After I made this remark in final week’s concern, I didn’t assume I’d be following up on it this week:
Why do I preserve linking to David Smith’s posts on app design? Partially as a result of he’s one of many few folks running a blog on this subject…
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 superb level that the subjective nature of the work implies that most design writing is generally thought management or case research.
My favorite articles are subjective, although, and never simply with design subjects. I be taught probably the most from real-world tales from folks engaged on actual tasks, regardless of if it’s a coding or debugging concern, pondering round a design drawback, or a retrospective of a advertising marketing campaign. That’s why David’s submit 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 usually due to how a lot work should occur earlier than you place down a single phrase. It’s far more easy to provide goal or instructional articles the place you decide a topic and clarify it. There’s tons of that form of writing round coding and far much less on design, primarily as a result of there’s not often a concretely appropriate 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 hassle or usefulness of goal, instructional writing, nevertheless it serves a special goal than I used to be simply speaking about.
I’d additionally like to focus on just a few current 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 incredible. You must also learn this submit from Neale Van Fleet on designing Audio Hijack 4. I additionally actually loved this submit 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 understand 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 
