One of my favourite aspects of the Information Architecture Summit earlier this year was meeting and getting to know Dan Willis. He’s a consultant for Sapient (yawn) but far more importantly, he’s super smart, super funny, and scribbles like a demon. He also looks pretty suave wearing my hat.
My favourite bit is what Dan has to say about defining the problem that design is there to solve:
I don’t think it’s served design or designers well to run away from that part. I think designers need to step up their game. If they’re not able to step it up to where they’re really good at that, they should at least not be satisfied with being told what it is at the end of the day.
Thanks for the interview Dan!
Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.
When my super smart friend Dan Willis asked me to be on his panel at South by Southwest next year, my brain started spinning, trying to imagine what technology will be doing to our lives in five years.
Back in 1992, I helped set up a virtual reality lab at VCU where I was studying design. I’m not ashamed to admit that, at the time, I thought people would be wearing gloves & goggles to conduct their daily business in the Not Too Distant Future. I got over it, of course.
One of the most exciting things I found at the time was a book called Artificial Reality II by Myron Krueger. In it, he put forward the idea of a layer of information projected inside your glasses, synced with the reality outside your glasses. So, for example, you could write a sign in the air with your finger saying “This is it!” outside your house, and save it on a friend’s private channel to help them find your house for the first time. Pretty heady stuff back in 1991, and today almost a reality.
The field’s called Augmented Reality or “AR”, and I’ve been hearing more and more about it every day, but until now, not really paying it too much attention. I took a closer look this week, and here are some of the most striking examples I found, which give a pretty good overview of the state of the field today.
Sixth Sense
Probabaly the most exciting AR application I’ve seen so far, Sixth Sense is unique in that it augments reality by projecting graphics & data out onto the world.
Browsers
An augmented reality browser is software that puts a layer of information over reality, exactly as Myron Krueger foretold back in ‘91. I think it’s inevitable that these will become the hub of our digital lives and a software battlefield.
Layar
Nearest Subway
Marketing
Wherever you’ve got a new technology, you’ll always have someone trying to use it to better sell you stuff. Most of the AR marketing is extremely gimmicky so far, so here just a couple of well-done examples.
Lego
Mini Cabrio
Games
I predict that games will be to AR what porn was to the early internet. It’s just too good a match. Maybe it’s just because it’s so new, but AR feels like magic — it’s fun just because of what it is, no matter what you do with it. Employing that sense of magic in play is a no-brainer. I also predict a rash of rather painful real-world accidents, if the Roku’s Reward video below is anything to go by.
ARhrrrr!
Roku’s Reward
levelHead
PITStrategy
Art
It doesn’t seem like there’s too much experimentation going on in this space yet, but as this video shows, there’s plenty of potential.
Tagged in Motion
Weirdness
Of course, just like marketing gimmicks, wherever there’s a new technology there will be someone building disturbing, sleazy software to entertain creepy, sweaty geeks. Ewww.
Manga Girl
What’s Coming?
Augmented Reality is a very young field, and exciting enough that we designers should be keeping a close eye on it. But just like any technological jump, everyone will eventually get used to it, the sheen of coolness will fade, and it’ll go from being a sexy gimmick to an everyday tool. What then?
AR is such a large enough step away from the desktop / window / mouse world we’ve been clicking in for so long, that I’m certain it will totally bend the brains of us experience designers. We’re so used to thinking in 2D layers of information and linear paths of interaction, it’ll be a while before we really figure out how to squeeze the most out of AR experiences. At the moment the space seems to be dominated by academics on the one hand, and money-grubbing marketers on the other. I’d personally like to see a few of us practical, out in the real world, thinking designers make something out of the AR primordial soup, and I’d love to have a chance to get into it myself.
To keep up with the world of AR, check out these blogs:
These videos are surely just the tip of the iceberg, but I’m pretty new to the world of AR. Have you seen anything stunning out there that should be here too? What’s your favourite AR app? Which of your day-to-day tasks do you look forward to having augmented in the future? If you could have any AR app you wanted, what would it be?
As I mentioned previously, it’s been quite a while since the IA Summit. The recent surge of inspiration and energy caused by UX Australia reminded me that I had a number of video interviews with some very smart people, just sitting around waiting to be uploaded.
So here’s the interview with Steve Baty, user experience strategist, one of the organisers of UX Australia, and an awfully nice man.
Thanks Steve!
Click here to see all “What’s Design Mean to You?” interviews.
Can I ask a favour? Can you please ignore the fact that South by Southwest (SxSW) and the IA Summit were about five months ago? You can? Thanks, how kind of you!
At SxSW and the IA Summit this year, I continued a little project I started around this time last year when I was at Reboot — I sat down with smart people who use the word “design” to describe at least some of what they do, and asked them what the word means to them.
If you’d asked me how I felt last Wednesday morning, I might have answered “shoot me.” That’s how nervous I was about leading my workshop, “Scribble Your Way to Success!” at UX Australia last Wednesday afternoon. It was the first workshop I’ve ever given for complete strangers, and the first time I’d ever tried to teach anyone to draw.
