9:30 panel: Mike Kruzeniski, Creative Director for Microsoft gave a steller Saturday morning presentation for How Print Design is the Future of Interaction.  He started with a great history of UI design, and then incorporated best practices of print design, as now applied to web design.

Key learnings:

  • Icons are only useful if everyone understands what it means. This is a great principle to follow.
  • Grid based designs speed up your development systems as we as increases the user experience. It helps form the appropriate amount of white and negative space.  We’ve been a huge fan of a modified version of the  960 grid system for our web designs.
  • The Flipboard RSS reader provides a print page like interface and provides a cleaner RSS reader experiencee.

 

In summary, Mike spoke often about Paul Rand’s quote regarding how bad design is now become common design. This is a quote that you should show clients whenever they want a glossy or reflection-like layout, circa 2008!