Digital Terroir

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Jordan Koschei

Is design "tech?"

Working on digital products is like working in a bubble – it’s easy to forget that what we do remains mysterious to the rest of the world. Few things bring home that point like someone saying, “Oh, you design apps? What’s it like having a tech job?” That question

Design and taxonomies

So much of design is about deciding how to categorize things properly. The user doesn’t care if we’ve designed the prettiest screen in the world – if the content isn’t arranged logically, if the navigation is senseless and the layout unintuitive, it won’t matter how much lipstick

ValioCon 2014 recap

Just about everyone I spoke to on the last day of ValioCon agreed that, as design/tech/maker conferences go, it was special. I’m sitting in the airport waiting to board a plane to New York, trying to distill the conference into a single takeaway. It’s probably impossible

Design and empathy

Originally published on Stemmings, a now-defunct publication. You can see the original at the Internet Archive: Stemmings The most important trait a designer can have is empathy. Practical skills are important, and a shot of talent never hurts, but at its core, design relies on our ability to see things

Lines on the road

Great design is often invisible – ideally, we never even notice it. Consequently, we rarely think about many of the designed things we encounter every day. Consider the road system. Street lights, stop signs, and the ubiquitous yellow lines fade into the background of our consciousness while we drive, yet they

Great design tells a story

Every user interaction is a narrative. Whether the user is browsing a website, inputting data into a form, or using an app, they’re the key player in a story. Stories are the most resonant way to communicate information – since design is largely about communication, this should interest us. Raw

Scrolljacking is awful

Nobody likes being scrolljacked. You scroll down the page, and something unexpected happens. The scroll speed is abnormal, the behavior doesn’t map to the action, or some other nastiness takes place. To me, the worst is when you scroll down a little and an entire new pane of content

Creation, destruction, reduction

Creation is the process by which we bring something new into existence. It may be derivative, it may even be a ripoff, but it’s still something new. Destruction is the process by which we tear down something that already exists. Reduction is the process by which we remove extraneous

A (brief) defense of circular avatars

I don’t tend to like design fads, but despite all the naysaying on Twitter, I don’t think circular avatars are terrible. Here’s why: * They are helpful differentiators. Most information on the web is presented in boxes. By placing avatars in circles, it sets them apart from raw