Rob Green - Final Major Project

The new windows phone interface looks really swish, may actually be competeing with android soon I think. I really like the simplicty of the software, looks very intuitive.

Take the new Vimeo for a spin
The new vimeo design looks brilliant, just signed up for early access but there's a waiting list. It lookes like it's going to focus much more on the content, which is a good step forward.

This is a talk from Jake Nickell, the founder of the online tee-design community Threadless. He discusses how to stay creative and about having the initiative to try things out and make things whenever possible. He also mentions collaboration, suggesting that people should try to work with friends and colleagues on side-projects and general creative endeavours, as this is how he met his Threadless co-founder.

Here is the version of my SOI that I brought to the tutorial:

And a list of ideas for content in my design context publication:

• Web-Based Publication
• Practitioners and Studios
• Interviews
• Products/Designs
• Articles on Subject
• Book Extracts and Quotes
• Own writing on subject
• Tutorials and Guides
• Tools of Design

Here are some logos that I found in the book Logology 2 that I think will be good inspiration for my Handyman Surveyor logo ideas.

The first few images are about a brand identity across a range of media and the rest are examples of logos that I feel have a good aesthetic qualities and some that also communicate an idea of structure or building.

Gridr Buildrrr is a web app that lets users generate grids by changing lots of different variables. It could help save time when creating future layout designs.

Type-a-file is a web service that allows users to download free type-kits to use on their websites, allowing the use of more fonts in their coded designs.

Here are two web design inspiration sites that showcase lots of different designs and themes. They will be useful for finding inspiration for my future web design briefs:

Here are a couple of website designs that I initially think have the kind of aesthetic properties my surveyor website could work with:

An great article about Sharypic from Sacha Greif talks through the homepage design decisions and how the site evolved over time.

I have compiled the copy and images supplied by the client so far into a pdf completely unedited for furutre reference. The Next step is to sort out a possible hierarchy and website structure.

Here are some notes and sketches I have made of my initial ideas and direction for the Handyman Surveyor Website:

Here are some notes taken from the book 'Designing Interactions' by Bill Moggridge about his design process. I think they are a great structure for developing interactive design solutions.

Here are some notes about some of the briefs I am considering for my FMP:

Here is a video showing some of the features that the app offers:

These are our initial concept boards for the yearbook proposal submission. We noticed the half-finished paragraph on the second board after submitting, left like that because of a bit of mis-communication.

We haven't worked in teams like this for quite a while so we're still getting back into the swing of it!

“As a living identity, the mark uses javascript to self-generate a unique movement and mark for every search term.”

Here are my first digital mockups of the symbol overlay concept. The first image shows the shapes over the initial number 4 symbol, and the second displays the same shapes without the symbol underlay.

One of our initial concepts that I chose to develop was the idea of a symbol or mark that can run throughout the publication and have a changing shape overlay for each student. This was inspired by the Wikipedia branding proposal by Moving Brands.

Here are my initial sketches developing the idea into something relevant to our year-group:

Here is the first draft of my statement of intent, with some initial notes on what I want to write about in the full copy.

This is a list of the first principles of interaction design written by Bruce Tognazzini (of Apple fame).

• Anticipation
• Autonomy
• Color Blindness
• Consistency
• Defaults
• Efficiency of the User
• Explorable Interfaces
• Fitts' Law
• Human Interface Objects
• Latency Reduction
• Learnability
• Metaphors, Use of
• Protect Users' Work
• Readability
• Track State
• Visible Navigation

These quotes are taken from the article titled 'Wanna Create A Great Product? Fail Early, Fail Fast, Fail Often' found on FastCoDesign.

“Including quick prototyping in the design process will not only help communicate your ideas but allow you to harness one of the virtues of creating something truly innovative: failure.”

“In tandem with design explorations, rapid prototyping is a cyclical and iterative process. The basic cycle allows for testing and refining of the product or service early and often: ideate, prototype, test, analyze, refine, and repeat. The key understanding in adapting a design process to an iterative one is that failure must be expected and embraced. This process also creates opportunity to remedy those failures early on -- and more efficiently.”

They both explain the virtues of testing-out interactive design ideas early on and throughout the design process. Through the development of basic prototypes tested on potential users, ideas can be tested, evaluated and re-iterated, encouraging the development of stronger solutions.

I definitely want this system of continuous prototyping and iteration of ideas to be part of my own design practice so that I can develop better solutions to the problems I face. I also feel this system will help me overcome my reluctancy to make decisions and try-out my ideas early on in the design process without worrying about failure, as Thomas Edison said:

“I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Failure is something I have to embrace to bring my solutions to new heights.

CardMunch is a brilliant little app that digitalises business cards using the iPhone's camera and also connects to the online social business website Linked-In in to pull in extra information and connect accounts.

This app fixes the old problem of collecting dozens of business cards and having to organise them manually into a card rolodex. This kind of simple digital solution to traditional problems or limitations is an area that I want to address in some of my FMP briefs.

“Personality is the framework we use to crack jokes, empathize, and connect with other humans. If we can bake emotion into the interfaces we design, we reap big benefits.”

This aspect of pleasure/delight is something I want to develop in my own interface designs.

“The models created from your user research can be fashioned into personas, which Souza describes as “tools for creating empathy among everyone in the project.” Use personas to guide user-centric copywriting by establishing very specific user goals and preferences.”

This quote was taken from an article over on the Smashing Magazine website. Creating personas or 'user profiles' will be important for creating my interfaces that work well for the target audience.

“I think the best way to learn UI / UX design is to spend a few days looking at the UI of a specific application and try to understand the choices that were made. I don't mean standing behind your desk and playing with it, I mean actually trying to understand the design decisions step by step.”

This is a very inspiring presentation/lecture given by Ben Chestnut, CEO of popular email marketing client MailChimp. He talks in depth about what it takes to run a profitable fun/creative company and fight against the mundane routines that dampens the creative spirit of employees.

He also talks about his main hands-on role of listening to and connecting ideas between the different areas of his company and how this allows them to create an emotive and pleasurable experience for their customers by communicating delightful ideas.

I think a lot of his advice can be used by anybody working within a creative discipline, even as an individual, as much of the ideas discussed are about connecting different ideas together to create something brilliant and unique. The concept of delighting the user through the interface is another aspect of the MailChimp practice that I would love to apply to my own designs.

There is also an article (mentioned in the presentation) over on the FastCompany website. Here is one of my favourite quotes pulled from the article:

“Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.”

Here is the brief we have been given for the course yearbook:

Content

Here is my first live brief:

This is my initial proposal form to help me make some decisions about my SOI before the tutorials later this week.