Week 5

Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses

Here are the 2 points that stood out for me.

1. "...bit time consuming, but it's invaluable insight and will save you twice the time redoing your site later." - Enough can't be said about proper planning and organization on the front end.
   
2. "...determine who will be using your organization scheme first and do a card sort only with those folks." - subtle way of saying know your audience.
   

Another thing I thought was interesting was the different ways suggested to identify and handle oddball categories with feedback and ranking systems and how in many social network driven sites today the whole labeling of the taxonomy is left to the user or community with an individual tagging system. (43things.com)

Hierarchy And Contrast: The Basis of Good Design

Not sure what to say about this, it was an article that could be titled Graphic Design 001. The points they made about contrast and hierarchy were true and useful. It just felt like they needed a little more, no a lot more, depth of explanation. Like handing someone some knives, showing them a fish and expecting some sushi.

Week 4

Gestalt Theory and HCI

The relationship between positive and negative space is at the core of all visual design. The Gestalt ideas of similarity, proximity, and continuity, are, in my opinion, the foundation for the HCI design principles. HCI is concerned about a users ability to perform tasks easily, and get results they expect. So the designer applies their knowledge of these basic Gestalt design principles to organize the elements in a visual hierarchy to hopefully guide the user to the different tasks available and what can be expected in the following steps. HCI with Gestalt not only has the power to make tasks easy, but can actually create a path or guide that directs the user to certain elements, while pushing others into the background. That is why there is so much thought put into e-commerce web sites and the relationships around the buy button.

Cluetrain Manifesto

As I was reading this I tried to remember my internet experience in 1999. While I do agree with many of his views on corporations, and the attitudes they have, and I agree that many still have a problem.

However the idea of Joe Sixpack joining the conversation and corporations not I think is very short sighted. Also that everyone in the group of unwashed masses out there is starved for a creative outlet and the laziness we see is a result of corporations is seems very idealistic.

CEOs, CIOs, VPs, Marketing directors and all the other people running corporations are people as well. They will join the conversation and today many have. One thing about corporations is that they have lots of money and power to figure things out, even if it takes a little longer.

His point about leveraging an intranet to tap into the knowledge of the worker bees is good. My director where I work now has been trying this, it works ok.

Overall, fun to read and very good points that are still relevant in today's digital environment. In 1999 while the adoption curve had come down considerably it is even further down now.

I remember when...

For me the “I remember” idea has the best potential to be molded in to something everyone in the project can have a piece of and claim as their own. As I said in my post below, I see the greatest potential not only in aesthetics and richness of the design, but in the content itself. Some people will like interviewing people for stories, others might want to research interesting facts and history about places or things.

Some links:

Not that we are going to go for 10 years, but the potential for richness in the content is very compelling.
http://www.storycorps.net/
http://www.nyc-plus.com/nycp8/storycorpspreserves.html

Very simple site - http://www.myurbandig.com/

Some photos to get you feeling nostalgic
http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/
http://phototaken.my-expressions.com/slides.html

Not really examples of sites but this is to show potential if someone wanted to take a story or a topic this far.
http://www.gen.com/trailer/usb/usb_trailer.html
http://www.gen.com/trailer/atg/atg_trailer.html

I’ve included this just for the front page photos. Where can I get a sweater like that - http://www.remembertheaba.com/

Project goals, roles, and other fun

Before I go into my goals I want to play the role of cheerleader.

We have a great opportunity to design, plan, build and complete a project with no corporate political bureaucracy to wade through, no accounting hoops to jump through, and no half-baked marketing plan to mislead us. Yes, I understand there are still some constraints and obstacles to work around, but I’m not going to be a kill joy and go into those. I just want everyone to be excited at the prospect of getting to make something big, hopefully fun, and having their creativity freed from the man.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ve been creating web content from a graphic design perspective going on 8 years and I’ve been a member of creative and design teams varying in sizes from 2 to 20. There are many reasons teams have succeed or failed that I’ve participated in, but the main factor in the effectiveness of the team has always been one thing, clear expectations. The team needs to communicate expectations with each other and with Kathy very clearly. Fulfilled expectations bring happiness; unclear expectations bring frustration and confusion which leads to failure and finger pointing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The goals or areas I want to focus on during the project:

There is probably one word for what I want to focus on, but I can’t think of it so I’m going to use many. The following job titles all have aspects of things I want to learn; Product Manager, Creative Director, Producer, Information Architect, Usability Engineer, even some aspects of Account Management. Basically, I’m trying to figure out a way to say I want to get better at managing resources, the creative process, and site assets, as well as expand my design skills with a better understanding of usability factors. I would also like to learn backend programming, but I suspect this isn’t the right class for that.

One role that is best left to someone else is copyediting/proofreading. I’m not good at this nor have a real desire to become good. Video or sound editing however, while not a strength of mine, is something I would like to learn more from the experts among us. Many of you expressed an interest in learning some common software applications. I’ll be happy to share what I know and some tricks I’ve learned. Please don’t hesitate to ask.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All the projects have good potential. The one I gravitate most towards is Brian’s “I remember idea”. I think this not only has a lot of legs to go far in our class, but can potentially continue to grow through time. The content itself can be very rich in nature or just simple text, very flexible depending on time, resources and subject matter. I like the idea of focusing on one topic like Seattle, but I also think there are many other topics to consider as well, like favorite food Mom cooked, or childhood toys, TV shows, lots of back in the good old days stuff. And I don’t mean to sound like it has to be all really old, kid have great memories that are old to them as well. I think this is a great thing to brain storm about.

new year new class

My goal for this class's blog posts are to be short and to the point. Not only because I don't want to spend a lot time writing, I don't want to make you read it either. We all have more interesting things to do.

moment of clarity #1
Notes on Design Practice: Stories and Prototypes as Catalysts for Communication - I have sat in many exploratory design meetings as a graphic designer, but I have never experienced story sharing as described in the article. It is a very intriguing idea and would be fun to try with the right project. Like any method for design there is no one size fits all.

moment of clarity #2
The Publishing Team - Having worked primarily in a in-house agency or freelance environment in my career it was interesting to see where the marketing exec was put in the org chart. From personal experience the 'markcoms' rarely understand their role.

As for application to goals this quarter, I'm still a little vague as to where this class is going to apply to goals of my own.