Having a fruitful collaboration this morning ended with some images and designs.
Settling on the design language
We took inspiration from the UI of MonkeyLearn and Miro, both possess a quite similar style. They both
We started with a simple draft for the layout, based on the design of monkey learn.
The Design is quite simple and we kinda stuck here, so decided to wait a bit before proceeding further.
Designing user roadmap
Realizing that drawing designs only make more confused, later we agreed that it would be better to have a user roadmap (how the users hypothetically use the system) lined out before crafting the design further.
The design revolves around workflows and models. Where:
- We import the data into the workflows
- For additional feature (e.g: prediction, charts), we install models from the “marketplace”.
- > By this way, users can start as atomically as possible - a plain dashboard and customize it as they want, without sticking to an opinionated statistics that our team see fits.
Typography
Bach gave me 6 font suggestions to pick from. As a software engineer who spends most of my day looking at equally-spaced font, these fonts are just in their proprietary realm.
At first, I started to think that these fonts are identical, but that only makes me more racist, (you know) to put all fonts in one bucket… At the time, I realized that I was just looking but not genuinely observing. Realizing that, I start digging deeper into the font universe.
After doing some research, I found that: apart from mono-spaced, there are more than 1 other types of fonts, instead … 4, tldr:
- Serif: has some projection at the end of the stroke + contrast between thick and hard strokes
- Sans Serif: Minimal or no contrast among strokes
- Script: resembles (or is) handwriting fonts
- Display: font that looks unconventional
Initially I gave credits for the IBM Plex Sans, maybe… because I spent time on IBM Cloud so that I grow a bias towards their looks. The font looks professional and trustworthy, like if I see a product with this font -> I’ll buy them immediately. That was until I knew that it was used for Vietnamese Tiktok that I changed my mind: Roboto is not too bad.
Until next time..