All posts in Design

How Might We: Create A Community That People Asirpire To Be A Part Of?

By On May 12, 2012 In Branding, How Might We... With No Comments Permanent Link to How Might We: Create A Community That People Asirpire To Be A Part Of?Permalink

This morning I put together this little mind map on my iPad using Adobe Ideas. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what a learning platform specifically tailored for creatives might look like, and how we might (HWM) create an online community for that platform that people would aspire to be part of. Given that the core of great branding is the expression of the right values, I started brainstorming there, asking myself “what types of values and traits might provide a good foundation for growing such a community?”. That exercise produced this. It’s incomplete, but I thought it was worth sharing.

If you had a place where you learned online with others, what type of community would you be proud to be a part of?

Mind map by Steffan Antonas

Learning Web Design, Web Development & iOS Development Online with Treehouse

By On May 11, 2012 In Method & Craft With No Comments Permanent Link to Learning Web Design, Web Development & iOS Development Online with TreehousePermalink

Like many web designers and developers, I’m almost completely self taught. I started years ago with books, manuals and blog posts because that’s all that was really available. Now we’ve got an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to learning. Im a visual learner, so I find that video works best for me learning this stuff. Being able to watch someone show you how something complicated is done is so much faster, easier and enjoyable.

For the last few months I’ve worked my way through 38 badges on Treehouse, which has been great. At an average 6-7 minutes per video, and about 5 videos per badge, that’s around 20 hours of content. I’ve learned a lot, and the fact that the content is delivered in a thoughtful, structured way has really made the experience good. Continue Reading →

Process Is Not Magic

By On May 10, 2012 In Design, Downloads With No Comments Permanent Link to Process Is Not MagicPermalink



Today’s post is a link to a free wallpaper design illustrating a quote by Charles Eames comes from the CAMP creative studio in southern California. This is what I’ve got decorating my desktop right now. It’s making me smile. Download it here.

Three Tools For Quick User Interface Prototyping

By On May 8, 2012 In Design, Prototyping With No Comments Permanent Link to Three Tools For Quick User Interface PrototypingPermalink

This week I’ve been doing some research on prototyping tools. A discussion about these types of tools and what works best came up in a recent meetup I attended in Boston for web/UI designers and it sparked an interesting debate. Some people preferred to start designing straight in Fireworks or Photoshop, others preferred paper and pencil first, and then some people liked a few tools specifically built for rapid prototyping. While everyone had their own preferred method, I think we all agreed that succeeding in the prototyping stage is about speed, pure and simple. Quick and dirty beats slow and pretty every single time. That said, here are 3 prototyping tools that did get discussed:

Keynotopia

This is the one I would naturally gravitate to. I’m firmly in the “quick and dirty” camp, and this tool is the simplest and is the least expensive. Keynotopia is a large collection of user interface design templates that enable you to prototype and test your site or app ideas using Apple Keynote, Microsoft PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Impress – it’s almost all drag and drop, and if you understand page transitions, you’re already on your way to mastery. Plus, you can export your prototype as a clickable pdf, which is super handy. The templates include thousands of wireframe and high fidelity vector UI components, designed from scratch in Keynote, Powerpoint and OpenOffice, and are fully editable and customizable without needing additional design tools. Again, at $49-$99, this one is the cheapest of the three.

Here’s a video demo of Keynotopia:

Antetype

Antetype is an app that’s relatively established in the marketplace, and there were a few strong advocates in the room who praised it. While the learning curve is a little steeper than Keynotopia, this one is definitely better suited for more complex projects and designs. At $289 USD, you’ll have to decide how feature-rich you need the tool to be to get your job done. Students can also score a copy for $49, which is very reasonable.

Here’s a demo of Antetype:


Axure

Axure was the big boy of the 3. At $589, you’d have to be prototyping a lot with it to justify the cost, but again, there were a few happy users in the room who had good things to say about it. This tool’s learning curve seemed similar to Antetype’s and it’s clearly suited for more complex demos that require a bit more care in look and feel. If you’re in to adding visual details like rounded corners, gradients and shaded buttons, this could be your best solution. Although, I think everyone in the room I was in agreed that at this stage of the game spending a lot of time on gradients and shadows often hurts you more than it helps. That’s your call.

Here’s a demo of Axure:

If you know of any tools like that you find useful? Please let me know in the comments. I’d love to have a chat about it.

