10 cheat codes for designing User Interfaces

I’d probably assume that most of us started in UI design with the littlest knowledge or nothing at all. But even though the odds were against us at the start, we managed our way through numerous design books and articles to understand how colors, typography, layout, etc work. I remember how it is established in us at Make Technology, a UX-driven company, that Design can’t be simply explained by colors, shapes, and text. It is a process that has a “Why” behind it, whenever we create a text bigger, add a shadow, or change the color, there has to be a reason why things have to be.

Thus in this article, I’ll be sharing a list of things I’ve learned from different companies, designers, things I’ve learned in designing user interfaces, and new discoveries I found along the way:

*Disclaimer: The following “Don’t” samples provided doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. It’s our basis of how we can improve from a good design solution to a much better one 😀

1. This text is important, make it bigger!

When faced with content that needs font hierarchy, making the text bigger to give emphasis and importance usually doesn’t solve the problem, just like the one below:

Font hierarchy is just not about small to big font sizes. It is about the right mix of…