Zara Evens, Senior Designer at Punchcut, will present “Glance, Scan, Read: Typography for Mobile User Interfaces” at Justified West in Vancouver, BC.

Designing for mobile devices introduces new challenges: screen size, device performance and most critically, the unique contexts of mobile use, glancing, scanning and reading. Zara Evens, Senior Designer at Punchcut, will elucidate design criteria related to the ways users consume, communicate and share information on the go. Continue Reading »

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Designing for touch-based mobile user interfaces requires new thinking and an expanded design vocabulary.

Our motion designers at Punchcut prepared this video to illustrate our thinking about touch UI design. Read the full-length text, blogged last week here: “Design Considerations for Touch UI“.

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You could read this every week, or you could follow @Punchcut on Twitter. We’ll follow you back because that’s how we roll. Unless you’re Ashton Kutcher. (If you can’t unfollow Ashton Cnet has a tutorial.)

1 // Cnet reported on Apple’s latest patent filing that forecasts a context-aware iPhone.

2 // Kyocera showed off a flexible, large-screen OLED concept phone.

3 // @eyemagazine (distinguished UK design rag, Eye) listed our design community Typophile among their prestigious list of 10 great typography blogs. We’re okay being a community forum listed among blogs.

4 // LinkedIn has a Mobile Touch UI/UX group with some healthy discussions.

5 // @marekpawlowski (Mark Pawlowski) MEX organizer, blogged about the problem with app stores. How did app stores forget the user experience?

6 // @iA (Oliver Reichenstein) posted the final cut of The Web Trends Map — their attempt to plot the 300+ sites on the internet that matter. We blushed a little when Typophile.com made the list. The map is available as a free download. We’re a little sensitive to saying so much about Typophile this week, but hey, the site turned 9. We’re celebrating one of the oldest design communities on the ‘pipes.

7 // @stevenf (Steven Frank) wrote an interesting piece lamenting the inability to move beyond the “desktop” metaphor in computing. He’s hit on all the reasons we think touch and gestural UI shows so much promise. The limitations of designing for mobile are precisely the reasons it’s so promising.

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Designing for touch-based mobile user interfaces
requires new thinking and an expanded design vocabulary.

Carriers and handset manufacturers are increasingly adding touchscreen devices at the premium end of their device line-up. Our challenge is not just designing for touch, but designing mobile UI frameworks built for the range of devices in an OEM’s or carrier’s product line. This means designing for consistency for 5-way keys and full-screen touch UIs. We’ve collected the following insights from Punchcut’s interaction design, visual design and motion design disciplines who have drawn insights from their disciplines to create satisfying touch UI experiences.

1// Design for immediate access

Touch screens allows users to jump from point A to point B with a single tap, influencing the ways we design interactions and screen layouts. The user doesn’t have to step through menu items the way traditional key-based mobile UIs require, so the top-most items on a screen may not necessarily have to be the most important or most accessed feature. Continue Reading »

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