design | Björn Wilmsmann

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.

7 Practical Design Tips

Some time ago, Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger of Tailwind CSS and Refactoring UI published this article with "7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design". While I don't think that you can actually cheat at design, design being a skill that can and has to be learned, practiced, and honed like any other, pragmatic advice such as using colour and font weight for creating information hierarchy can help with achieving some quick wins and reaping the low-hanging fruit when it comes to ...

Christopher Alexander – Patterns in Architecture

Sadly, a few days ago, seminal architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander passed away. Having coined the term "pattern language" Christopher Alexander is considered the father of the pattern language movement. It is this term we as software engineers - oftentimes quite casually - refer to when we're talking about design patterns. In 1996, Christopher Alexander gave this compelling talk at the 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA): In this talk, Alexander addresses the connection between architecture and software ...

Sunday March 27th, 2022 by Bjoern in Software

I see numbers

Metaphors play a vital role in how human beings make sense of the world. The ways in which we view and describe both the world around us and abstract thoughts often are inherently metaphorical. When relating to time, for example, we often use spatial metaphors such as "to look forward to", "time moving forward", or "to turn back time". For some though, relating to time in terms of spatial concepts and relations can take on quite a literal meaning. I've always visualised numbers, ...

Sunday January 2nd, 2022 by Bjoern in Design, General

Welcome Back: beyond tellerrand Opening Titles Düsseldorf 2021

Last week, I was at the 2021 Düsseldorf edition of beyond tellerrand. As most on-site events during the last two years, beyond tellerrand had been postponed until, earlier this year, they got the go-ahead that the event was finally allowed to take place again. In spite of the rather short time to prepare, Marc and his team once again put on a fantastic event. These beautiful opening titles celebrate the event's return to the limelight with the simple, but very appropriate, words "Welcome ...

Sunday November 21st, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Web

The Layers Of The Web – Jeremy Keith @ beyond tellerrand Berlin 2019

Earlier this week - after a hiatus of almost two years on account of having been postponed due to the pandemic - this year's beyond tellerrand conference, an event about design, creativity, and the web, went ahead again. Even though Marc Thiele, the mastermind, organiser, and genuinely awesome person behind beyond tellerrand, ran a terrific series of online events under the Stay Curious moniker while on-site events weren't allowed to take place, it was amazing to be back at this wonderful event ...

Sunday November 14th, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

User Experience Design Methods & Deliverables

As I previously wrote about, design and user experience (UX) design are disciplines defined and governed by rules, principles, and constraints. The highly recommended Laws of UX provides an in-depth overview of principles and best practices in UX design. Coming from a slightly more hands-on perspective, designer Fabricio Teixeira compiled a comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables such as service blueprints, personas, or user journeys.

Sunday July 25th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design

A Collection of for a Improving the UX of Signup and Login Workflows

Independent UX designer Erik D. Kennedy recently published an article with 15 Tips for Better Signup / Login UX on Learn UI Design - a website through which he provides acclaimed courses on both UI and UX design. The article lists general suggestions such as autofocusing on the first field (i.e. the username, or rather: email, field), immediately validating form values, or making input labels clickable, as well as more specific - but no less expedient - ones like making password requirements explicit to ...

Sunday July 11th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Opinion-driven Design: Simplicity Over Flexibility

Software developer Brent Roose recently wrote a blog post on what he calls "opinion-driven design". His point his that while a mindset of "high configurability and flexibility" is undoubtedly common when it comes to the development of software frameworks and libraries, it ultimately is also misguided in most cases. In an attempt to both accommodate every possible use case and to remain in control (also known as the "Not invented here" (NIH) syndrome), framework developers tend to favour flexibility at the expense of ...

Sunday July 4th, 2021 by Bjoern in General

Second-order Affordances: Design & Quantum Superposition

A few years ago, having read a thought-provoking article by Csongor Bartus I wrote about design & quantum superposition. The main idea behind this article, and my interpretation, is that - similar to a particle, which exists in a state of quantum superposition - a design doesn't exist by itself but can only ever be realised in a given context and at a specific moment through observation by a user and possibly a device that design is observed with. The gist, ...

Sunday June 27th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

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Let’s talk digital.