Anecdotes
In Praise of Half-Baked Ideas
I was recently going through my work and had a moment of realisation: I loved my incomplete projects more than my fully fleshed-out projects. There was something raw about them...
Design Thinking is Not Design
We’ve all heard about Design Thinking, and it’s been a buzzword catching on like wildfire. Business touted it as the be-all-end-all solution to everything Customer Experience, User Experience, and at...
In Search of the Wow Factor
It was during a job interview that I first heard the term “wow factor”. I was presenting a project I’ve worked on and explaining the design process, the research I...
What is User Experience Design?
We’ve all used products. Some products are enjoyable to use or require no effort from our side because they’re easy to use and understand. Other products might not be easy...
How to Spot the Faux-Prophets of UX Design
Too many “UX Designers” out there are giving UX a bad rep, especially in the MENA region.
The Job Interview Design Challenge
Almost every single designer out there has been put in a situation where job interviews seem to be going well until the hiring teams asks you to do a design...
You Are More Than Your Software
Software is great. It makes our work faster, more efficient, and gives us more design power and capabilities that we otherwise would not have had. Software is also a crutch....
What is Design?
The question of “What is Design” is big, but it is also an important question to tackle.
What is Experience Design?
It is tempting to break up and package (user) experience design into smaller subcategories to limit their scope, but is that truly reflective of how we experience the world? Or...
Who is Moe Hachem?
Before I get started with the blog posts, I’d like to introduce myself. You can call me Moe. I am a Lebanese designer and grew up in many different countries...
The M Blog: An Introduction
The M Blog is an online resource created to help all aspiring and professional designers/architects in their design journey by providing my insight, research, and observational anecdotes. The goal is...
Design
An Introduction to UX Research: A Cheat Sheet
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything, so to rekindle my knowledge-sharing flame, I’ll kick off my new efforts with a new post on UX Research. Going forward,...
Information Layout Affects Perception
Information Layout Affects Perception The information that we are exposed to strongly affects how we perceive our world or environment. How we arrange information is just as important as the...
The Visual Breakdown of Information
We’re going to talk about how we process visual information and interpret it. In other words, we’re going to study how we look at an image and interpret it as...
The Visual Perception of Information
It’s crucial to understand how we, as humans, perceive and absorb the information in the world around us. Without a proper understanding of how we perceive information, it becomes hard,...
The Ten Usability Heuristics
A designer’s biggest challenge is figuring out if they are on the right path during the design process. The Ten Usability Heuristics is what you can call the Ten Commandments...
What is User Experience Design?
We’ve all used products. Some products are enjoyable to use or require no effort from our side because they’re easy to use and understand. Other products might not be easy...
The Job Interview Design Challenge
Almost every single designer out there has been put in a situation where job interviews seem to be going well until the hiring teams asks you to do a design...
Introduction to Typography
Typography has always been an indispensable tool in the designer’s toolkit. Picking the right typeface is just as important as choosing the colour, images and the design elements within the...
Designing Under Pressure
Inevitably, you’ll eventually run into a situation where you have to deliver a task under an entirely unfeasible deadline. Your company or client will ask you to do a lot...
The Design Process for Non-Designers
The role of a designer is to create solutions for visual problems in medium communications that are responsive to the media the design will exist in, be it analogue (paper)...
Design Elements and Pathfinding
In this post, we’re going to begin exploring the basic terms used when creating a composition. We will also explore how to create a grid, a point, a line, and...
Bruce Mau: An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
Bruce Mau is a Canadian graphic designer born in 1958. He was the creative director of Bruce Mau Design from 1985 to 2010, and then later founded “The Massive Change...
Design is Not Independent of Context
A terrible misconception people have about designers is that we make things pretty. Yes, pretty is nice, but it’s a result of the process and not the purpose of design....
Exploring Hierarchy: Hierarchy as Revolution
Some designers will call Hierarchy “Order”. In reality, the names don’t matter, but the ideas they convey do. We’ve defined what Hierarchy was previously, but here’s a quick recap: Hierarchy...
Autonomous Decision Making in Design
Every designer has been in a position where they needed to make a project-changing decision, only to find their design process coming to a standstill. Why is it that even...
An Introduction to Descriptive Drawing
As designers, we need to be able to draw in different manners. The two types of drawings designers typically have to do can be categorized as “Descriptive” and “Analytical” drawing....
Dieter Rams: 10 Principles for Good Design
Dieter Rams, born 1932 in Germany, is an industrial designer known for heading Braun’s design team for over 30 years. He founded the “10 Principles of Good Design” as a...
The Gestalt Principles of Design
The human brain makes sense of the world through pattern and logic. The Gestalt Principles help us understand how we experience the world.
The Principles of Design
In my previous post, I stated the following: The elements of design are the tools a designer uses. The principles of design are how a designer uses these tools. When...
The Basic Elements of Design
What makes up a design? Design can be very overwhelming to get into when all you look at are the finished compositions. To kick off your journey into design, it’s...
What is Design?
The question of “What is Design” is big, but it is also an important question to tackle.
What is Experience Design?
It is tempting to break up and package (user) experience design into smaller subcategories to limit their scope, but is that truly reflective of how we experience the world? Or...
History
An Introduction to Material Culture
What is material culture? Material culture is the study of the objects, art, and architecture that surround people. It is the study of the physical and material tradition of humankind....
Professional Practice
Design Thinking is Not Design
We’ve all heard about Design Thinking, and it’s been a buzzword catching on like wildfire. Business touted it as the be-all-end-all solution to everything Customer Experience, User Experience, and at...
In Search of the Wow Factor
It was during a job interview that I first heard the term “wow factor”. I was presenting a project I’ve worked on and explaining the design process, the research I...
How to Spot the Faux-Prophets of UX Design
Too many “UX Designers” out there are giving UX a bad rep, especially in the MENA region.
The Job Interview Design Challenge
Almost every single designer out there has been put in a situation where job interviews seem to be going well until the hiring teams asks you to do a design...
Designing Under Pressure
Inevitably, you’ll eventually run into a situation where you have to deliver a task under an entirely unfeasible deadline. Your company or client will ask you to do a lot...
The Design Process for Non-Designers
The role of a designer is to create solutions for visual problems in medium communications that are responsive to the media the design will exist in, be it analogue (paper)...
You Are More Than Your Software
Software is great. It makes our work faster, more efficient, and gives us more design power and capabilities that we otherwise would not have had. Software is also a crutch....
Design is Not Independent of Context
A terrible misconception people have about designers is that we make things pretty. Yes, pretty is nice, but it’s a result of the process and not the purpose of design....
Autonomous Decision Making in Design
Every designer has been in a position where they needed to make a project-changing decision, only to find their design process coming to a standstill. Why is it that even...
User Research
An Introduction to UX Research: A Cheat Sheet
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything, so to rekindle my knowledge-sharing flame, I’ll kick off my new efforts with a new post on UX Research. Going forward,...
Resources
Reading List: UX and Personal Development
I compiled a UX-focused reading list that filtered out the painful-to-read books so that you don’t have to.