The Year in Design

• Mobile is today’s first screen. So design responsively, focusing on content and structure first.
• Websites and apps alike should remove distractions and let people interact as directly as possible with content.
• 90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace.
• Boost usability and pleasure with progressive disclosure: menus and functions that appear only when needed.
• One illustration or original photo beats 100 stock images.
• Design your system to serve your content, not the other way around.
• Remove each detail from your design until it breaks.
• Style is the servant of brand and content. Style without purpose is noise.
• Nobody waits. Speed is to today’s design what ornament was to yesterday’s.
• Don’t design to prove you’re clever. Design to make the user think she is.

Originally published at www.zeldman.com on December 24, 2015

Translated into German (also here) by Mark Sargent

Translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Sachsé

Translated into Turkish by omerbalyali.

Translated into Spanish by Tam Lopez Breit.

Designing and blogging since 1995, Jeffrey Zeldman is the publisher of A List Apart Magazine and A Book Apart, co-founder of An Event Apart design conference, and founder and creative director of studio.zeldman. Follow him @zeldman.