UIE13 Day I: Visual Design for the Web with Luke Wroblewski

Today’s topic of choice at the UI13 was Visual Design for the Web, presented by Luke Wroblewski, principal designer at Yahoo! and of Luke W Interface Designs.

Wroblewski put on a great talk giving contextual examples of good and bad design and pointed out how different designs are relevant for different people with different needs.

Over the corse of the seminar, he established and used a vocabulary for designers to use when discussing the importance of their projects. These terms include:

  • Visual Communication
  • Visual Organization
  • visual Hierarchy
  • Visual Weight
  • Visual Relationships
  • & Meaning (for users)

During his talk he made reference to heat-maps which represent the time a user spends looking at a perticular part of the page content.

One particular example I liked, which he borrowed from Jess McMullin, can be found in his blog post and seen here:


Other points covered included contrast and color type, and how each fits into a design methodology.