Creating Extensible Baseline Grids

By On May 2, 2012 In Design, Method & Craft With 3 Comments Permanent Link to Creating Extensible Baseline GridsPermalink

In addition to the Y-axis grid, a baseline-style grid can be a really valuable X-axis alignment tool when you’re design compositing. Given that typography is so important, a good baseline grid is pretty essential for developing a nice rhythm in your designs. In this short 7 minute video, Mike Precious, a designer who contributes to Method & Craft shows how to quickly create an extensible baseline grid within a Photoshop-based web design workflow.

Why Designers Should Be In Love With The Process

By On May 1, 2012 In Design, Method & Craft With No Comments Permanent Link to Why Designers Should Be In Love With The ProcessPermalink

This 99% Conference talk by Yves Béhar on the design process has some great nuggets in it. I watched it on the way to the Harvard Entrepreneurship conference yesterday on the train and really enjoyed it. It’s 30 mins, the perfect length to get through on a short commute on your phone. Yves shares his seven principles for “holistic making.” There’s also a great quote at the end by Saul Bass on creativity and where ideas come from. Good stuff.

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

By On March 21, 2010 In Design With 4 Comments Permanent Link to The Ten Commandments Of User ExperiencePermalink

This presentation given by Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave at SXSW this year is great. Slides 5, 10 and 11 stand out. Special thanks to @Fraser for sharing the link on Twitter and pointing to the most valuable slides.  Here’s a quick summary of the talk:

“User experiences are your everyday experiences—anything from operating a car, to making a pot of coffee, to ordering a pair of shoes online. User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design.

In this presentation Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave will explore the ten characteristics of a great user experience. They will cover all aspects of user experience design such as user research, information architecture, information design, technical writing, interaction design, visual design, brand identity design, accessibly, usability and web analytics. Nick and Raina will also explain how following the ten commandments can boost your web sites, web app, or mobile app’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.”

The Ten Commandments Of User Experience

View more presentations from Nick Finck.
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The Way We Consume Magazines Is About To Change: TOUCH Changes The Ecomomics & The Experience

By On March 1, 2010 In Design With 6 Comments Permanent Link to The Way We Consume Magazines Is About To Change: TOUCH Changes The Ecomomics & The ExperiencePermalink

Back in January I wrote a post discussing why the iPad would be so significant to the future of publishing where I said the following:

“the reading experience itself is going to change…it’s all about the apps… that’s where the real innovation is going to happen, and that’s where consumers are expecting it to happen. They don’t want a crazy new device they have to learn how to use – they want something they know how to use that does new and useful things.  The extra screen real estate is exactly what developers have been waiting for, and it’s all they need to change the way we think about reading.”

I stand by what I said – and I think the upheaval we’re about to see in the publishing market is going to be driven by a shift to tablets in general. Once again, the point is that the significance of the iPad isn’t due to the fact that Apple has created something conceptually revolutionary, it’s that they’re in the best position to create a new market and change consumer behavior on a massive scale with what they’re releasing (feel free to debate this point in the comments ;-)).

This afternoon I found this demo (below) of Wired Magazine’s new iPad Table app that made me pretty confident that the way we consume magazines is about to change in a hurry. I’ve seen similar demos like this for magazine-like reading experiences on a tablet (The Mag+ by Bonnier that was demo’d on PopSci immediately comes to mind), but the fact that this is a working demo for the iPad (which hasnt even been released yet!) is pretty significant. I think Chris Anderson‘s bit in this speaks volumes about how publishers perceive the opportunities for rich story telling and revenue that the tablet phenomenon presents (not just the iPad, tablets in general). He says…

“This is what we’ve been waiting for, for 15 years. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal to tell these stories in a way that is efficient, that is multi-dimentional. But we also think it’s an opportunity to reset the economics. For the first time people might value this experience so much that they’ll pay for it.”

Touch Changes The Revenue Game

Chris’ point about resetting the economics for magazines is an important one. We all know that print is on its way out. You’ll notice in the demo that they make the point that advertising is just as important to the consumer’s experience of Wired as the content itself is….but check out how interactive the ads are. It’s a whole different experience. You know why you haven’t seen ads like that on your laptop? Because we don’t touch our screens, that’s why. When you’re encouraged to touch and explore, ads themselves are much closer to interactive content than they are to an object of interruption. The act of touching is literally creating a whole new category for advertising (as content). Now, you couple the opportunities there with the fact that what you’re touching (the magazine) comes in the form of an application that consumers are downloading (easy distribution) and probably paying as much for as they did for the print version…no wonder these guys are excited.

Considering this is a working demo for a product that hasn’t even been released yet, I’m pretty excited to see what other players are doing. Apple was smart to give developers a window to get going between the official announcement and the actual release date. If this is the beginning, this is a really exciting time to be in publishing.