Posts in GUI

New Year / New Blog

The ISO50 blog is now approaching it’s second birthday and with the new year I thought now would be a good time to rethink the layout and functionality of the interface. The blog runs on the superb WordPress platform (highly recommended) so it’s extremely flexible and I want to take better advantage of that flexibility. When I first designed and built the blog I admittedly had no clue what I was doing. At the time I wasn’t really an avid blog reader so I didn’t really understand the finer points of a well thought out blog design. Thankfully, WordPress supports themes so I snagged the classic Kubrick theme (now K2) and hacked it into the form you see here. I learned a lot during the process and during the following year or so of working with the blog so I feel better equipped now to give it another shot. But as anyone in web design knows, it’s very difficult to be objective about your own interfaces and to understand the difficulties end users may have with your design.

So I wanted to ask you, the readers, what you would do to improve the blog. Is there anything about the interface or the layout that’s confusing, cumbersome, or just plain broken? Are there any features that you feel are missing or would be a good addition? I am in the early stages of the redesign, I have some mock-ups and wireframes going and a development install running here locally, so now would be a great time for suggestions. I look forward to reading any ideas or suggestions you might have in the comments

Update: Based on Michael J.’s comments I have added to this post in the comments.

iPhone GUI PSD

iphone_gui
I started out my career in graphic design as an interface architect so I’ve always had a soft spot for GUI’s and user interaction theory. I happened across this post at Teehan+Lax about the GUI for the iPhone. They’ve posted a PSD with most of the assets from the iPhone interface, all in freely-scalable shape layer and PS effect formats. Technically it’s been posted to provide an easy way to create iPhone mock ups but I think it’s a great reference for anyone trying to learn how to create interface graphics in Photoshop (for web or otherwise). Reverse engineering PSDs like this is a great exercise in working with scalable graphics in Photoshop. You can download the PSD from the Teehan+Lax site.