In an attempt to control the utter panic that overtook me at having committed to doing a workshop, and inspired by my friend Donna Spencer’s blog post, How I Draft an Information Architecture, I went back to a method I’ve often used in the past to organise my thoughts for a pitch presentation. I thought you might find it useful, so here it is.
What You’ll Need
It starts (as so many good things do) with a stack of index cards and two Sharpies, black and red. You’ll also need a large, flat surface where you can spread a large number of cards out and move them around. It might sound odd, but I recommend that you pick a surface that isn’t white, or if your surface is white, use cards that aren’t. This allows you to really see the structure you’ll be creating. I used to use a pinboard and pins for this, but it’s far quicker and easier to place and move the cards around on a horizontal surface.
Brain Dump
The first step is to get everything out of your head and onto cards. Take the stack of cards and your black Sharpie, write an idea on a card, and throw it onto the pile. Then another, then another, and so on. Only write one idea (rule of thumb: maximum 5 words) on each card, and don’t worry about penmanship or eloquence - you’re the only one that needs to understand these. Don’t worry about order, don’t worry about “getting it right”, don’t sort as you go - there will be time for all of that later. Just like popcorn, when your ideas stop popping, you’re done. Don’t fight to squeeze every idea out - as you move along, more will come. Pick the low-hanging fruit and move on.
Rough in Some Structure
Now that you’ve got a stack of ideas, start sorting them. First, flip through the stack quickly and make a few smaller stacks of ideas that go together. Now look at each of those stacks and sort them into some sort of order, as in “this idea leads to this ideas leads to…” Now take your sorted cards and lay them out on your table. We read top-to-bottom & left-to-right, so I tend to put “chapters” one after the other from the top, and within the chapters ideas build up from the left, as you can see in the photo above.
Get the Details In
Odds are that you got new ideas and noticed things missing (hrm, how do I get from that idea to there?) while laying your cards out. No problem, think a moment and add what you need at this point. If you can’t think of what you need right away, don’t get hung up on it - make a note in red, and move on. At this point you can also add chapter titles (in red in the photo above), timing (the stopwatch icons on the right of the photo), notes to yourself about possible imagery or diagrams, whatever.
Now step back and take it all in. Read through the cards from start to finish and note where the ideas flow, and where the holes are. Move chapters around and see if things flow better. If you want you can take the time to fill the holes now, although the point of this exercise is to get ideas & structure down quick.
Once you’re more or less satisfied, do what you need to move this structure into Powerpoint or Keynote. Take a photo to refer to, write down a hierarchical list, or bring your laptop over to the cards and whack in a slide with each card’s text, which is how I do it. Now the real fun begins - Powerpoint acrobatics! But that will have to wait for the next post…
What a Blast!
Although I was terrified, the workshop seems by all accounts to have been a success, and I enjoyed it immensely! The nine remarkably nice participants made my day by kindly and obediently jumping through whatever hoops I put before them, and they remained creative, friendly and funny throughout. Thanks guys! More than one of them best possible feedback afterwards, “I never thought I could draw, but now I know I can.” And that was the whole point.
I enjoyed it all so much, I can’t wait to do it again! If you think you and your colleagues would benefit from breaking down the “I can’t draw” barrier to collaborate & communicate better, generate ideas faster & easier, and simply enjoy your work more, let’s talk.
I’ve been watching Mike Rohde, the unchallenged King of Sketchnotes, for a while now, with a “why didn’t I think of that?” attitude and a healthy side order of “get your ass into gear and start doing that too!”
This year’s UX Australia conference served as a perfect place to get started. Considering how smart & inspiring most of the speakers were, I had the right amount of “yeaaaah!” to almost get myself going. Considering that I taught a workshop called “Scribble Your Way to Success!” – during which I taught people who thought that they couldn’t draw that this belief was complete bullshit – I had the right amount of guilt to actually get myself going.
So, instead of spending hours agonising over the best way to describe the best UX conference I’ve ever attended, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
What I learned from these sketchnotes (other than the smart things the speakers said):
Sketchnoting makes for stronger, more memorable notes than just text notes. I assuming this has lots to do with the left/right brain activity I talked about in my workshop.
The paper in the Windsor & Newtown visual diary I’ve ben using is too thin, and there’s quite a lot of bleed-through. I also miss the warm tone of Moleskine paper, so I’ll be going back to the good old Moleskine sketchbook with the thick drawing paper.
I’m not confident enough with sketching people, so I dodged the portraits through the whole conference, although I did draw half of Alex Wright, a little Paul Otlet, and Guillermo Torres and Ayne Valencia’s hair. Next time I’ll suck it up and see if I can’t get closer to Mike Rohde’s great little portraits. Being afraid to suck at something shouldn’t keep me from trying.
Other than the fact that he’s a far better illustrator than I, Mike Rodhe’s sketchnotes hang together so well due to the simple, consistent elements and the large text, among other things. I’ll emulate those aspects of his notes a little closer next time.
