SAMUEL W.

Product Designer based in Hong Kong. Reinventing travel experience at HyperAir.

AboutWorkBlog

Discover Posts in Design Journal

Thanks to Figma Plugins, Automated Work Spares More Time For Design

It’s been a while since beta but Figma Plugins is finally here. While Sketch is catching up with their cloud capabilities, Figma has also been working on proper third party support. Figma has become my main design tool over the past year. I have been using it for interface and website design on a daily basis. Our social media and marketing assets are also created in Figma for easy collaboration and bilingual support. (I’m writing another piece to elaborate our process, stay tuned.) After a few…

Sep 18, 2019

Lessons from IKEA

My journey to Scandinavia continued in Älmhult, Sweden (2 hours of train ride from Copenhagen), after the Design Matters conference. It was the home of the biggest furniture retailer in the world - IKEA. The town as the headquarter of IKEA, offers a museum and also a hotel, just for the visitors. Experience Design in 1950s IKEA was founded as a mail-order business by Ingvar Kampradin 1943. It grew and started selling furniture a few years later. In 1951, The first IKEA catalog is published…

Oct 08, 2018

Journey to Design Matters

It was a truly enlightening trip to Denmark, attending Design Matters 2018 in Copenhagen (Sep 26 -27, 2018). Not only did the talks and workshops given by design practitioners across the industry are illuminating, but it had also made me realized to take a step back to reflect on the whole workflow of design process. Design for feelings One of the recurring theme during this year conference is the re-discovery of emotional design. Few speakers’ keynotes coincidentally brought up the importance…

Sep 29, 2018

Essential Color Tools to Step Up Your Design Game

Color is the combination of science and art, a simple color change could have drastic effect on the emotion or perception of the viewer. Being a UI/UX designer, mastering the color theory and its application truly can step up your design game. Stephen Few’s “Tapping the Power of Visual Perception” coined the term “Preattentive Attributes” in displaying data. Intensity and hue of color are two attributes that can enhance visual communication quickly. Leveraging color help users to process…

Jul 06, 2018

How to do localization right - Citymapper in Hong Kong

After switching to Android last year, Google Map has been my first choice of transit app. Living in a city that public transport operators discourage open data , transit app is for navigation most of the time. Although selected lines of MTR and bus operators have their app to share real-time next train / bus data, yet they refuse to share them with an open API, welcoming third-party apps integration like Google Map or Citymapper. I downloaded Citymapper ( iOS and Android , Free) again…

Jul 03, 2018

Whole Earth Catalog

Steve Jobs did not say “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”, he quoted this line from a 452-page book named “Whole Earth Catalog”. Critics and reporters have been saying the book has changed the world (not only through its influence on Steve Jobs), as a symbol of the formation of counterculture. A lot of new ideas and products, like solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing were firstly introduced to mainstream audience from this book in late 1960s. The quote was printed on the back cover…

Jun 03, 2018

Why real data & content matter

We have a lot of assumptions in the process of creating wireframes and mockups for websites & apps. As wireframes & mock-ups are not dynamic, it is easy to aware various scenarios when dummy content or placeholders are used. In contrast to graphic design or typesetting, which you build on certain materials delivered by the client. Website & app is on the other side of the track, it’s like working on a blank canvas at the beginning. Stakeholders like clients & users have some rough ideas but…

Apr 24, 2018