Last semester I taught a class. This semester, I have embarked again on the journey that is ‘writing a book’. I have picked back up, the project I started in 2004, which was a remix of my thesis project from graduate school—a book version with narrative and history about Dr. Robert L. Leslie and the…
Combine an Interaction Design program, with a crash course in visual design, mix it up with how visual design principles, practices and approaches intersect and influence designing the full user experience and you get the class I am teaching. We are doing a crash course in the basics – gestalt principles, typography basics, type history,…
As part of the class I am teaching – Visual Interaction Design – we are doing a module on typography and type design. Tangential to that is type history – not specifically relevant but great background for the designers. So starting with the type history deck provided by Ellen Lupton, which is part of her…
UPDATED 2019 – over the last four years, I’ve been teaching Visual Interaction Design at CCA (California College of the Arts) – which is a crash course in visual design for interaction designers. I reference a lot of great books that I think are worthy of having on the shelf as I work up my curriculum…
I’ll be doing a webcast of my Foundations of Social Interface Design over at O’Reilly on August 20, 2015. Here’s what I’ll be talking about – check it out and hope to see you there: Description: Designing social sites and mobile applications, or adding a social dimension to an existing project, entails unique challenges way…
I wrote a piece pondering some questions coming out of the Ellen Pao / Kleiner Perkins trial. I sat on the jury for five weeks and although I was an alternate and didn’t get to deliberate, I came away with a host of questions about our industry and how we in UX, nested inside tech,…
Christian and I are currently working on a revision of the Social patterns book. We talked to Mary Treseler last year at the IA Summit – where we signed free books – about a second version and finally by December we signed our contract. This time around though, we are on a super accelerated schedule…
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….