*** From the Archives ***
This article is from March 9, 2009, and is no longer current.
Design for Mobile Devices
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Mobile devices are pervasive in our lives, and visual designers who want to be as marketable as possible should know the basics of creating for the mobile medium. In this chapter from Strategic Mobile Design, you’ll learn the following:
* the role that interaction design plays in creating useful mobile sites and applications
* the special implications to consider when designing for the small screen
* the proper interaction design process and the various methods used in creating interaction design deliverables
* information resources so you can continue to learn
We’ve posted this chapter as a PDF file. Click the link “Strategic Mobile Design” to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Download the free Adobe Reader here.
To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
Excerpted from Strategic Mobile Design: Creating Engaging Experiences by Joseph Cartman and Richard Ting. Copyright © 2009. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.
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It’s a little difficult to take an article on design too seriously when the font used is difficult to read (not stress, tall x-height) and when the PDF is not formatted for the media on which it is presented. Too often PDFs are simply thrown online, created from a “typical” 8.5×11 format, in portrait. At least turn it to landscape for onscreen reading so that a read if presented with a screenful of information at a time. Take a look at the Before & After newsletters for a good example of this in practice.
On the other hand if this PDF is intended to be printed before reading using a san-serif font is certainly a poor choice. Research seems to show that seriffed fonts are more readable in print.