I had the pleasure of teaching recently as part of the Design Writing Summit crafted together by Christina Wodtke and sponsored by Boxes and Arrows. It was as enlightening as exhilarating. Each of us had the opportunity to also participate in the sessions with the other session leaders so I got to participate in writing exercises…
I am curating a conference! Feeling a bit deer in headlights but I am super stoked and am having a blast figuring it out. RE:DESIGN, which will be held here in San Francisco in May. It’s very interesting to be thinking about designing a conference experience. I am thankful I don’t have to design the…
Back in the days of the Bauhaus, designers were multi-faceted. The designers that many of us studied in school and admired for their modernist thinking about type and layout and grids, were also designing fabric and theatrical sets and exploring photography and writing plays. We don’t hear a lot about the other sides of these…
I have been super busy lately working on the beginnings of a Mobile Pattern Library for a client. This work involves a lot of auditing applications. I am looking at both apps designed by the client and others in the landscape for comparison and for developing best practices across the iPhone, iPad, an Android handset…
Here are a few more good articles/posts about this ongoing conversation about Identity and Google +. This is a hot potato and people need to speak out against the policies that Google has set forth. They are discriminatory and do not promote true social engagements. “Real Names†Policies Are an Abuse of Power Google+ and…
Recently Google launched Google Plus and in the process, they have required that people use their real names as their identity. This is causing tremendous issues—suspension of accounts deemed not “real”, suspending accounts because of pseudonyms. In our book, Christian and I talk about identity, about owning your words and owning your reputation. We proposed…
I have long been a proponent of grid systems in design. After all, I started out as a print designer working on annual reports and other multipage projects. The grid has been harder to apply in reasonable ways online but I still love the order of working with an underlying structure and the challenge of…
A few more events are coming up that I will be involved in: Web 2.0 Expo Keynote talk: Start Using UX as a Weapon March 29th, 4:45 pm, Main Stage I will be a judge, along with an impressive panel of amazing designers and web people for the 2011 Webvisionary Awards at Webvisions this year….
I will be attending Interactions 11 in Boulder next week. I am not presenting, just attending, but Tangible UX is looking for strong independent UX people to work with, so I would love to meet with you. Christian Crumlish and I will be presenting a short keynote talk at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco…
Very nicely done infographic showing the history of various social media services.
Last week, Christian and I had the pleasure of doing our Designing Social Interfaces day long workshop as part of Adaptive Path’s UXWeek. We had a great time and had a terrific group of people participating. Super engaged and collaborative, we had a lot of cool ideas created during the day. We also got a…
Last month I was one of the speakers at An Event Apart, Minneapolis. It was a fantastic experience and I highly recommend it. If it’s at all in your budget, get thee to An Event Apart. One of the best conferences I have ever been too. But then I am partial to very geeky things…
[Part 7 of a series on Patterns. Working with a Pattern Library.] Patterns, Components, and Code, Oh My! Ok, so now you have a pattern library. Now what? Ultimately, you need to be able to work with this content on a daily basis. The patterns, in and of themselves, give you the tools to understand…
[Part 6 of a series on Patterns. Organizing the pattern library for a design team.] Organizing a pattern library is like organizing any other large body of content. You need to look at the content you have as well as the content to be developed and come up with a primary and a potentially a…
[Part 5 of a series on Patterns. Developing a quality system.] Once you have a collection of patterns they should be reviewed by the team or designated representatives. A review process is good for catching missing issues or considerations as well as refining the problem statement and context of use. Additionally, the review process helps…