Reddit reviews Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules

But it's wrong. And so is his "evidence". And that's why it's dangerous that new designers are reading this crap. It's rules of thumb written by someone missing a digit or two...

What do I mean? Here, this is blatantly copied from a reply I posted in another discussion about this piece:

As someone with professional experience in photography and a masters in design – I think this piece is seriously lacking.

First – the photo that is used as "evidence" caught my eye quickly because it is clearly poorly processed/improperly exposed. There is no black point and that's a bad thing for the image; which leads me to say – you can't make the sweeping generalization that black is always bad. It's not – and the work of one pop art painter and a bad bit of photography isn't substantiated proof.

If you want to actually make something meaningful out of this, you'd actually push hard on the idea that too much contrast is a bad thing. Black isn't bad. Heavy contrast can be. Instead, get down to the root reasons that we have issues with contrast – in short, we're wired to notice differences in color or brightness than we are for absolute values of color or brightness. As such, it's not about one color, it's about the contrast.

Check out Jeff Johnson's Designing with the Mind in Mind or Colin Ware's Visual Thinking for Design

Both of those do a much better job at explaining the hows and whys of the average person's visual perception and thus when/where/how black is good/bad.

Previous version was better than these.

Among other things, you have some confusing gestalt issues here. The name blends in with the dark roads due to color, shape, and proximity. The result is confusing and jumbled.

You might want to read "Designing with the Mind in Mind" by Jeff Johnson (among others) for some good tips on visual processing.

> I just don't understand why you're so hostile to the idea of people enjoying their work. Even if you apparently despise it, that doesn't mean others can't like coding for work.

Do you want to know my reasons? I'll enumerate them.

But first, let's be clear. As I noted elsewhere, I take great pride in my work. I'm damned good at what I do, and I'm very well compensated in exchange. Even though I freelance, I haven't had to cold-call anyone for a job in years, because I get referrals via word of mouth. I also go into every job pleasant, with a smile on my face, acting polite. I'm kind to my coworkers, I often will get expensive gifts for the secret Santa exchanges, and when I managed a team of people I bought them nice gifts and I was very clear that, unlike most managers in tech, when 5 rolls around, go home. Be with your family. Take vacations, for Christ's sake. If the schedule slips, it was my fault for not planning the project, so my team should not be punished by being asked to work (illegal) unpaid overtime.

And I fought for the largest raises I could for my team because I believed then, as I believe now, as I keep stating (and you keep not hearing) that we work first and foremost for money. So if I want to show appreciation, do it in the form of a raise, not some stupid "thank you" note or by brining fattening food for the team. (I'm the guy who, when told I should spend $1k on my team for a moral-boosting exercised, asked if I could just have four checks for $250 for each of my team members and send them home that day.)

Those things I take great pride in, and enjoy.

But here are the things I've run into in tech, where the idea that work should be enjoyable has created so many personal, team, and corporate problems.

1. The problem of unnecessary tools, frameworks or technologies. I've watched so many team members on so many teams incorporate technology because they wanted to play with the tools, not because the tools actually brought benefit to the company. (And I've watched as many systems had to be rewritten in scratch because the cool tool the team choose to use because it was "fun" didn't scale as the company scaled. Hell I've watched to companies go bankrupt because the "cool tools" their developers decided to use were completely insufficient--thus, my earlier link of Uncle Bob's article on "The Churn."

(Footnote: I like Uncle Bob. He's nearly as curmudgeonly as I am.)

2. The problem of irresponsible financial calculations in exchange for "exciting opportunities" or "fun." I illustrated that with my example of working for a startup. I see this happen time and time again--and it perplexes me how many programmers allow emotions rather than logic drive their financial decisions.

3. The problem of "the grass must be greener somewhere." As I noted before I've seen a lot of people hop from job to job, from skill set to skill set, never becoming good at what they do, looking for that "golden ticket" that they should have been developing within themselves rather than seeking for elsewhere.

4. The hook used by so many companies that you should work for them because their environment is "fun!" and "exciting!" and that somehow tweaking an advertising algorithm to more efficiently violate the privacy of web browsers to better target them will "change the world!"

Bah.

(The last time an HR person asked me what excited me, I told him quite frankly it'd be taking the next five years coming up to Ph.D. levels of knowledge in data processing and to do theoretical research in parallel database processing. This, for a job writing mobile apps. Please. For 90% of mobile apps, there's an API on a back end to hit, some local data model, a bunch of presentation views put together by an artist with zero knowledge of UI design, with a bunch of front end presentation and some animations. I've been writing iOS since iOS 2; there is very little new under this sun.

So I'm under no illusion that this will be anything other than the last 20 or so mobile apps I've worked on.)

And the stupid part: somehow in exchange for all this "fun" and "exciting" and "changing the world", somehow salaries are, frankly, ho-hum, once you pass about 35.

----

I'm just asking for some realism here. You may love your job more than life itself; you may choose to go to work over staying home and having a threesome with two very hot supermodels. That's fine by my book.

But I'd rather people be a little more realistic--and I think if we were to start having less "fun" and concentrate on writing the simplest code that gets the job done, working on our own professional development rather than trying to do something "exciting", things may be much better all the way around.

It's part of my theory, by the way, why we see so few women in tech.

Because women are smart enough not to be part of this "churn."