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Articles by Karl Fast
Unicorn designers don’t exist. Generalists do.
If there’s one thing the design industry loves it’s false dichotomies. Should designers learn to code or focus on design? Should they generalise or specialise in one area? These debates distract us from the real issue: it doesn’t matter how you realise your work, as long as the end result is a clear articulation of your design vision. Specific skill sets are merely a means to an end. Take a carpenter. Sometimes they’ll need to use to use a fine-toothed Japanese saw.
Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding
Four Interaction Themes Fifteen epistemic actions … constitute a broad vocabulary to describe how we create understanding from information…. Our interaction vocabulary comprises fifteen epistemic actions.
Mr. Roboto: Connecting with Technology
People don’t always need another human being to experience a sense of connection. The deep emotional bonds many people have with their pets proves this. (So might the popularity of the Pet Rock in the 1970s but that’s just speculation.) Even Link in The Legend of Zelda had an inanimate companion: his trusty sword (see Figure 9.1). Article Continues Below Fig 9.1 Even the company of a wooden sword is better than venturing into Hyrule alone.
Design for Real Life: An Interview with Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Our users don’t live the tidy little lives we’ve concocted for our personas, with their limited set of problems. Life is messy and unpredictable; some days, terrible. When planning a project, it’s important not to let our excitement lull us into blithely ignoring life’s harsher realities. Article Continues Below Discomfort with others’ burdens has no place in good design.
Mental Illness in the Web Industry
The picture of the tortured artist has endured for centuries: creative geniuses who struggle with their metaphorical demons and don’t relate to life the same way as most people. Today, we know some of this can be attributed to mental illness: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and many others. We have modern stories about this and plenty of anecdotal information that fuels the popular belief in a link between creativity and mental illness.
Organize that Sass!
Article Continues Below One of the many beauties of working with Sass is how easy it is to get organized. In the past, importing different CSS files wasn’t good practice and in fact made for more HTTP requests. With Sass, you can have many different partials which allow you to isolate styles in a logical way. What is a partial?
Figure It Out
Color is, without a doubt, the visual element most often misunderstood and misused. Article Continues Below As mentioned earlier, when designing visual representations, color is often the first visual encoding that people use. It’s also quite limited to about a dozen, distinguishable colors. It’s a potent visual element, but one fraught with accessibility and perceptual problems. A general rule of thumb: Save color for things you want to draw people’s attention to.
Figure It Out - Rosenfeld Media
In this illuminating and profoundly unique book, Stephen and Karl have cracked the code on how to make complex concepts not only simple but tangible. And, as they show, that makes all the difference. When you need to give your ideas body, form, and shape, you need this book. Dan Roam, Author of The Back of the Napkin and Draw to Win Figure It Out is about learning tools + spaces—perception, representation, metaphor, models, systems, interaction-in-the-world, thinking-with-things—and design.
Cross-Cultural Design
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share this excerpt from Chapter 5 of Senongo Akpem’s Cross-Cultural Design, from A Book Apart. When I first traveled to Japan as an exchange student in 2001, I lived in northern Kyoto, a block from the Kitayama subway station. Article Continues Below My first time using the train to get to my university was almost a disaster, even though it was only two subway stops away. I thought I had everything I needed to successfully make the trip.
Design Beyond Devices
Testimonials The future is multimodal because we are multimodal. Here is an essential guide to unleashing the potential within that symmetry. —Bill Buxton, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences This book harnesses our very selfish desire to make cool things into the ability to benefit clients, stakeholders, customers, and society itself. Chock-full of insightful conceptual models and practical applications, designers will be both inspired and prepared.
Trans-inclusive Design
Late one night a few years ago, a panicked professor emailed me: “My transgender student’s legal name is showing on our online discussion board. How can I keep him from being outed to his classmates?” Short story: we couldn’t. The professor created an offline workaround with the student. Years later this problem persists not just in campus systems, but in many systems we use every day. Article Continues Below To anyone who’d call that an unusual situation, it’s not.
The Imbalance of Culture Fit
When I started Bearded back in 2008, I’d never run a business before. This lack of experience meant I didn’t know how to do many of the things I’d ultimately have to do as a business owner. One of the things I didn’t know how to do yet? Hiring. Article Continues Below When it came time to start hiring employees, I thought a lot about what the company needed to advance, what skills it was lacking. I asked friends for advice, and introductions to people they knew and trusted who fit the bill.
Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate
As I write this, the world is sending its thoughts and prayers to our Muslim cousins. The Christchurch act of terrorism has once again reminded the world that white supremacy’s rise is very real, that its perpetrators are no longer on the fringes of society, but centered in our holiest places of worship. People are begging us to not share videos of the mass murder or the hateful manifesto that the white supremacist terrorist wrote.
The User's Journey - Rosenfeld Media
Testimonials Lichaw delivers a creative, common-sense design method that simply works, no experience necessary. This book belongs on every experience designer’s desk. Kristina Halvorson, Author, Content Strategy You’ve heard the term storymapping before. In this detailed, tactical, and delightfully illustrated book, Donna Lichaw takes a different spin on how to bring the story of your product to life.
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