my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

UI Movement

UI Movement is a website that showcases user interface designs on a daily basis as an inspiration for your own designs. The designs itself are mostly sourced from Dribbble - the show and tell site for designers. Originally just a newsletter in the vein of an MVP, UI Movement has developed into a fully-fledged website with designs organised in categories such as commerce, dashboard or menu.

Explorable Explanations And A Reactive Document IDE

It's no secret I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work and the notion that programming tools should interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. Recently, I've come across two intriguing projects / products that both draw upon this idea: Carbide (currently available as an early alpha version) is a new kind of JavaScript IDE that both immediately visualises the result of code changes and allows you to manipulate and visually interact with your code using UI controls such as sliders. Explorable ...

Sunday September 25th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

Reasons to: 2016 – Opening Titles by Mike Brondbjerg

This week I was in the wonderful seaside city of Brighton for the Reasons to: 2016 conference. While I haven't yet had the time for a proper write-up of the event, the amazing opening titles by Mike Brondbjerg are already available: Reasons to: 2016 - Opening Titles - Mike Brondbjerg from Reasons to on Vimeo. The entire visuals are generated by code and react to the music! With Jared Tarbell and Joshua Davis as two of the speakers, generative art, data visualization and ...

Sunday September 11th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Cracking the Code – David Jonathan Ross

At this year's beyond tellerrand typeface designer David Jonathan Ross gave an interesting talk about the typography of programming, including its history and the design rationale behind monospace fonts, in his own words hitting the sweet spot that is the nerd trifecta of history, programming and fonts: Cracking the Code - David Jonathan Ross - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The talk contains a lot of intriguing insights into why programming fonts are designed the way they are, what UX ...

Sunday July 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Christopher Murphy: Time + Creativity

In this beyond tellerrand talk designer Christopher Murphy emphasizes the importance of procrastination and reserving time for experimentation and endeavours not directly related to a specific goal at hand: Time + Creativity - Christopher Murphy - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. While procrastination usually is seen as something negative - and in most cases rightfully so - setting aside time for a free flow of thoughts and ideas that's not immediately purpose-driven is an essential part of any creative process ...

Sunday July 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Dominic Wilcox: The Reinvention of Normal

At beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf in May London-based artist / designer / inventor Dominic Wilcox gave a hilarious talk on his work, which is at the same time ingenious, playful, sometimes ridiculous and always insightful. Some of his designs include: a pair of shoes with inbuilt GPS to guide the wearer home a stained glass driverless sleeper car, whose exterior is reminiscent of church windows a bread bulb that emanates a warm, fragrant freshly baked bread scent when turned on Dominic encourages designers to try out ...

Sunday June 12th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design

Why motion matters in UI design

UI designer Craig Dehner wrote this interesting article about why he thinks motion design is the future. I wouldn't necessarily use such grandiose terms but essentially I agree: Motion design might not be THE future but it'll certainly play a vital role in current and future user interfaces. It took operating systems and browsers some time to be able to display smooth, seemingly natural animation (using CSS3 animations in the latter case). Now that animation is a staple of modern UI frameworks and ...

Sunday May 8th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

A design rationale for Tube stations

In December 2015, Transport for London published the London Underground Station Design Idiom - design and user experience guidelines for London Underground stations, if you will. Ranging from their consistent usage of the Johnston typeface, to the iconic roundel and - of course - the equally iconic Tube map, which constitutes a design feat in its own right, TfL always had a strong foundation in design thinking. London Underground stations from very different eras and styles - Victorian, Art Deco, as well as ...

Sunday May 1st, 2016 by Bjoern in Design

Dropdown menus and alternative approaches for selecting from a choice of options

In this post designer Luke Wroblewski outlines why dropdowns should be the UI of last resort. The problem with dropdown menus - also known as select boxes in HTML lingo - is that they're something of a general purpose, one-size-fits all solution for dealing with lists of elements. Although dropdown menus accommodate most list-based use cases using them often doesn't take the specifics of the use case at hand into consideration. As pointed out by Luke most of the times other, more ...

Sunday April 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

UI Design Patterns

UI Patterns is an extensive library of user interface design patterns by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe. This website is a collection of tried-and-tested best practices in UI design. Although the site focusses on web applications and websites most of its practices apply to user-facing software in general. Best practices and design patterns allow us to draw upon proven methods - of user interaction in this case - instead of having to re-invent the wheel (which itself is an anti-pattern) each ...

Sunday March 20th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.