Practical Tips for Cheating at Design

While not everyone is a fan of this, I think it&#x27;s the best article on web design i&#x27;ve read in a long time, and easily the best thing i&#x27;ve read on HN this year. Kudos.<p>Not all the advice is going to work in all situations, but they do serve as a great collection of simple but effective tips for improving the design. I&#x27;ve spent a long time tweaking things about in this realm, so these tips are welcome even if i already use many of them. Seeing them together also helps identify new techniques or combinations you can use.<p>I don&#x27;t agree with tertiary buttons with no border and no underline, for example. I think that poorly communicates what&#x27;s clickable&#x2F;tappable and whats not. But then again, that&#x27;s an easy tweak.

UI Developer for over 20 years and fine arts and design major in college. From my experience I can&#x27;t agree more with all of these recommendations.<p>Fewer font sizes and more font weights in general is always good.<p>Removing borders is extremely powerful for a lot of great reasons. When trying to maximize data density and readability, when trying to reduce clutter&#x2F;visual noise and gain whitespace. The use cases for borders can often be resolved in other ways. However this puts more demand on the quality of the typography and layout hence the other techniques mentioned come into play those are design challenges worth addressing.<p>More on borders: This of course is a tool that can be mis-used but I find it is one of the best tools I have. The emphasis should be on data &#x2F; information not on arbitrary borders. You can say the same thing many different ways visually. This is under-appreciated. You need not have font size, color, style all colluding to say the same thing, that you can accomplish with only one of these. When dealing with any series of items the human eye will clearly see periodic patterns and implied lines &#x2F; alignments very quickly thus I find that often borders are unnecessary and even impede a working design.<p>A key observation is that with every border you have two white space areas to design with and a foreground element competing for attention with your actual information. Every border you eliminate gains you twice as much whitespace as you had and one fewer foreground element. 3 design components to 1. As with lines of unnecessary code, when you can delete elements in a design you are winning.

When it&#x27;s about UI design, you know the advice is good when you see a lot of comments panning it on HN ;)<p>I just have two nitpicks: different font sizes are not a problem as long as the hierarchy is clear (i.e. sizes not seemingly chosen at random) and the advice on text contrast is accurate (unless you&#x27;re using a display at very low brightness, pitch black text is jarring on light backgrounds), but the contrast on the example is too low. For body text, the ideal choice is closer to #222 or #333. Here, the advice on colors also applies: you can give the black a slight blue hue if the rest of the interface has blue accents.<p>The last example (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn-images-1.medium.com&#x2F;max&#x2F;1600&#x2F;1*cuYcwjOO26sKHImHaY6yFA.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn-images-1.medium.com&#x2F;max&#x2F;1600&#x2F;1*cuYcwjOO26sKHImHa...</a>) also moves me to give an unsolicited tip: pay attention to the &quot;color&quot; of the typeface you&#x27;re using. That example has body text in Avenir (EDIT: looking again, it must be Proxima Nova); it&#x27;s a thin geometric type, so the gray of the body text should be darker, or a bolder weight should be chosen. As it is, it&#x27;s not very readable, which is okay for certain sentences but not appropriate for a warning message. Since system and webfonts are often constrained to regular and bold (and rarely, a bolder and a lighter weight) it&#x27;s easier to control this by tweaking the gray.<p>An alternative is to give a higher priority to &quot;you will lose all of your saved data&quot;.

Half of this advice hinders usability.<p>#2.1: Reducing the opacity of your text makes it harder to read.<p>#4: Borders help logically separate areas of an interface. Throwing in more white-space is wasteful.<p>#4.3: Gratuitous white-space is wasteful, especially if you have limited screen real-estate (i.e., mobile).<p>#7 is a major pet-peeve of mine which I cannot agree with. If it&#x27;s a button, make it look like a button. Nothing is more confusing than a button that just looks like some text label.

