Simon Li – Page 11 – Design and Code

Design in General

Is It Working? — A Simple Question to Keep in Mind when Critiquing a Design during Interviews

Recently, I was participating in a few designer interviews. After the first round, candidates would be given a design exercise which they would need to complete and present to us remotely in the second round. We would then look at the design, ask them questions and provide feedback during their presentations.

From interviewers’ perspective, understanding a candidate’s design could be challenging. Candidates usually need to go through many screens in a short period of time. Maybe the candidate is not so good at explaining the rationale behind his or her design. Sometimes there could be problems with the connection which lead to poor audio or video. In these circumstances, how can we critique a design effectively and provide the candidate with valuable feedback?

Coding

An Elegant Way to Break the Bootstrap Container

Carousels are a popular UI element. Unlike other elements that are often constrained by the main view, they often occupy the entire width of a page (the viewport), as can be seen from the following examples.

Design in General

5 Lessons On Reducing Design Frustrations: What I learned in the Past Year as a UX Designer

I am a user experience designer. A lot of my knowledge in UX comes from the human-computer interaction program I did in graduate school. Getting an degree in HCI, of course, cannot teach me everything about how UX design is practiced in the real world. Below are 5 lessons on reducing design frustrations I’d like to share which I learned while working as a designer on the agency side in the past year.

The Secret to Nice Typeface Combinations

When I asked people what their biggest struggles related to typography were, one of the answers I often heard of was pairing typefaces. We want to use more than one typefaces to make our design more lively and interesting, but for a lot of us, we are not sure which ones go together. When it comes to matching typefaces, there is actually a secret. With this secret, you will be able to create nice typeface combinations.

Visual Design

3 Things You’ll Need to Do When Using a Large Font Size

We are used to working with small font sizes. Body text of most documents falls somewhere between 9pt to 14pt. Small font sizes have also dominated the web for a long time. Not until recent years did web designers try to use more and more bigger and bolder texts (36px+). Large font sizes are intended to stand out and draw attention, and working with them is slightly different from working with small body text. There are adjustments to be made in order for the big text to make our design bold and attractive. Today I’d like to talk about 3 things that you will need to do if you are using a large font size.