Simon Li – Page 3 – Design and Code

Visual Design

Small Investment, Nice Return

How creating 200 illustrations on a weekly basis has made me a better illustrator

I recently posted my 200th illustration on Instagram. As you may know, I started this project of creating 1 piece of illustration per week back in 2018. I first reflected on this journey in 2020 when I reached the 100 milestone. Now, after another 100 pieces, it’s about time for me to look back again and share with you how 4 years of consistent practice, especially in the last two years, has shaped my illustration style, and I hope that this will give you inspiration in whatever goals you want to achieve.

Interaction Design

The Next-Level of User-Friendliness

A complex software application often involves multiple personas, several user journeys, and complicated interactions between different user groups. Without a thoughtful design, these complexities can be overwhelming and frustrating: Users are forced to deal with a cluttered UI with overloaded features, or to search for an obscure button or command, or to figure out a user flow that’s hard for laymen to understand. As a result, they get lost while using the software and are forced to seek help or go through trainings.

Instead of forcing the users to learn and adapt, how can we design an application in such as way that it proactively tries to help the users? Well, one way to do that is to predict the user intent using various contextual cues, such as the user’s skill level, the content the user is working on, etc, and present the right features at the right stage of the user journey through an adaptive UI.

Colors Are Relative

One of the most amazing things about colors is that they are relative. I learned this from one of my professors in university. It’s an optical illusion, and it can be used to our advantage to create the perception of the color we want without actually using that color.

Design in General

This Book Will Change the Way You Look at Data in Design: Learnings from Reading Designing with Data

How do you feel when the success of your design hinges on metrics? For me, I used to not like it. I felt that it was too rigid and that design shouldn’t be reduced to a number game, which I talked about earlier. Since then, I’d been trying to learn the best practices of integrating data into design, and this book Designing with Data — written by Rochelle King, Elizabeth F. Churchill and Caitlin Tan— helped me understand better the role data plays in product design. I’m sure you’ll benefit a lot from this book, just like I did. Below are my learnings.

AI Color Palette Generator

A New Way to Explore Color Combinations

Running out of inspirations for colors when designing or illustrating? Give this new tool a try!

AI Color Palette Generator (Web/Figma) is a new way to explore different color combinations. It allows designers or illustrators to search for the right palettes based on nouns or adjectives like those related to seasons, mood, themes, colors…

This tool extracts colors from the huge library of high-quality photos made possible by Unsplash. When enough palettes have been extracted from photos for a particular keyword, the AI will kick in and learn those palettes to generate even more combinations. You can even specify a color bias for the AI. The possibilities are endless.

Send me an email if you have any comments or questions. If you want to support me, you can buy me a coffee.

Enjoy the new tool!