TBH I am starting to hate the subtle box-shadow on card components, including the example they provide as &quot;better&quot; [1]. It&#x27;s getting to a point where it&#x27;s hard to see the edges, especially if I have f.lux on or need to clean my glasses.<p>A regular border is easier to spot and more definite. It&#x27;s not skeuomorphic but it&#x27;s more functional.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn-images-1.medium.com&#x2F;max&#x2F;800&#x2F;1*qH-2RAS3rbnql-vpP8flmg.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn-images-1.medium.com&#x2F;max&#x2F;800&#x2F;1*qH-2RAS3rbnql-vpP8...</a>

The examples are mostly low contrast: a wasteland of white and preferably off-white empty space, also white and preferably off-white and preferably borderless boxes, lightly colored and mostly grey text inside them. When did combining dark text on a light background and light text on a dark background become nontrivial advice?<p>When web pages had a proper structure and color scheme (compare www.gnu.org now and in 2004: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20040113091408&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20040113091408&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.or...</a> ) they were more readable.

The color picker site they link to which limits choices is great for me- I will admit to spending hours trying to pick the perfect color scheme.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;colors&#x2F;eee966" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;colors&#x2F;eee966</a>

Please don&#x27;t use &quot;lighter&quot; and &quot;darker&quot; colors to signal importance. The contrast on these is invariably too low for most displays, and people miss that cue completely. What&#x27;s lighter for you has the exact same color&#x2F;intensity for most users. It&#x27;s the same with &quot;material design&quot; where some genius decided that buttons no longer need to look like buttons, and links no longer need to look like links. Sure they don&#x27;t. And users sure don&#x27;t need to know what can be done with the interface. But what&#x27;s the point? &#x2F;rant

I like most of these, especially the different ways of making a hierarchy stand out. But I would say that if you&#x27;re going to use gray text, pick out the exact shade using a really crappy LCD screen, maybe on an old phone, to make sure it&#x27;s legible. Sites that use very light gray make me think the designer picked the color on a 5k iMac with the lights off.<p>Also, make your buttons look like buttons.

Pet hate of mine is using more space to replace a border or other distinction between elements.<p>Most of the time I want to see more playlists, or email subjects, in preference to delighting in your use of whitespace. Information density matters.<p>Buttons should look like buttons. Always.

&gt; “Is this text secondary? Let’s use a lighter color.”<p>Please no. Light grey text on not very dark grey background? Can this design trend just die?<p>See: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;</a>

I would caution anyone from using these tips if you are building some kind of B2B Enterprise app where the focus is on getting as much information on screen as possible and minimizing the possibility of making errors.<p>Borders and clear destructive actions are a must. Needless spacing is wasted space.

The contrast examples in this article are a continuation in a poor trend of monkey see monkey do design that seems to come out of a reliance and reuse of original base bootstrap styles.<p>Designers seem to love to decide that certain text doesn&#x27;t look right, is unimportant compared to that stock image they spent 3 hours selecting.<p>A great tip for cheating on design regarding typography is to completely drop &quot;grey&quot; from options.<p>What will happen is that during any manner of stress testing, usability or accessibility testing someone will immediately point out the lack of legibility.<p>More importantly when your site is audited for accessibility issues, you will fail on contrast every time.<p>I realize this was written as tips to help non designers but most &quot;designers&quot; should be staying away from making decisions about font color that lean towards &quot;grey&quot;.<p>The cost and effort in development of most written copy far exceeds the value of this design trend that leads to low legibility, low impact type.<p>Web designers need to get back to the basics of typography. The web as a whole and &quot;start up&quot; style sites particularly suffer greatly from design choices by designers who clearly never actually read what they layout.

The text in the first example, &quot;bolder not bigger,&quot; is quite obviously bigger.

&quot;4. Use fewer borders &#x2F; 3. Add extra spacing&quot;. I&#x27;m not a big fan of this current trend. It seems that everyone is doing that and I found difficult to find the logical separation between elements.

