January, 2010

design / technology — Comments Off
29
Jan 10

Week 471

Another jam packed week, but quite busy so this will be shorter than usual.

Presented first draft of the design I’ve been working on, wireframes quickly thrown into a deck and a 1 minute UI ‘visual sketch’ which hopefully got across some of the more experiential elements I was hoping to include.

Obviously it’s quite exciting to present new work, but this was tempered with the reality that this is a first draft and it felt it. Response was muted. Clearly there is more work to be done. Things need exploring more, some things need to be made simpler. Some need to go. We’ll be bashing out details this afternoon to take another run at it for a second draft.

During the lull of midweek I popped along to the Toy Fair up the road at Olympia. It was a bit depressing really. I’d previously first visited about 15 years ago, and a few times since, but this seemed to have had the life sucked out of it. No videogames, or interactive things really. Very much ‘old’ toys and very many of those with licensed brands. This year: Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2 the  big properties. All a bit lifeless. All a bit constrained by already professionally imagined worlds.

And then there was the launch of the iPad. Literally a blank canvas: lovely, exciting, endless new possibilities. Not least, possibilities for toys. Games, drawing, music, PLAY – all these things should shine on the iPad. I literally cannot wait and have downloaded the iphone SDK to fiddle, maybe even learn some basic app programming skills.

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23
Jan 10

Week 470

Bit late this week, but it’s technically still this week, so there. I had a good chunk of the wireframes done by the start of the week, but they didn’t really sing or convey some of the qualities I had in mind for the product. To fix this I’ve dived into the other extreme and have spent a few days this week making a really glossy UX demo in After Effects.

Although some of the visual tricks I’m using on this aren’t quite possible in a web renderer just yet (getting very close though… 3D transformations in CSS here). For visualising how things might stretch on better than browser platforms though (smartphones, consoles and tablets) it’s ideal. Knocking back the fidelity of the transitions on less capable platforms will be fine – the quality here is in the layout, functionality and experience.

There’s a bit more to do over the weekend to extend this 1min video a little and revisit the wireframes with the adhoc changes and improvements I made while tweaking the UI as I animated. There’s something to be said for the speed and detail level animating makes you work (ie. slowly and closely) – you spot the clunkers easily and finesse the tiny marks. Anyway, onwards a busy week ahead.

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13
Jan 10

Week 469

It’s been a good week so far, if busy and a little fragmented. I’m due to be getting a chunky bit of design completed describing the main elements of the project I’m working on. I did a sprint last week to so an applied example to a specific product, now I’m wireframing up a generic “enhanced” product with very broad visual cues of how it could be presented. I don’t think we’re going to be massively tough enforcing the presentation layer but it’s good to have a strong vanilla framework to fall back on in cases where time or resources get squeezed.

We have a product suite which this stuff falls into the top end of, so another little task is to better define visual language across this suite – product labels that can describe the scope and depth of the experience while feeling solid when presented together, each one dipping into a bag of icons describing specific features. This is primarily a graphics job, and I’m probably not the best person to do it but do need to get an hour to write the brief.

Also on my plate is a much pared down homepage for the main company site, which isn’t as big a deal as you may imagine. What we end up doing with it may surprise a few people by it’s simplicity but it makes sense. And it will be very very clean as I’m hoping to base it on the excellent Basic Maths theme by Khoi Vinh which should also condense development time significantly.

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6
Jan 10

Week 468

First week back at work and I’m snowed in, along with what sounds like half the country. Still, it cuts down on meetings and focus is going to be priceless this week. My orderly scheme of Think – Plan – Do has been upended by needs of the business, so rather than orderly functional workings flowing into wireframes and then into a few polished screens I’m working in a much more finished level, revisiting and iterating as I go as we need to show some solid stuff next week in LA.

Part of me hates doing things this way round, but the other half really likes diving in, getting my hands dirty with some pixels. Luckily I had a good few weeks to let the idea really percolate in my brain, so I’m not stumped and changing things round is quick. It’ll come out looking good, and this first iteration as a whole might need lots changing before we take a run at a full production project. However, the benefit of everyone involved being able to finally see something long talked about is clear – excitement, it builds!

The wider economy must be warming up, so I’ve had to update my linkedin profile with a job title – it’s a contract but extremely full-time right now. Future gigs are always considered, but that’ll be later in the year thanks.

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