7thgroove » design

This is interaction design

kevin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:55:50 +0000

View article on wikipedia

Interaction design frameworks

kevin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:47:45 +0000

View more documents from miskeeto.

Required Reading for IxD

kevin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:36:37 +0000

Required Reading for Interactive Designers | Design & Innovation | Fast Company

Posted using ShareThis

50 Best Ever Icon Sets

kevin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:07:14 +0000

If you are looking for that perfect icon for your web site, blog, web app or application, you will find them here.

read more | digg story

Social Media Cheat Sheet

kevin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:09:46 +0000

Step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for a process to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

read more | digg story

One day, one website

kevin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:45:56 +0000

We just launched a very simple site for a chiropractor in Collingwood. The trick with this is, we did it in one day—5 hrs to be exact. I remember several years ago reading an article by Jim Frau on Wired with a title like : One day, five bucks and a website. Well this was kind of like that. I find building websites now is a bit like lego, all the peices are built and out there, you just have to put them together in interesting ways. You can do fantastic stuff with little to zero actually coding. Check it out www.mountainchiropractic.ca.

This site also represented an experiment in new process. The client had very little say in terms of the design of the end result. Unlike the current process which has a lot of client engagement, design reviews, choices, trade offs, education, justification, explanation etc.. Not that that is bad. Just that if the scope of the project is quite small, like this one, a designer can ‘get-it’ quite quickly and easily, and maybe the client can save quite a bit of money by well you know ‘trusting the designer’.

It’s kind of like those new Home improvement shows. Where the designers meet the home owners, understand their needs, ask a bunch of probing questions… then ship the home owner off somewhere at some point so they don’t get in the way. Maybe they are involved a bit in the tear-down and part of the renovation. They’ll inevitably hate the paint color, because they can’t envision the end result. But when they come back at the end and see the final product 9 times out of 10 they love it.

Well this project was like that. We chatted, set some scope and goals. Really tried to focus on the goals. Next we had the customer write a document that had all the content the site needed to present. They gave us their logo. Showed us a few sites they liked in terms of design and tone. That was it. No concepts, no design reviews, nothing. We took complete creative control. One day, or five hours later , the next thing the heard from us was—your site is done. What was the result? Here’s a quote:

“I LOVE THE SITE!!!!! You are AMAZING!!!! THANK YOu Thank you THANK YOU!!!!!” Dr. Heather Munroe

Graffiti

kevin — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:14:32 +0000

Playing around with SLIDE for another project. I threw this together with a set from flickr pretty quickly… The photos in this slideshow are taken around the world… I’ve developed a recent interest in Graffiti.

buzznet

kevin — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 05:05:07 +0000

Photos by Cyclingteam on Buzznet

Before and After

kevin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:27:42 +0000

All in all I really like the new features Google have added to gmail. The new contacts UI is an awesome upgrade. But one things always bugged me with gmails fly-out sidebar contacts…

Here is what they look like now:

I’m in gmail all day, and–as much as I have to say I hate using the phone–I look for phone numbers all the time everyday. Wouldn’t it be great if:

See, the space is there, just give us the option to show a couple of phone numbers in the fly out.

SpokenText

kevin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:25:34 +0000

This is neat… It’s made by a guy I work with at Industry Canada.

Posh

kevin — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:09:15 +0000

Interesting podcast from Paul Boag who casually redesigns the way clients and designers interact. Next Marcus asks if you really need a content management system, and Garrett Dimon sharing his experiences of information architecture. Source link and podcast

Procrastination and Analysis Paralysis

kevin — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 02:50:44 +0000

If the company you work for spends more than an hour a week in meetings you just might have the organisational version of analysis paralysis.

Reading this was relevant to a current government engagement. You have to laugh at the following comment :

Seems very interesting. I guess I will read it later.

iPhone hype

kevin — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:51:44 +0000

Is it all just hype? Thirteen reasons to doubt the iPhone breaks down the new iPhone into reasons why it just might be hype.

Changing Image Resolution

kevin — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 05:50:42 +0000

Possibly one of the most confusing aspects of dealing with digital imagery is resolution–specifically, what it really is and how changing it affects an image. This is a great tutorial to show you how. read more | digg story

Turn Your Photos into …

kevin — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 03:41:33 +0000

Turn Photos into Lichtenstein-inspired Comic Book Art. Earning your chops as a painter is no easy task. But if you manage to do it, and further, do it while critics lambast your pieces for being mere copies of comic book panels, you must be something pretty special. read more | digg story

Breakthrough Tech

kevin — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:22:45 +0000

Popular Mechanics picks 10 products that set new standards of innovation. We like the Cooper super-slide and the smart blue-tooth robots read more | digg story

Photoshop Brush Resources

kevin — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:21:32 +0000

More than 170 Photoshop brushes indexed and growing daily. read more | digg story

Online: Color Palette Generator

kevin — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:10:28 +0000

Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

Broken Typewriter style fonts

kevin — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:12:10 +0000

Good free fonts for download. Broken 15 is interesting. Typofiles will appreciate these collections. Anyone involved in design understands the importance of typography and it’s always nice to find open typography resources. This is a great typography site to add to existing resources like veer, typophile and 7thgroove’s favourite divide by zero.

Design Process Deconstructed

kevin — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 02:13:08 +0000

“Not only that, but my “honest” description of the process is an idealized one. Sometimes I have one great idea but can’t convince the client it’s great and I have to do more ones. Sometimes this leads to a better idea. Sometimes it leads to a worse idea. Sometimes after I go back and explore other ideas we all come back to the original idea. Sometimes the client accepts an idea, and then produces other people who haven’t been involved . These people end up having opinions of their own. One way or another it always seems to get done, but never as originally promised.”

It’s interesting to see such a leader in the design community confess that, really, at the end of the day, the process may not really work, and is rarely followed. Design is fluid and inspired. Read it all from Design Observer »