Episode 44 of Jonathan Nadeau’s Frostcast podcast series is up and features an interview with yours truly. I think it went fairly well with some discussion about free software, design and some other things. No doubt there will be some criticism about the quality of the guest. After all Jonathan’s been busy interviewing actually important [...]
Let’s say you and I set out to design a vehicle. I think it would be wise for us to choose what sort of vehicle we were designing and who we were designing it for. Are we serving young fathers just getting into their parenting years? Or maybe 55 year old balding men knee-deep in [...]
Back in mid-February, I was offered the opportunity to create some graphics for an Android application called OpenSchedule. It’s an application which lets you view and manage information on upcoming conferences and events registered with the OpenSchedule web app. This tied in nicely with the Linux conference stuff I’ve worked on (more on that in [...]
Well I think I made it over two years with the same self-designed blog theme. But alas, it was starting to feel clunky and somewhat rusty to me. That, and the fact that it displayed the odd quirk (likely due to my amateurish wordpress theming skills). I’m no spring chicken, and as such I’ve got [...]
Iterative design. It’s a relatively simple process. You come up with an idea, then have a go at it. Analyze it, test it, figure out what’s wrong with it, and if you’re lucky, how you might make it better. Then you refine it, circle back, and carry on the cycle. Iterative design is not throwing [...]
The recent Smashing Magazine post “Designers, ‘Hacks’ and Professionalism: Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?” is an interesting one. I urge you to read it. It brings up several different issues but one that struck a chord with me was the whole feeling about the commoditization of design. With sites like 99designs.com which leverage design [...]
While recently on vacation down in Las Vegas (yes it was hot, and no I didn’t win anything), I managed to pick up a copy of Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut. I have utterly enjoyed reading this book. Not all of the essays are about design directly, and in fact you’ll not [...]
Usability testing seems to be the new black in Libre Software Land these days. And while I won’t discount its importance one bit, I am a bit frustrated reading this recent post titled “When users first encounter Ubuntu: six showstoppers” over on the Canonical Design blog. Why am I frustrated? There is no real information [...]
Did you know that there is a visual identity guide for Ubuntu? I didn’t. But perhaps I never looked. It’s currently at revision one, and you can find it here. It’s nice to see this aspect of the design taken seriously. I wonder how many other Linux distributions have one. There are a few things [...]
Two parts to this, not nearly as tied together as I’d like, but heck, it’s been a month. First it’s pretend time, then a few things to ponder. Okay, pretend time. Let’s pretend that you and I are designing a new Linux-based distro. So being good designers means that we’re going to immediately try to [...]