As designers, with every new project we tend to leverage existing symbols and reinforce their meaning to be able to benefit from mental associations people will naturally make. But we also have the power to modify and repurpose those symbols, should that be our intention.
A brief history of the manicule, illustrated with some extreme examples.
From the days of Xerox PARC:
In your garage organization, there’s always a bucket for miscellaneous. You’ve got nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and then, stuff, miscellaneous stuff. That’s kind of what the hamburger menu button was.
Same as it ever was.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
The steps that the Canva team took to turbocharge their design ops.
I’ll talk about why creating a shared design system has boosted our organizational productivity—and how you can help your teams improve product quality while reducing your company’s ‘design debt’.
A step-by-step account of trying to find a way to keep Sketch files in sync with the code in a pattern library. The solution came from HTML Sketchapp, a more agnostic spiritual successor to AirBnB’s React Sketchapp.
The contract was incredibly straightforward—as long as you generated HTML, you could import it into Sketch.
After some tinkering, Mark Dalgleish came up with a command line tool to automate the creation of Sketch libraries from HTML elements with data-sketch- attributes.
An illustrated history of digital iconography.
The numero sign, the reversed question mark, the interrobang, the l b bar symbol, the Tironian et, the capitulum, and the ironieteken.
A lovely little tour of eleven ubiquitous icons.
It’s really good to see more providers of icon font sets. These look very nicely designed indeed.
It's funny because it's true.