Issue 89

Compromise AI making decks

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

• How to create a good icon

• Three interesting new items from the CES exhibition

• Excellent AI service for presentations

• The fundamental map of the main railways of the world

• Stable Diffusion 3 Public Announcement

• 5 Things Designers Need to Know for a Smooth Handoff

• A large set of 1090 B&W character illustrations

• …and much more!

Enjoy reading!

🗞 News and articles

Tesler’s Law

Guys from the Laws of UX project wrote about Tesler's law. According to this law, any system has a certain minimum level of complexity that cannot be reduced. They also talked about how designers cope with the complexity of various systems and gave examples of several solutions and methods.

The main thoughts from the article:

• The burden of complexity can be placed either on the user, or on designers and developers who will simplify the interface. This is a fundamental question of balance

• When designing, designers inevitably reach a point where complexity cannot be reduced further, but can only be transferred from one place to another

• One of the most common ways to simplify the system is autofill. For example, when payment data is automatically inserted in online stores or the recipient's email address

• People tend to choose complex and intricate solutions because they seem to them deeper and more accurate. This also applies to designers who design interfaces.

• There is an "active user Paradox", according to which people do not read the instructions, but immediately start using the product and end up spending more time. Therefore, it is necessary to smoothly integrate instructions into the workflow

• AI opens up new possibilities in simplifying interfaces, because the user no longer manages specific commands, but immediately intentions. In such a paradigm, the complexity of the system is hidden from the user, which allows you to simply describe the result that a person would like to see

How to create the perfect icon

The guys from the Streamline icon service talked about what questions you need to ask when designing icons in order to achieve the best result. Their advice is based on 12 years of experience and tens of thousands of designed icons.

They also talked about the process of discussing icons in the team and showed the results before and after the review so that improvements could be assessed.

What questions do I need to ask?:

• does the icon convey a clear message;

• will it be clear after a while;

• will it be understandable to people from different cultures;

• does the icon shape match the rest of the set in style and construction rules;

• will the icon be legible in the context in which it should be applied;

• will the icon look good in a smaller version and will its meaning remain clear?

⚡️ Briefly

5 Things Designers Need to Know for a Smooth Handoff. Five tips in the Figma blog on the proper preparation of layouts for transfer to development.

New technologies

Stability AI has publicly announced the release of Stable Diffusion 3, a new version of the popular open source neural network for generating images. It will be based on a DiT transformer, will be able to generate text better and will contain several models: from 800 million to 8 billion parameters.