Design

What one gets easily and for free can be a real struggle for others — these are the thoughts every letter of the «Dobroshrift» [Kindness Font] evolves. It was developed for the World Cerebral Palsy Day with the participation of children with this diagnosis. So we decided to take part in this charity action and changed the website logo till the end of the day.

The creation of design models as well as visualization of solutions is for some reason always a subject of great interest among all members of a productive team, be it a manager eager to master Sketch, or a developer who wants to make cool interfaces without the need to go to a designer. But we all know what happens when it comes to actually doing stuff.

My way

Hi, everybody!

My name is Anna and I work for an American company Scentbird NY as a product designer. Prior to that I was involved in developing flagship products in Alfa-Bank design team.

I was probably born under a lucky star but all my life I've been working with the developers who suggest the best product solutions, better than a lot of product managers and product owners. But anyway, my observation is that the earlier you involve developers into working on a particular task, the better off you are.

What you are about to read is actually a blueprint on how to conduct brainstorm sessions and generate not-so-obvious yet effective solutions, which are apparently really easy to reach and not that time-consuming.

My name is Vladimir, and I develop mobile front-end for Yandex Mail. Our apps have had a dark theme for a while, but it was incomplete: only the interface and plain emails were dark. Messages with custom formatting remained light and stood out against the dark interface, hurting our users’ eyes at night.

Today I'll tell you how we fixed this problem. You will learn about two simple techniques that didn't work for us and the method that finally did the trick — adaptive page recoloring. I'll also share some ideas about adapting images to a dark theme. To be fair, darkening pages with custom CSS is a rather peculiar task, but I believe some of you may find our experience helpful.

Why do so many programmers hate UI work? Because it is tedious. Especially, for the Web, but other types of UI are only slightly easier. Layouts, margins, paddings — neverending stream of little tweaks to make it look OK on all sane environments, and somehow this freaking button sometimes overlaps that input field. Rrrr! And yes, it should not hang on button clicks, which means a lot of asynchronous programming, which is a nightmare.

And don’t even speak about aesthetics and usability! Choose right colours, element sizes and locations, find/draw images and put them where they fit, think about user workflows — isn’t it a designers’ or Ux specialists’ job?! Leave me alone, I’m a programmer. I work with backend layers, where everything is straightforward and linear, there are no buttloads of different environments to adjust to, and design is guided by mere logic without pesky fussing with ‘user friendliness’ and ’beauty’!

I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.