Today in Design - Top Articles RoundUp 13 August 2014

Great con­tent found by Pariah and shared to the design and cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties on social media.

  • How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

    Why Designers Need to ‘Become the Patient’ to Build Better Products

    Gebbia’s expe­ri­ence with upgrad­ing pho­tographs proved that code alone can’t solve every prob­lem that cus­tomers have. While com­put­ers are pow­er­ful, there’s only so much that soft­ware alone can achieve. Silicon Valley entre­pre­neurs tend to become com­fort­able in their roles as key­board jock­eys. However, going out to meet cus­tomers in the real world is almost always the best way to wran­gle their prob­lems and come up with clever solutions. 

  • Free Extension Integrates Dribbble Directly Into Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (CS5, CS6, CC)
    Bounce is a free exten­sion that inte­grates and con­nects the Dribbble design com­mu­ni­ty into the Adobe design appli­ca­tions you love to build with everyday.

    Keeping up with the game has nev­er been eas­i­er as it’s now pos­si­ble to check out the late…

  • More on the Amazon Letter and its impact – Untangling the Amazon/Hachette Dispute

    More broad­ly, Amazon’s errat­ic response ignores most of the real­i­ties of pub­lish­ing. The pub­lish­ers in ques­tion, and most pub­lish­ers, con­tin­ue to print books as well as issue them in ebook edi­tions. TidBITS Publishing, with its Take Control series, is one of a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of pub­lish­ers (across fic­tion, non-fiction, text­books, and more) that deliv­ers books sole­ly in elec­tron­ic form.

  • The Notification is the Interface #UI #UX

    I’ve always been a big fan of min­i­mal inter­faces, and noti­fi­ca­tions as the inter­face are prob­a­bly the ulti­mate fron­tier in terms of sim­plic­i­ty and sur­face size. They are con­sis­tent and con­strain­ing in design, but still very powerful. 

  • The Top 5 Metrics Every Publisher Should Care About [Infographic]

    While the mantra of the pub­lish­ing indus­try was once “con­tent, con­tent, con­tent,” today’s refrain might as well be “data, data, data.” Sophisticated ana­lyt­ics pro­grams have pro­vid­ed unprece­dent­ed amounts of infor­ma­tion about read­ers and their habits across dif­fer­ent web­sites, pro­vid­ing pub­lish­ers new insights and oppor­tu­ni­ties to innovate.

  • Photoshop-Like Blend Modes Come to the Web with CSS Blend Modes
    Bennett Feely has been doing a good job of show­ing peo­ple the glo­ry of CSS blend modes. There are lots of design­er­ly effects that we’re used to see­ing in sta­t­ic designs (thanks to Photoshop) that we don’t see on the web much, with dynam­ic conte…
  • How To Cope With Lack Of Support For Your Freelancing Career

    However, this doesn’t mean that unfor­tu­nate stereo­types about free­lancers have abat­ed. According to a sur­vey con­duct­ed by Crunch Accounting , 75 per­cent of free­lancers claim that they aren’t tak­en as seri­ous­ly as larg­er busi­ness­es, because of mis­con­cep­tions like “free­lancers spend all of their time in their paja­mas”, “free­lanc­ing is for peo­ple who can’t find full-time work”, “free­lanc­ing is a stop-gap to a full-time career”, and “free­lancers aren’t as reli­able as agencies/temps”.

  • Roboto Rebooted: Why Google Updates Its Font Like The Rest Of Its Products
    With its ambi­tious plan to cre­ate a sin­gle design lan­guage for all its prod­ucts, Google had to update its main font to work on any screen.
  • These Free Productivity Planners Help You Focus and Stay Organized
    Productive Flourishing has made free plan­ners for cre­ative peo­ple and oth­ers who don’t fit the nor­mal 8–5 mod­el of work.

    The site notes that not every plan­ner is per­fect for every type of job or per­son, so they have cre­at­ed dif­fer­ent ones for …

  • What web design­ers can learn from Disney. Interview with Rogie King
    We speak to Twitter-ruling design­er Rogie King about what he’s learned from the House of Mouse and more.