March, 2010

design — Comments Off
26
Mar 10

Week 479

This week I had a day off across the middle of the week, it was great and I had a haircut. Work either side of the midweek is more calm before the storm, our monster offsite prototyping sprint over Easter.

We want to have layers of data visualisations as additional content or even as interfaces to the mainstreams of content. I’d been putting together examples I liked, and received two glorious books to add to this. Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless Data Flow. Really nice.

A little userflow doc I sketched together straddled 3 pages, almost without thinking I added three dots, centred to the bottom of each, one filled the others in outline. UI style pagination signalling in print – seemed completely natural.I like it, will use it again. As we use screens for more and more of our reading, it seems entirely reasonable to translate the visual cues from the screen and apply them to ‘legacy formats’ like paper.

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19
Mar 10

Week 478

I didn’t do a weeknote last week. It got to Friday and I was a blank: weeknote block. Last week we had a big release, the second with an ‘extra feature’ product so I should have plenty to talk about except… except I don’t. Because we didn’t do it. It was a special case, with much more work than usual handled by the artist and their own design agency. We only saw it the day of release and while it wasn’t terrible by any means, it was a bit disappointing. Good album tho, so hey.

This week has been revisiting early work. Recording our process doing a couple of ‘lite’ products with third-parties seemed like a good idea, so I’ve been drawing up wireframes and layout advice for future product teams to shortcut what worked for us.

I’m also revisiting the iconography I quickly put together at the start of the project. We’ve had a little feedback now, and spending a bit longer drawing a better “suite” of icons seems like good time spent ahead of our upcoming dev/fort powered prototype week.

More about that, another time, but I’m quite excited about it.

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8
Mar 10

Week 476

A good week, i think, but this is late posted. Product dev churns onwards, I’m up to other projects too so those took priority this week a bit.

It’s simple wireframing of standardised ‘bricks’ (chunks of content, navigation elements, components, plugins, widgets, whatever) to use on a wide range of websites built using Wordpress. Not dull exactly, but just stuff that needs doing.

On Thursday I attended the Music 4.5 conference, which was a mashup of music biz and tech startups. Full coverage here. It was really good, decent line up and well organised. Techcrunch had a Pitch segment there, which was interesting.

One startup in particular caught my eye, Decibel who are aiming to create a metadata service, offering much more depth than the standard Gracenote artist/genre/year/album dataset. A big undertaking, but properly researched, maintained and API’d could be extremely useful to build advanced discovery services and connective tissue for music content.

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