[A]s designers we have a moral duty to establish and defend the emotional, cultural, aesthetic qualities that manifest in the structural proportions, harmonies of color and image, and the details of alignment / organization / typography, and (increasingly) animation / transitions / interactivity.
[Design] integrity matters for coherence, quality, and consistency–bound by a personally and professionally-held value of holistic integration of elements into something that stands on its own, distinctive and memorable–something worthy of pride and envy.

→ Ghost in the Pixel

…und es lohnt sich auch den Rest des Eintrags zu lesen.

The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

Jonathan Ive

Invention depends on two processes. The first generates a collection of alternatives, the other chooses, recognizing what is desirable and appears important among that produced by the first. What one calls “genius” is much less the contribution of the first, the one that collects the alternatives, than the facility of the second in recognizing the value of what has been presented, and seizing upon it.

Paul Valery (in Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton)

Zu dem Zitat passt auch mein Artikel über Kreativität.

When a designer is introduced to a project brief through a client presentation, the first ideation skill is for the designer to be able to listen actively. That is, the designer needs to make sense of the client’s needs and desires, asking questions and exploring the client’s reasoning behind the project brief. By understanding how the client’s reasoning was arrived at the designer is in a better postion to make links to his prior knowledge and experience that may help address the client’s concerns. Having applied his listening skills, the designer is then ready to start the ideation process and articulate his response to the brief in a language that is both imaginative and meaningful using an appropirate range of ideation tools.

→ Ideation and listening skills

Make simple things simple and complex things possible.

Tom Kelley in The Art of Innovation
(via ui-patterns.com)

A design is intuitive when people just know what to do and they don’t have to go through any training to get there… When a design is not intuitive, our attention moves away from what we’re trying to accomplish to how we can get the interface to accomplish what we want.

Jared Spool (via InspireUX)

…ich finde, dass ist inhaltlich wie Don’t Make Me Think, aber weniger plakativ.