Fairweather Zealot

I’ve always been a sketcher during meetings, but unlike many other people where doodling is a sign of boredom or inattention, with my ADD, it actually keeps me focused. By keeping my hands and my right brain focused on the paper, it keeps my ears and mind on Wednesday is being said. Strange but true.

My doodles have cycles: a week or two of realism, a couple weeks of abstract line art, a period of typography, etc. Lately, I’ve been doing bird sketches from memory in the margins. I’m not sure if it’s because I still have birds in the brain from Arizona (probably), if I just have birds in my head right now (definitely) or if I am just enjoying doing some realistic drawings of something that I have a fairly decent picture of in my mind’s eye. Regardless, it’s been fun to try to draw a reasonable likeness of some birds from memory in my notebook. Some samples are below. I just wish I had a better scanner for them (the details didn’t come out very well).

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get creative about anything, but we recently had a contest at work to replace the boring “Day of Move” nameplates we had at our desks. I know it isn’t the Mona Lisa, but it was fun to think about how to represent myself. Continue reading

After I got my new hard drive, I set about doing some things that I had put off for a while, such as organizing my images (strewn across 4 hard drives, 7 partitions and countless different folders), and culling the vast number of ‘backup disks’ that had accumulated over time.  Some were interesting “Wow, my old college lab reports”) – and some were destined to be trashed (“Hmmm, a Photoshop 5 LE disc.  That’s old – and in the way”).  But one thing that I discovered (multiple copies of) was the first website that I ever designed – and I use that term loosely – and ran, way back in 1995. Continue reading

In addition to the obvious skiing thing, my boss Dante is going to be presenting at the Interaction ’09 conference next year.  It’s a cool subject (at least for our IA/UX geeks), and Vancouver + February means snow.  Now if I can just figure out a way to afford the trip…

The other day I was working on an internal UX Guidelines website and instituting one of the very things that I was advocating when I ran into a problem. Essentially, I was implementing the code to create a file type icon at the end of links so that all PDFs would show a PDF icon, all SWFs would have a Flash icon and all external links would have an external link icon, using the CSS3 attribute selectors. Continue reading

The other day, I saw something that Mozilla had come up with – Mozilla Ubiquity. In the shortest sense, it’s a way to create quick internet mash-ups from your browser without having to go to a bunch of different webpages to do it. If you’ve ever used the ENSO Launcher interface, it’s a similar method but browser-based.

You can learn more from the video below, but basically if you’re on a web page, you can select text and then use CTRL+Spacebar to activate a command structure to analyze/manipulate the data you selected. Type “map” and it will map the selected address in Google maps. Select a term or phrase and type “wiki” to get a wikipedia entry, or “ask-search“/”google“/”msn-search” to search on that particular engine. Type “flickr” to search the term on Flickr. Even better, it starts to predict what you want to do.

But it does more than that – you can also run commands such as calculator (“calculate“), switch tabs (“tab“), create a TinyURL (“tinyurl“) and more. Check out the video below, and then go download the prototype. Unless you have IE, that is. Then you can just suck it. Continue reading

I just got done a great book on building usable forms – Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design – Filling in the Blanks”. It was a really well-done, interesting book on a less than interesting topic (well, to most people) – in fact, it’s one of the best usability books I’ve read in terms of giving quick, easy-to-read, usable information. From my review on Goodreads.com:

“Good or bad, there aren’t many books that I can use for my job that I go through quickly. There’s just something about a limit to my absorption of information from these books that makes me take my time to get through them. However, that was not a problem with this book. Chock full of good information, Wroblewski manages to make it a quick, easy and yet informative read that only took me 2 days cover-to-cover.”

You can see more on Luke’s website, to get a feel for the book.

I wanted to get some more work done on my ID posts, but had to take a quick tangent for a couple of things. I’ve realized lately that I’ve really been getting behind on my reading of blogs in my industry, so I’ve been taking the opportunity to spend some catching up on some of my favorites including 456bereastreet and authentic boredom. Continue reading

I saw this on the A Passion For Nature blog and thought I’d play along:

Rules

1. Pick up the nearest book.*
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.

“At the core of all screen (and print, of course) visual design is layout: where and how the features, controls, and content are placed. Layout provides the structure that these elements reside within. Layout provides hierarchy, letting users know what is important and what is less so – a control that is visible at all times is perceived as more important than one that is buried in a drop-down menu.”

Questions:

1. Do you know what book my quote comes from?
2. Do you want to play ?

Daily Links

• Batman: Dead End – Still one of the coolest fan films out there, there is now a sequel.
• I never thought I would agree with Glenn Beck.
• Barnacle Goose one step closer to being added to the NJ Species List after removal ‘Origin Uncertain’ designation.

* note: I actually had to pick up 3 books: the first didn’t have 5 sentences on page 123, and the second had an image on that page.

Today was the fourth and final day of the UX Intensive conference here in Vancouver, and the day that nominally was the most appropriate for me, being that it was about Information Architecture. It was supposed to be hosted by Chiara Fox, but she was forced to pull out due to illness, so Adaptive Path co-founder Peter Merholz stepped in to take over. Continue reading