Once I made this remark in final week’s concern, I didn’t suppose I’d be following up on it this week:
Why do I hold linking to David Smith’s posts on app design? Partially as a result of he’s one of many few individuals running a blog on this matter…
However David additionally couldn’t consider many individuals both, and Chris Clark, who additionally runs a nice TikTok channel masking design and SwiftUI coding, made a very good level that the subjective nature of the work implies that most design writing is usually thought management or case research.
My favorite articles are subjective, although, and never simply with design matters. I study probably the most from real-world tales from individuals engaged on actual tasks, irrespective of if it’s a coding or debugging concern, considering round a design drawback, or a retrospective of a advertising marketing campaign. That’s why David’s publish stood out to me final week. It was a narrative about fixing an actual concern in his app, and whereas he may have solved that concern in some ways, studying how he approached the issue was fascinating.
However that additionally explains why there’s much less of the sort of content material round. Writing about options to real-world issues isn’t simple to do recurrently due to how a lot work should occur earlier than you set down a single phrase. It’s rather more easy to supply goal or academic articles the place you choose a topic and clarify it. There’s heaps of that type of writing round coding and far much less on design, primarily as a result of there’s hardly ever a concretely right reply with design. It’s simple to confirm whether or not Swift code that calculates the primary hundred prime numbers works and far tougher to do the identical for even a constrained design drawback like “How would you design display X in Y app?”
Please be aware that I’m not attempting to decrease the trouble or usefulness of goal, academic writing, however it serves a distinct goal than I used to be simply speaking about.
I’d additionally like to spotlight just a few latest real-world subjective design writing examples. I already linked to it, however Sahand Nayebaziz’s article on the keyboard-driven operation of his Particulars Professional iPad app was unbelievable. You must also learn this publish from Neale Van Fleet on designing Audio Hijack 4. I additionally actually loved this publish from Yves Jannic on not worrying too a lot about your app icon.
I’ll end this week’s remark by echoing my name to motion from final week. If you recognize of anybody writing or producing any content material on design, growth, advertising, or something associated to app growth, please both allow them to know so as to add themselves to the iOS Dev Listing or, even higher, add their web site for them!
Dave Verwer 
