Archive for 2009

A photo of the Alamo Drafthouse that I took for SpiceWorld 2008 is being used, with permission, by Spectrum Culture. It’s not a great photo, but still cool to see it being used: http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/the-alamo-drafthouse-at-the-ritz-austin-tx.html.

I’m reading through resumes and cover letters, looking for freelancers to add to our pool of talent at Spiceworks. And most of the resumes suck. They are horribly designed. (Two pages in all caps, seriously? And you call yourself a designer?) As a whole they have terrible leading, headers, use of white space, suffer from poor font choices, and are riddled with typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, missing punctuation, inconsistent punctuation on lists, and on and on.

With any given design in your portfolio you can at least fob off poorly designed elements on the client/boss/committee. But you can’t do that with your resume. That’s all on you. At the absolute minimum it should be free of errors and use a good font. That’s not setting the bar very high.

Bonus tip: if the only thing you have listed under accolades is that time you participated in a civil war reenactment eight years ago, considering leaving that section off of the resume altogether. I’m just sayin’.

These are the unedited notes I took during the SXSW panel. Sub-lists aren’t indented so I’ll need to come back and format later. No guarantee I’ll actually do that so hopefully she’ll publish her presentation.

• Put away the computer
• Start with a six-up template:
  • A piece of paper with six thumbnail boxes
  • Designers tend to come up with only 1 or 2 ideas at first
    Usually influenced by tools and recent designs
  • Six-up template forces you past that wall
  • Don’t limit yourself to six

• Conceptual frameworks:
  • Spectrums: explore 1-dimension of project
    Ex: Experience Level: Beginner to Expert
    • First timer: how-to guide
    • Intermediate: Choose template, step-by-step process
    • Expert: DB stuff with past evites, invitees, etc. (control panel)
• 2×2: spectrum on top of a spectrum
  • First-Timer/Expert plotted against Manual/Automatic
    • Quadrant A: First-Timer/Automatic
    • Quadrant B: First-Timer/Manual
    • Quadrant C: Expert/Automatic
    • Quadrant D: Expert/Manual
• Grids: plotting all the spectrums across x/y axis

• Word Association:
  • accordian, auto-complete, bookshelf, breadcrumbs, carousel, cart, collapsible, comments, comparison, configurator, …, icons, …, modules, …

• Inspiration Library:
  • Use screengrab tool for Firefox to grab screenshots of things that are interesting.
  • Use iPhoto to catalog them

• Assemble an ad-hoc team:
  • Make sketchboards
    • Post sketches by group to a large board (like a mood board!)
      • Ex: requirements, home page, create invitiation, re-visit invitation
  • Run template-based workshops
    • Design the box: front, back
    • Concept Sheet: title, draw a picture, …
    • Design the experience: title, …

Decorate your space with your project sketches and materials while you are working on it (not after). Invite people into the process.

When someone starts describing something to you, give them a pen. Ask them to draw it out.

• Have a black-hat sessions:
  • Get everybody together for a fixed period of time and play a game where everybody has to take a turn being a villian and they have to go through and point out every possible objection they could possibly have. Gets people who won’t shut up about their concerns and let them feel heard. Takes people who were too afraid to give you their criticisms and gets them to open up and voice their concerns.

Get rid of the idea of a genius designer (d’oh!)

• Use design principles (5-7 pithy statements about the essence of the experience):
  • Tivo Ex:
    • It’s entertainment stupid.
    • It’s TV, stupid.
    • It’s video, damnit.
    • Everything is smooth and gentle.
    • No modality at deep heirarchy.
    • Respect the viewers privacy.
    • It’s a robust appliance, like a TV.
  • Google Calendar Ex:
    • Fast, visually appealing, and joyous to use.
    • Drop dead simple to get information

Quiddity (great Scrabble word): a statement of what you want the essence of the experience to be. You will not create a great experience unless you define what the quiddity is.

• Evite was the case study used for the session:
  • Three step process:
    • Choose design from the design gallery
    • Add recipients
    • Send evite
  • How would you improve this process?

March 16, 2007, Karina and I welcomed our baby boy into the world.

January 1, 2008, I took a job with a startup company, Spiceworks.

You’ll have to excuse me if I not only didn’t post here in the intervening two years, but if I let the site fall into disrepair. But I just had a productive weekend. I finished moving all of the sites I maintain — about half a dozen — to a new host. Where shareware was in use, like on this site (WordPress), I upgraded everything. I switched to new plugins for Flickr and Delicious (see sidebar). I’ve gone back to the default theme with the hopes that I’ll have more weekends like this one and that I’ll take those opportunities to design something new. Something not corporate. We’ll see how that goes.

At this point I just want a place that I can post family photos too, share design links, tweets (note to self: add a Twitter feed), and maybe even an occasional blog post when Ashton does something funny or when I’m working on something interesting.

PS I’m “clussman” on Twitter.