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Thanks to everyone who attended my design talk at That Conference. It’s always great to see the dev community genuinely interested in learning about design. That Conference was awesome, the support of the attendees and overall energy at the conference was some of the best I’ve ever seen. Water park after party?! Nuff’ said.
New Content Highlights
The slides from the talk are available below, but before you go jumping in face-first, there is some new hotness worth noting. I posted this deck about a year ago, when I originally gave the talk at DevSum. And since then I’ve spent about a year turning the talk into a BOOK. And over the course of the year I’ve generated quite a bit of new content. Along the way I’ve created a few design tools that help make some mundane design/dev tasks a little easier.
Grid Helper
The first of the two tools I showed during the talk is called GridHelper. If time allows, my plan is to write up a more detailed post on how to use it. But here is the gist:
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If you’re a designer or a creative coder you’ve probably needed a grid at some point. Whether you are aligning elements on a page, or creating a layout from scratch – grids are the layout power-tool.
If you’re like me, you probably hate the meticulous process of adding a bunch of guides to your photoshop or illustrator files. Or you hate writing code to generate a grid to overlay in your projects.
What’s more, most grid calculators are targeted at web design. What about apps?! iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, Large format touch screens, kiosks….we all need grids!
So that’s why I built the grid helper. Quickly make vector or pixel-based grids to drop in your design files or add to your dev projects.
GET IT from the Chrome Webstore or just hit this link. *works best in Chorome”
Rhythm & Scale Calculator
The other tool I demoed during the talk is a typography widget. Its called the Rhythm & Scale Calculator and it helps with two key typography taks:
- Creating a Typography Scale / Ramp
- Ensuring a baseline rhythm
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I will defer to my detailed blog post about how to use the widget.
The widget is also available in the Chrome Webstore or hit the link HERE. And for you mac users you can download the dashboard widget for OSX.
The Goods
I hope these slides get people excited about integrating design into their own software projects. Coming Soon – Stay tuned for the book coming soon!
Enjoy
Erik Klimczak | eklimczak@claritycon.com | twitter.com/eklimcz