… serifs are by no means superfluous and I like designing roman faces! Particularly for body text where serifs are a reading aid. There are two kinds of reading: text, and looking something up. Reading text is much easier with serifs. They are better at holding the words together.

But my main life’s work was designing sans serif typefaces. It is much more difficult to draw a grotesque than a roman face—much can be covered up with serifs in the latter. The grotesque is like the body of a fish, it is so smooth that no mistake can be allowed to happen!

Adrian Frutiger.

The whole point with type is for you not to be aware it is there, if you remember the shape of a spoon with which you just ate some soup, then the spoon had a poor shape.

The whole point with type is for you not to be aware it is there, if you remember the shape of a spoon with which you just ate some soup, then the spoon had a poor shape.

Adrian Frutiger.

A letter follows the same canons of beauty as a face: A beautiful letter is in perfect proportion. The bar of a ‹t› placed too high, the curve of an ‹a› too low, are as jarring as a long nose or a short chin. Adrian Frutiger.

Don’t pick a funky font. Pick something straight and do something funky with it. That’s harder to do, but it’s better to do. (Plus in five years you won’t look back and groan with embarrassment at your font choice.) Alexander Isley.

… countless makers treat MVPs like lottery tickets. They look at these with unrealistic expectations, and forget them when they don’t «win.» This is akin to a child expecting her first drawing to be on par with a Michelangelo—and quitting when it isn’t.

Yet, this notion of hitting a home run on the first try persists. A whole generation of startup founders is drunk on the fantasy of an afternoon project that turns into a unicorn. So, they pump out one sloppy project after another—and they abandon these products with equally little consideration.

You are not a failure if one version doesn’t perform. You just return to your workbench and make another. This is what it takes to build something good.

Eric Karjaluoto.

The tasks you need to act on are quite often those you’re least apt to. When design studios need more work, they redesign their websites—instead of drumming up sales.

It’s not as though these people aren’t aware of what they should do. It’s that indirect tasks tend to feel more manageable, at the time. This is the paradox that surrounds priorities: What needs doing is often obvious. In fact, this course of action can seem too simple—so you go looking for ways to complicate it. You write new plans. You tackle indirect tasks. Or, you think too much—and psyche yourself out of doing what needs doing.

Creative work involves a sort of duality. You need that spark that drives you to pursue an incomplete (perhaps impractical) idea. You also need the discipline to figure out which tasks need doing—and do them—even if this feels tedious.

Eric Karjaluoto.

Being able to create something and make something that a lot of people find helpful or useful or makes them smile at the kind of scale that designers are able to do, is pretty magical and a pretty amazing opportunity.

Designers for a long time were relegated to billboards or designing books which obviously quite some time ago had an immense scale, but given the way that designers are now able to design technology is pretty insane historically. The size of the opportunity is something that I find fascinating. If you look at the history of technology in the world there hasn’t been a period in time where you could go design something and it be used by millions or hundreds of millions of people. To have a lot of opportunities for different designers to work at that scale is fairly new. It’s not like there’s 5 designers or 5 places where you could go to do that. There’s a lot of places for designers to go do that at this point in time and I think it’s a really great opportunity. I guess I could’ve pulled the shoot at some point and gone and done industrial design or some kind of mechanical engineering, but the scale of usefulness that you can create is pretty powerful right now as a designer. I think that’s a great opportunity to have.

Nathan Garvie.

The first thing you learn as a professional designer is how to walk in the shoes of others — techniques for making things that work well for people not like you, and building empathy for these people. In the real world, this involves an additional factor — balancing the problems people have, and identifying the important ones worth solving given the time and technical constraints you have.

We call this high level process of identifying problems and needs of people Product Design.

The product design role is one of finding problems, iterating on potential solutions, and refining toward one which we’ve identified as the «best», through testing, and user research, given our needs and constraints. It’s one of the coolest and most frustrating parts of design — you get to explore the craziest ideas and go completely broad, but you do need to balance your time, and not get personally attached to things that don’t work.

This is the process that explores the tangential, the lateral — it’s our attempt at systemizing disruption. It’s what produces things like iPhones and Macbooks, Polaroid cameras, Legos, and Coke bottles.

Chen Ye.

There are plenty of helpful frameworks and grids on the Web that aid designers and developers who are looking to start a website but don’t want to start from scratch. Bootstrap, HTML5 Boilerplate, and 960 Grid are examples of foundation CSS, HTML, and JavaScript that can help you kick-start a site design.

However, grids and frameworks come at a cost. Because they are designed to cover a large number of generic use cases, they will include plenty of things that you don’t need on your site. This extraneous content can be a hindrance to your page load time rather than an aid to your development time; if you’re not careful about how much is included as you start implementing a grid or framework, you could have a lot of unnecessary assets, markup, or styles loaded on your site.

Lara Callender Hogan.

I’m not saying that craft isn’t important. A solution is only useful once it’s been executed upon, and sometimes understanding how somebody else put their design together can be enlightening. But a craft can’t be taught by proxy. Your hands only learn when they do work for themselves.

It took me a while to realize that. I used to spend a long time learning about new web technology, reading design blogs to see what was hot in UI, and drooling over typography. I was always excited to apply the latest thinking to my latest project. I was trying to come up with a solution before the problem had even materialized, which of course, never works.

The wider design community doesn’t know what you need to learn. Everybody posting case studies and comparing Dribbble shots is telling you what they’ve learned, but that’s irrespective of your work.

There are things to be learned from other designers, definitely—everyone we work with leaves an indelible mark on us, in some way or another. But the things they have to teach can only be learned in working