April 25, 2014After a long weekend of holiday I decided to continue the One Year of UI Design story today. Some time ago one of my clients told me it would be great to have a nice tool to publish one message to several places at the same time. At Media Injection our system has such a thing, but it’s part of a much bigger system. I thought it would be nice to create a new design for a multi destination composer. I made a sketch this morning and discussed it with a colleague. He liked it, though immediately came with feedback:... View Article
April 17, 2014Every designer needs inspiration and so I decided to use today to make a selection of the most beautiful interfaces I’ve found so far. I love to regularly spend some time at Dribbble and Pinterest to collect inspiring designs. Since today is day eleven, I thought it would be nice to make a selection of eleven designs: Windows 8 Day Mode Why I like it: It’s clean. It’s super clean. Only showing the things needed and nothing further. I’ve used this design a lot as inspiration for my work at Media Injection. Windows 8 Night Mode Why I like it:... View Article
April 14, 2014I think Live Chat is one of the best features a website can have to offer support to their visitors. Happily I see chat boxes appear on more websites these days and I find it very helpful to be able to ask direct questions before I buy a product or sign up for a service. I was thinking how a chatbox like that could be improved and made a quick sketch. Often you see the live chat buttons at the right bottom or vertically at the left side of a website, presented as a tab. To let the chat button... View Article
April 13, 2014Last week I was doing some research for new pens, since I’m sketching more these days. I found this nice list and ordered various different ones so I can compare them. Earlier this week the first package arrived. It was the Pilot G-TEC C4. I grabbed a piece of paper and made a quick sketch. From the first line I felt the difference. This pen is a lot sharper than the one I used so far and enables to work far more detailed. Of course I still have to improve my sketching skills, but having a pen as nice as... View Article
April 11, 2014Let me start by saying that this project in still in concept stage and that the design is far from ready. It’s just a visualisation of thoughts and still need a lot of work. Having that said, I feel free to show you the design of today. It’s the sketch from the other day worked out into a first design in Photoshop. I used an iPhone 5s mockup to present the design as an app and borrowed the coffee cups from another place. I think it would be nice to have different cups for each drink. The aim of this... View Article
April 9, 2014The other day I was thinking, since I spend so much time in Starbucks it would be nice to design an app for them. The next step was to consider what part of getting a coffee at Starbucks could be improved. I recalled my own experience and realised that there is a lot of waiting involved before you get your coffee. First you have to wait in line to place your order, then you’re in line for paying and at last you’re in line to wait for your coffee. All together, that can quickly be five minutes of waiting. Five... View Article
April 7, 2014After a weekend full of other activities, I continued my UI Design series today with designing the round menu. The first challenge with a round design is that you have to work with angles. After a few failed trials to create the right angle by hand, I just chose to use 45 degrees, which Photoshop can automatically lock into when you hold the shift-key while dragging a line. Using that angle actually worked out nice and divided the menu in eight parts. It’s still a quite simple design, though I like that it’s a really different menu than you often... View Article
April 4, 2014When I was working on the vertical menu yesterday, I turned my Philips light on with the remote control which happens to be round. That got me thinking. We always have our navigation horizontal or vertical, but you almost never see it round. One company that has a non-traditional way of navigation is Vodafone. In their new app you navigate by dragging bubbles to the centre. I had to get used to it the first time, but from then it felt natural and very fast. I really like it when people are thinking out of the box like that and... View Article
April 3, 2014I planned to watch a tutorial on flat design yesterday, but the day was fully planned and by the time I got home at night I was too tired to do anything more. Since today will be busy again and I didn’t want to skip another day, I decided to start the day with some UI design before breakfast. I worked out the sketch of the menu. I’m aware it’s still very basic, but many good things start small. I made a light and a dark version in collapsed and expanded state. The top icon is to collapse and expand... View Article
April 1, 2014Today I spend time thinking about a vertical menu. I did some research at Dribbble and made two sketches. I think menu’s are a necessity, but shouldn’t take to much space. My plan for today was to design a floating menu that can be dragged around, so users can place is wherever they want. After my first sketch I got the idea to make the menu even smaller by having it collapsed to a single square. When clicked on the square, the menu will expand and show the full size. I plan to work out these sketches in Photoshop later... View Article
