
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/
Also, Dragon Interactive is pretty cool, although they can be mega douches at times.
http://dragoninteractive.com/
I also really like what Sofa does: http://www.madebysofa.com/ (checkout the enstore demo, epic: http://www.enstore.com)
Ryan Singer of 37signals was very impressive when I saw him speak at RailsConf this year. I definitely think he's up there. http://twitter.com/rjs
My favorite interactive design agency: http://www.2advanced.com/
...really?
http://jontangerine.com/
I think stackoverflow if one of the best examples of brilliant UI I've seen recently - certainly one of the best I've seen on the web - but it probably wouldn't make my top list for beautiful design.
This is the crucial point in this whole discussion. If the user has a task to accomplish, the user may indeed want the task to be accomplished in a beautiful environment, but most of all the user wants the task to get done. User interface design is first of all tested by seeing whether or not any typical user anticipated for the site or for the application can accomplish the task successfully.
Stuff they've done:
http://silverbackapp.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
http://www.tourdust.com/
http://www.scifi.co.uk/
http://clearleft.com/made/wwf/
http://clearleft.com/made/ratemyarea/