What these sketchnotes don’t convey about UX Australia was how surprised and impressed I was with the sense of community in the Australian UX scene. By way of comparison, last year’s IA Summit in Memphis was full of navel-gazing, rockstar posturing, and no small amount of friction, which left me with little desire to attend in 2010. Now that UX Australia exists, I know I won’t have to. It was full of practical ideas that I can use in my work, fun jibes at how seriously we sometimes take ourselves, and intense conversation between intelligent, grounded individuals. By the time Friday night arrived, I wanted to start a company with all attendees so we could do this sort of thing every day.
It’s been said many times already, but here’s mine: congratulations to Donna Spencer, Steve Baty and all their helpers for not only hammering a stake into the ground of the international UX scene, but also hosting one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I can’t wait for UX Australia in Melbourne next year!
I’ve been to a lot of conferences in the last couple of years. Without exception, every one of them has had a badge that is either ugly or useless or, in most cases, both.
So when UX Australia announced their badge design competition, I just had to jump on it.
To make the best badge possible, I decided to share my rough designs on Flickr and get your feedback. The first version went up yesterday and plenty of people left helpful comments, so today I threw together a revised version.
While working on my presentation for UX Australia, I decided it’s about time I had a new and snazzy font for my slides.
Happily, I stumbled across Klim, a so far unknown to me foundry in New Zealand, and their lovely font Newzald, which may be just what I’m looking for. But lovelier still (to my eyes) are the pages of their sketchbooks that they’ve posted. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of creative process and painstaking craft goes into forging a beautiful typeface, you must take a look. It’s all there on the page, for anyone to see.
Let’s just ignore how long it’s been since I posted here, shall we? Ahem.
I’ve never really understood collecting - the feverish desire to have more, preferrably all of a particular thing - well, it’s always seemed a little bit soft-brained to me.
Then I looked in my drawers.
I have to admit it: I’m a little soft-brained too. I own so many nicely designed t-shirts, I could easily wear a fresh one every day for over three weeks without doing laundry. And as a designer, I’m more than a little in love with typography. Typographic t-shirts are like upperbody heaven to me. Maybe that’s something I should seek professional help with, or perhaps you understand?
So here’s my monster have/want list of typographic tees. Enjoy, and be sure to share your own favourites down in the comments.
Typefaces
Shirts not only set in, but also about particular fonts. No surprise: Helvetica wins the most love, hate, and love to hate.
Ampersands
Everybody’s favourite funky typographic symbol, the ampersand’s become quite a popular subject for shirts. In case you were wondering, according to Wikipedia the ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction “and”. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”.
Numbers
I was surprised at how unpopular numbers are on typographic t-shirts, but there are a few good ones out there.
Hand-Drawn Type
All the warmth and analogue fallibility that Helvetica is lacking radiates from hand-drawn typography, which always brings a smile to my face.
Design Nerdery
In-jokes, obscure jargon, phrases repeated to clients over and over and over… these are the shirts to warm the cockles of any designer’s heart.
Just Shirts with Sweet Type
And the grab-bag of shirts that have nice type, but don’t quite fit into any other category.
I use a 2.6 MacBook Pro with 4 Gig of RAM every day. Everything on this machine runs beautifully, and I rarely, if ever, experience enough lag in any app to become frustrated.
Photoshop CS4 is the only exception.
Extremely frustrating problems include:
up to 10 second pause before refresh when zooming in and out.
5 to 20 second pauses when selecting/deselecting layers.
stuttering and crippling lag when dragging an image around, especially when zoomed in.
unresponsive reactions to layer nudging.
anywhere from 10 second to 5 minute (not an exaggeration) pause while saving for web, accompanied by frequent crashes.
all of the above problems are completely random and not consistently reproduceable, though they occur very regularly.
As a professional designer, I’ve been used to ignoring Photoshop CS3 and concentrating on the work I was doing. This is exactly how a good tool should function. With Photoshop CS4 I spend far more time frustrated and conscious of the unresponsive & clumsy tool than I do paying attention to what I’m trying to do. Apart from being constantly and unbelievably frustrating, it’s costing me time, and therefore money, and affecting the quality of my work.
Dear Adobe, you should be very worried. I have spent a great deal of energy lately wishing for an alternative to Photoshop. Having customers whose loyalty is based on nothing more than a lack of viable alternatives to your product is a perfect opportunity for a competitor to drink your milkshake, and earn the gratitude of customers like myself. You, the creators of the Quark killer InDesign, should know that very well.
The first Photoshop CS4 update, 11.0.1, solved none of my problems. As a customer who bought CS4 new, and not as an upgrade, I don’t have the option of downgrading to CS3, although I would dearly love to. Providing me with a free downgrade wouldn’t really solve my problem – Photoshop CS4 would still be painfully slow – but at least I could work in peace again.
How about it Adobe?
Are you a designer using Photoshop CS4? Tell me about your experiences in the comments below.
Happily, I stumbled across Klim, a so far unknown to me foundry in New Zealand, and their lovely font 
