Ian Storm Taylor

    1. Refactoring Github’s Design

      Reducing an interface until only the absolutely necessary elements remain is one of the most satisfying tasks in design.

    2. Media Queries are a Hack

      The big buzzwords in CSS these days are “modular” and “responsive”—and for good reasons. But we’re still trying to achieve those goals with the wrong tool: Media Queries. What we really need is a tool that doesn’t exist yet…

    1. Walking Through the Design Process

      I was rummaging through my drafts folder and stumbled on this old post walking through the process of designing the “Goals” feature on our old product, before we switched to what Segment is now. I think it’s an interesting…

    1. OOCSS + Sass = The Best Way to Write CSS

      Object-oriented CSS is awesome. But littering your markup with non-semantic classes is not awesome. Those classes sprinkled all over your HTML are going to change, and that’s not gonna be fun. But if you combine OOCSS and…

    1. Break Apart Your Backbone.js Render Methods

      After my article on rendering views in Backbone, Jeremy Ashkenas pointed out that my examples were doing extra, expensive work by re-rendering everything on every call to render. He’s absolutely right, but they were just…

    2. Design Tip: Never Use Black

      One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same…

    3. Assigning Backbone Subviews Made Even Cleaner

      After my post about rendering subviews in Backbone.js, Tim Branyen asked me if I had taken a look at Layout Manager because it aims to solve a lot of the problems that crop up with managing complex application layouts. I’ll…

    4. Rendering Views in Backbone.js Isn’t Always Simple

      When I first started using Backbone, one of my biggest unsolved problems was finding a good pattern for rendering views. It should be easy, but there are lots of pitfalls that crop up in larger apps, so I’ll show you what we…

    5. Backbone.js Configuration Logic Should Be Extendable

      Backbone’s flexible design makes it really easy to structure apps any way you see fit. But it also means that you’ll always need to augment Backbone if you have a decent-sized project—which is fine because you can tweak…

    1. Audience on the Web

      There’s no question that audience is an important consideration in design. Hell, it isn’t even design if there isn’t an audience. But the web has transformed that audience from a passive group into a powerful one. It has…

    2. Skeumorphism and the iPad

      When the iPad was released last April, several applications on the device were derided bydesigners for their “kitsch” use of real-world interface metaphors, a practice promoted in the company’s Human Interface Guidelines for…

    1. Spec Work or Dialogue?

      The Gap redesign has sparked a lot of discussion in the design community about crowd-sourcing and spec work. In a recent article, Francisco Inchauste argued that designers’ reaction to Gap’s new logo was serving to lessen the…

    2. Good for Good’s Sake

      A recent post on Drawar criticizing some designers’ reaction to Gap’s new brand seemed so off-base to me I have to respond. While Scrivs makes some good points about the redesign’s intentions, one paragraph stood out to me:

    1. WebAdvisor Simplified

      As designers we are con­stantly both­ered by all of the poorly designed things around us. We can whine about the worst offenders to friends, but by now they’ve learned to filter our com­plaints. It’s a tough life.