Action Packed

The minds behind the Venture Bros., a cartoon that airs on Adult Swim, put an amazing level of thought and detail into their DVD design. My favorite is the homage to Atari video games.

Design Envy

There are three ladies that immediately come to mind when I think of rock star designers that I aspire to be like. They work hard, do a brilliant job, and are extremely successful. Oh yes, and they love what they do (as they should!). These women are definitely shining examples of the success you can achieve when you pour your heart into your work. I’m just one of many recognizing them, and I hope you can draw some inspiration from them as well.

Meagan Fisher has a brilliant eye for design and a great handle on writing clean, accessible code. She shares some great links, tutorials, and ideas on her blog.

Jessica Hische is well known for her beautiful typography and amazing illustrations. She has become an extremely successful freelancer shortly after leaving school. She attributes her amazing typography skills to drawing it day in and day out for three years.

Nubby Twiglet covers design, typography, business, fashion, and many more subjects on her highly popular blog. Her  keen sense of design and grasp on a well run business has taken her far, and she’s happy to share her tips to success.

I try to keep an eye on emerging designers to draw inspiration and am happy as I watch them grow with each success. Along with that, their work is enviable, and as Jessica Hische says, “Envy can be a big motivator.”

On the Future of Technology and Panda Diets

While putting together a presentation for Austin UPA’s World Usability Day event, I was having a hard time with one particular proposal to cut down on waste: design products that are meant to last. Sounds simple, right? Make longer lasting, durable products that simply need software upgrades so that our landfills aren’t full of discarded technology.

This hopeful suggestion has two major holes in it that I’m having a hard time solving:

• Businesses want to sell you the next new, shiny thing and get a lot of money for it.
• People love new gadgets and computers. Early adapters are likely to throw out the old and welcome the new with open arms, if for anything else, to be the coolest kid on the block.

We have a vicious cycle on our hands; they want to sell us something and we as a society openly consent to a wasteful consumer culture.

The only hopeful suggestion I can offer is that we must augment our perspective on buying new products. As we use up more resources and create more waste, I can only hope it will become more apparent to people as a whole. The current trends point towards that, and I’m optimistic. People use canvas bags instead of plastic, we’re careful about the amount of gas we use, we recycle. Perhaps the waste that comes from technology will become a heavier weight on people’s mind and the public’s opinion will force businesses to seek money in other avenues. They might be forced in some sense to create sustainable designs that simply need internal upgrades, or that have parts that can be upgraded to the new shiny standard.

Another, and perhaps more realistic offer, is that companies start building technology from easily recyclable resources, such as this bamboo hard drive. I know that if I my technology could be easily broken down and reused, I wouldn’t feel guilty making upgrades. Even better if it was made completely of bamboo and could be given to an adorable panda to gnaw on. Now that’s just heartwarming.

Mmm, delicious sustainability.

Any thoughts on this? Or even current examples that have these traits? I’m all ears.

Aligning Inspiration

When a friend is trying to get their name out quickly with a promotional site, I tend to recommend that they choose an image they love and begin to build a theme off of that. When my friend Stephanie, the soon to be famous Brooklyn based editor, requested a quick site that would serve as a launching point for her demo reels and video clips, I suggested she patrol istockphoto and see what she found. When she returned a few images, I quickly threw together a couple of suggestions that mainly relied on colors from the image and alignment. My other concern was that they could be coded quickly, so I kept it simple.

We passed ideas back and forth in this way and iteration was quick- the beauty of working on a two person team. This isn’t always a feasible method, but when working with a friend it was an enjoyable experience. Nothing beats playing around with a meaningful image and subtly making fun of your friend in the dummy text. It’s one of those priceless gems I hold dear when working for free.

Toolbox Series

I’m going to begin a series that will detail aspects and tools of the UX process that I’ve used and some that I’ve come across in my research. This will include (organized according to topic):

• Motivations
  • Interviews
  • Personas
  • Scenarios/user stories
• Modeling
  • Activity model
  • Task flows
• Ideation
  • Paper prototyping
  • Design studios
  • Design strategy sessions
• Creation
  • Wireframes
  • Mockups
  • Styleguide
• Technical Prototypes
  • Flash
  • HTML/CSS
• Evaluation
  • User testing
  • Design principles review
  • Heuristic evaluation

I’m looking forward to it as I’ve been meaning to explore each aspect of the process in depth for some time. I’m hoping others will find it useful, and certainly let me know if you have something to add to the list.

Function before Form

I’ve been browsing around A List Apart lately for some inspiration, and I found this article: A Dao of Web Design. Extremely well written and carefully crafted, this article gave me one of my new favorite quotes:

Firstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a particular design and make it “work”.

This states much more elegantly what I’ve been trying to put into words for sometime, and it has a very nurturing language. Instead of forcing your content into a design that’s all about flashy graphics and effects, instead ask yourself “how is this information asking to be presented? What is the best way to showcase it’s most important points?” After all, being a designer is about taking the path that leads to a fufilled user and client- not fulfilling your own desire to create a design that looks amazing but is difficult to use.

Sometimes we get lost in the visuals and forget to ask “Why?” Why does the page have a side nav instead of a top nav? Why is it a three column layout instead of two? These are all valid questions and you might find yourself scrambling for an answer if you didn’t take the time to analyze the information first, and let the design grow out of the function.

But as they always said on Reading Rainbow, don’t take my word for it- go and check out the excellent article by John Allsopp