skwpspace yan pritzker’s home on the web

How Facebook can dramatically improve Pages

Despite all the bitching and moaning, I think the recent facebook redesign is great. Focusing on the stream, and the ease of sharing a variety of content works very well. But Facebook Pages feel like an afterthought that was tacked on, hacked on, and clearly never thought through. And now, let the Airing of Grievances [...]

Why you (and I) are not designers

The problem with design is that, at first glance, it seems intuitive.
It’s pretty universally agreed that the iPhone is well designed. What makes it so? The rounded corners and shiny glass? The special effects in the OS? It’s too easy to think that once you’ve seen an example of great design, you can reproduce it. [...]

Rails moves to Lighthouse

In a series of dev infrastructure changes, the Rails team is moving to Lighthouse as its bugtracking system. I wrote about Lighthouse more than a year ago as an application to watch in the bugtracking space, and now they’re coming into the limelight with official support from the Rails team.
I’m really happy to see [...]

How to hire a visual/interaction designer

Design by committee is a bad idea.
Everyone knows this but few people practice it. There’s an inherent desire to get everyone’s input on the project, especially in a small team. What this leads to is a lot of argument and very little progress.

Especially bad is the idea that team members should give feedback directly to [...]

Interface design and usability

This is a great presentation for anyone even remotely connected to building interactive products.

Why didn’t I think of this?

Maybe cuz I’m not an alcoholic. Brilliant product idea, though!

Blueprint CSS

I’ve come out of hiding to write about a really cool project I discovered today: Blueprint CSS is a project designed to give a solid grid and typography based css stylesheet to start things off. Check it out in action here. Encoding the best practices of design into a css stylesheet is a great idea, [...]