Generally very good but mixing button&#x2F;non-button style is a dark pattern that should be avoided.<p>If you have 3 alternative actions and one looks like a button, why don’t the other two? It is actually very easy to miss at least one option that way, or otherwise make a mistake.

This is still a great tutorial, but isn&#x27;t it just the medium version of something I already bookmarked back in 2017?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;tyrellrummage&#x2F;full&#x2F;ZJPXgy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;tyrellrummage&#x2F;full&#x2F;ZJPXgy&#x2F;</a><p>The one technical question I have is about using a lighter font to de-emphasise things: the example de-emphasises &quot;*Prices may vary ...&quot; underneath the bold, emphasised &quot;$17 per person&quot;. Isn&#x27;t that a bit of a &quot;dark pattern&quot;?

Using low-contrast elements to create hierarchy looks nice, but bear in mind that it breaks accessibility for many low-vision users.

Overall I like this advice. However some of their examples do not really push the point. In the first example they make the text both bigger _and_ bolder and smaller _and lighter. This is good, however it is contrary to what they say.<p>In the shadows example, I prefer the bordered version. Shadows do not always look good and borders are &quot;safer&quot; to use.

These are great principles, but the execution still lies with you. I studied graphic design and have done it for many years, but I still fiddle for a while with the exact parameters: font size, font weight, text color, background color, border padding, border width, border color, border radius, text shadow. You can call all the &quot;functions&quot; he espouses, but whether it reigns on a throne of beauty, or falls apart in a pile of mush, depends on the &quot;arguments&quot; fed into those functions.<p>So if it doesn&#x27;t look right at first, keep tweaking. Try a shade darker, try a shade lighter. Add more spacing, add less spacing. And so on. Expect to spend some time on it. Don&#x27;t be discouraged if at worst it looks bad. Moving stuff around, and adjusting the different parameters, can eventually bring everything in a state that sings.

As a programmer who usually has to do all of the UI work himself, I definitely appreciate this! I&#x27;ve been on exactly one team during my career where we had a dedicated graphic design person. Alas, it&#x27;s seen as a waste of money by most management types in my industry (govt contracting).

&gt; 1. Use color and weight to create hierarchy instead of size<p>This article has a lot of great advice for the visuals. Using opacity to better mix colors is super handy.<p>But my main reaction is there is one bigger, better way to cheat at design in nearly all situations, and that&#x27;s to avoid hierarchy. All the tips here can be taken as ways to cram more things together.<p>When I try harder to say one and only one thing in any page or dialog, my design has usually improved. It can be really very difficult to let go of some things I strongly feel the user needs to see, but when I do, it&#x27;s surprising how often I find that &quot;less is more&quot;.

Please be sensitive to the lightness of greys you use for smaller text, especially if you value any of your users who are aging (all of them) or have vision-related issues (some of them, maybe more than you think)

This article strikes me as an indicator that we&#x27;ve reached peak this-kind-of-thing. In particular, I predict that in a year, it will seriously date your design if you&#x27;re using a lot of CSS shadows and putting a random bright color on the side of anything square-shaped.

Is it just me or do the examples in the article look like they were copied from common websites? To me it is just a grab-bag of things I&#x27;ve seen before.<p>I think that&#x27;s one problem with the web: so often are designs simply copied that the web looks boring. Well-designed, but boring.

&gt; <i>Making the text closer to the background color is what actually helps create hierarchy, not making it light grey.</i><p>Note that &quot;closer to background color&quot; is, more or less, &quot;making it transparent&quot;.

Thank you for the share. Simple and useful tips to bring UI to a prettier state. Especially for a &quot;pure&quot; programmer, myself, who has no idea how to make nice interfaces without being guided.

I bookmarked this. There are a lot of nice tips for someone like me who builds lots of prototypes but isn&#x27;t a designer at all.

Even the &quot;bad&quot; examples provided are beautiful.<p>I do love the accent borders. I&#x27;ve been using them a lot lately in PowerPoint tables.