Dave on Design

Adventures Making Vegemite

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

To non-Australians, Vegemite is one of the strangest food products you’re likely to ever encounter. It’s a dark brown, almost black, shiny paste with a pungent scent, and a very strong, almost indescribable taste that is strongly umami and very salty. Read article...

Introducing Fontimize: Subset Fonts to Exactly and Only Your Website's Used Characters

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

A Python library to subset fonts, which cuts ~95% from the size of your site’s font files & downloads/bandwidth. To use: from fontimize import optimise_fonts_for_files and call it with a list of HTML files. See the the full API docs for more info. Find Fontimize on Github and PyPi. Before the why, a quick preview of Read article...

Facebook's Fake Followers

Sun, 28 May 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Currently I moderate a Facebook group with about twenty thousand members. We get about four thousand fake membership applications a month, and it’s often very hard to tell if a profile is a fake profile, including apparently reasonable answers to screening questions during the join process. Read article...

Metrics and Mistakes

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Measuring things—and some poetry. Let me tell you a story about metrics. Stick with me: the results are more interesting than they sound. We’ll cover choosing what you measure, and what happens when you start acting on the results from your choice of metrics. Read article...

Creating Joy in the User Experience

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Consider any recent user experience or user interface design article. What elements are present? Perhaps they include design theory, typography, grids. Or phases: user research, ideation, prototyping. Or user feedback, A/B testing. Or perhaps you read more broad articles such as designing for children, or design as governance. What’s missing in all of them? Read article...

What Are You Optimising For?

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Here’s a true story I observed, identifying details removed: aCOO had a vice president reporting to them. The COO wanted the company to grow in value; to do this, to steadily evolve the product such that it retained or grew in market relevance, measured by growth in sales and revenue. Read article...

About the Author

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Hi. I’m David Millington. Read article...

About Dave on Design

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

It’s misnamed. Read article...

The War on Estonian Forests

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Originally published in Estonian World on 11 April 2022. It’s a cold spring morning and I’m watching a tour guide in the Old Town of Tallinn. With her back to a park built on a city block destroyed in World War 2 and facing a set of mediæval buildings not far from the old town square, head in a warm beanie, she’s explaining Estonia to a group of cruise ship tourists. Read article...