Later this month, the very first St. Louis Innovation Camp will be held. This is a unique event in St. Louis, hosted and organized by a group of people that are tired of seeing all the crazy cool things happen on one of the coasts. For a long time now there has been a ton of untapped talent in the St. Louis area, and those that really do shine normally end up getting whisked away to one of the those alluring coastal cities. Hopefully, St. Louis can finally peek it’s head out of the bushes and show those other cities it knows how to play with the big dogs too. Continue reading →
I’m normally not one for making New Year Resolutions simply because I know I wouldn’t be able to follow through with them. By posting them here, it’s my hope that I can use this post as a prolonged ‘To-Do’ list for the new year and be a gentle reminder that I always have something I could be working on. Between now and Dec. 31st, I’m going to be adding things to this post as they come to me. I know some of these resolutions will require the help of other people, so I’ll need to step out of my comfort zone a bit and be more willing to ask for help from my peers. Hopefully, by the end of 2010 I will have made some headway on this pesky things and be a better person for it. Continue reading →
The key to any advanced prototypes using Blend 3 w/ Skecthflow is using the SketchFlow Animation Panel, the more advanced States panel, or by adding common interactive behavior to controls. Now, if you happen to have any Flash background, setting up animations will feel very comfortable for you. Below are my thoughts on how to set up some of the behavior that is exhibited by another Silverlight Prototype I put together. (Please explore the prototype to see how feedback and annotations work.) Continue reading →
The art of designing is one filled with failing early and failing often. These iterations allow a designer to learn from their mistakes to get to a proper solution. Learning from your failures is real challenge though, especially if there is a close personal connection to a design. The slippery slope is when we don’t learn from our failures, for we are destined to make the same mistakes all over again. The act of ‘sucking less than I did last time’ is an art that any designer needs to learn if they hope to be successfully.
It is obvious to say that times are tough financially. Every business is trying to control its costs in order to best weather the storm, which makes asking for money difficult. What can you do to convince your manager that it is worth the time and money to send you to a conference like IDEA 09? Here are some tips to help you sell the idea of going to a conference. Continue reading →
Interview with Chris Spooner – My favorite part of this interview was Chris explaining why having a blog is important and how it helped him in his career.
Deconstructing Analysis Techniques Part 2 Deconstruction – Analysis is the one aspect of User Experience that is not documented well enough. Steve Baty is making great strides in correcting that fact. Continue reading →
While checking out the book shelf at our local Oregon Trail (twitter) coffee shop, I found a hidden gem. The title was ‘The Newspaper Designer’s Handbook’, and I never thought to find so many great examples of design layout. Inside were explanations on how to set up a grid based layout, why it is important, basic typography concepts, and best practices for images and captions. Continue reading →
While I was at the IA Summit I sent out ALOT of tweets. The final tally was somewhere around 360, and I only lost ~10 followers with all that activity. The challenge when I returned home was getting all my tweets organized and in a digestible format. Luckily, Yoni (twitter) has built an amazing tool that helps for people that take their tweets and turn them into blog posts.