Our exercise reminded me of this Core77 video of a design director at Converse sketching a summer sneaker concept in under five minutes -- it's pretty cool:
Core77 also recently launched this interesting sketching site. Check it out for more inspiration on varied techniques and conversations. How does sketching improve your creative process? What tools do you swear by?
I'll state the obvious that this is not where anyone wants to be in this business. So, how to deliver quality each and every time? This post looks at each major role in the creation process and posits the questions that need to be asked individually to keep professional-level design a strategic priority.
Every other Thursday, AOL presents speakers who will help you stay on the cutting edge of your profession, hone your skills, understand industry best practices and keep you ahead of the competition. We'll meet 12PM-1:30PM on alternating Thursdays in Dulles and New York to hear about new and advanced topics in Web design.
As a special bonus, the first session comes with lunch provided free! Expand your knowledge of Web Typography and fill your stomach! Who could pass that up?
If you plan to attend, please RSVP Jason Cranford Teague (j.cranfordteague@corp.aol.com) at least 24 hours in advance of the meet-up.
Click "Read More" for session dates and descriptions.
When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.
A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.
Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:
> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.
Click "read more" for more ideas >>
At this year's South By Southwest (SxSW) conference, I had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra speak about how to create passionate users. She reminded us that we can make our audience fall in love with our experiences if we can make them feel great about themselves while on our sites.
Here are some of her suggestions on how to do this:
> Try to create human-ness in our designs. Recreate subtle, real-world elements -- like the iPhone screen scroll bounce -- in our animations to make things feel more alive.
> Read facial expressions during usability tests -- you have to see people's faces (not just read a report afterwards) because we naturally simulate other people's thoughts in our own brain. When we see a face frowning, we infer what that person is thinking. They're not articulating it, but we can see it and use those perceptions to influence our design strategies. (Click "Read More")
I've always had visceral reactions to political paraphernalia . I remember ogling my father's I LIKE IKE pin when I was younger, wondering if Ike was a favored relative or a loved dairy product. And then there was the incident in the FAO Schwartz store, where I cried violently because my father wouldn't buy me a Bob Dole hand puppet.
And now I've stumbled across the CafePress political mecca of paraphernalia. Hand puppets, laminated items, t-Shirts, and tote bags represent mudslinging, lobbying, campaigning, parodying in one convenient location and in a variety of sizes.
The trek to the White House has been one of complete accessibility-- from powerhouse candidate webpages, to the CNN streamed debates, to facebook groups, to CafePress's consumerist appeal. And what's so appealing about this accessibility? Beyond the obvious fact that information is readily available, the opportunity for mass participation is as easy as an upload button or as obscure as throwing a sheep at a candidate. The phrase that 'every vote counts' is now extended to every myspace friend, every connected stream, and every submitted t-shirt design. Participation is becoming more creative.
I was recently browsing the collection of Esquire's covers starting from the year 1933, and noticed a recent transition to heavy text saturation on the cover of the magazine. Although the text is used cleverly, (and dimensionally no doubt), the question is this-- is there a claustrophobic tension detracting from the portrait? In more recent editions of Esquire UK and the Spanish version, the text has been minimal, if not non-existent. Could these be cultural differences in media consumption or simple editorial choices?
If you extract anything from this Socratic post, it hope its the URL for the Covers Gallery. Seventy Five years should give you a large enough sample size to make your own visual decision....
Famed writer Norman Mailer recently passed away, leaving feminists with a bitter taste in their mouth, readers a substantial body of work, and political paraphernalia-heads a valuable contribution. In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for Mayor of New York, promoting a campaign sign that is a cross between a Fifth Grade art project and a Fillmore poster. There is something pleasant about the playfulness of this campaign advertisement, especially when looking at the mudslinging used in the propaganda today.
(Photo Courtesy of frumin.net)
Popular Mechanics recently launched its 2007 Breakthrough Awards, a prize recognizing functional-design innovations. Although all of the awarded projects were ingenious in their own right, two particular proposals captured my attention.
After the release of the iphone, consumers were awed by the touch potential of the device-- the scrolling, the two finger zooming, the on-screen typing. Yet, the concept of employing a multiplicity of commands on a single surface hadn't successfully materialized until Jefferson Han demonstrated his hands-on super computer. This 'multi-touch media wall' is a massive monitor with a plethora of compositional capabilities. The wall is akin to digging through photo-boxes, unraveling posters, pushing aside documents, coloring on chalkboards, and stacking Legos-- yet it's all done on a two-dimensional monitor with fingertips.
The second noteworthy invention was Hod Lipson's in-house fabricator. We mostly assume that printers normally produce two-dimensional creations. This 3D Open-Source printer has the ability to fabricate tangible objects, even items as ubiquitous as chocolate bars or cell-phone cases. The ability to digitally input blueprints and create dimensional objects sounds like something out of a science-fiction utopia. Yet, the designers propose that in 20 years time, families will have a wireless fabricator alongside the toaster and the microwave-- download a fresh mug for the morning coffee.
Although the projects aren't mass produced now, (save the Darfur stove), they have future potential to be pervasive items. I guess that's what makes the concepts so brilliant-- something so seemingly innovative could one-day become commonplace.
Looking for a bit of inspiration and your morning coffee just isn't giving you a buzz? Nice To Meet You (www.ntmy.org) is a new world-wide design community Web site sponsored by Media Temple (www.meadiatemple.net) with continuously refreshed links to design news, hot sites, and design portfolios submitted by its members. You can also scribble your random thoughts on the community board, check out where in the world other people on the site are located, and, when you sign up, you get your own little blog page to add your own news to the service.
At first glance, the page is a bit cluttered and hard to follow, with large images that don't appear to be clickable (the mouse pointer doesn't change), even though they are, and tiny text captions which you can't tell whether they go with the image above or below. Now that my gripes are out of the way, I have to say that the content is diverse and cool. That with the community aspects makes this site one to return to when you get stuck for an idea.
