The Final state. →
An excellent observation by Goran Peuc about the design process, along with a wonderful analogy.
User Experience Design is Dead; Long Live User Experience →
I suspect the phrase “user experience design” is no longer necessary, and could even be harmful. Harmful because it suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers, when in fact companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat profitability, or corporate culture, or innovation, or anything else that’s essential for it’s ongoing success.
via @maratz
Interruptions are the enemy of productivity. →
Poor planning on your part doesn’t make am emergency on my part. I now have to deal with this culture of interruption, packaged as notifications but it’s just really lazy. It’s not a new economy, it’s not a new world. It’s someone wanting to micromanage my time that doesn’t understand my time. Thanks, but no thanks.
I hate notifications. I hate IM. I hate the phone. I hate everything that requires me to stop what I’m doing in an instant, and shift my focus to it.
ImageAlpha — lossy compression for 24-bit PNG images →
ImageAlpha converts 24-bit PNG to paletted 8-bit with full alpha channel. This greately reduces file sizes with only minor loss of quality. Such images are compatible with all browsers, and even degrade well in IE6.
When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it.
Ben Horowitz: “What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology”
I hate losing more than I want to win.
Billy Beane, Moneyball
Insights on Symbol Design, by Jon Hicks →
An awesome primer on icon design by John Hicks.
How can we be like the successful ones and not like we are: tired, confused, scared, not-rich? Just tell us the secret. There is a secret, right? There must be. They make it look so easy.
Funnel
We decide to pursue an idea when the feeling that it has the potential to turn into something significant, overwhelms the doubt and the reservation we may have about it. That is a natural filter that I believe everyone has “built–in”, that makes sure you don’t spend all your time working on things that cause instant fascination, and then before you know it you’re bored with them. Like pop music.
Funnel is one of our biggest failures to date. I had such high hopes for this project’s success, and I still have a feeling we could have gone big with this one. Eventually, the situation got the best of us and we never launched to the public. I demoed the app to people, collected feedback, wrote teaser blog posts, sweat over pricing models, created roadmaps, designed iteration after iteration of the interface, perfected the feature sets, and planned releases.
What Was It About
I have envisioned Funnel as the best tool for collaborative text editing. Not really Google Docs, more like Simplenote, but better.
People would use it for notes, to write prose, store and edit code snippets, or collaborate on any kind of content. They could also publish web pages simply by tagging posts with “public”. Collaborators could be invited by tagging posts with email addresses or usernames. To–Do lists would be created from unordered lists by tagging posts with “todo”, etc.
We Have Failed
This post is a reconciliation with our failure. I’m finally ready to admit I won’t pursue the project any further. I have collected my thoughts on the experience, and will make sure not to make the same mistakes again as the project’s initiator, and leader. Funnel is dead.
The funny thing is, I can remember the moment I have realized we are abandoning the project. It was when I stumbled upon a service that was almost feature–to–feature a replica of what we were building. The feeling was terrifying. Not because of fear of competition, or “They have launched before us, what will we do?”, no, it’s not that. It was the realization that there were two groups of people working on the same idea, one group went through with it to the end, one didn’t. I was ashamed. It hurt. It stil hurts.
This “competitor” was something we could, and should have done. I saw their product as a confirmation of our idea, that we were on to something.
Seeing that Funnel will never see the light of day, I can only recommend you to go on and give Typerighter a try. It looks like a solid service with a lot of the same functionality.
Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures →
I’m loving how this article displays the process that goes on in the designer/client relationship (Jamie being the designer, and Jason the client in this case). The biggest reason I like it is that it shows the design process and an exploration.
I feel like the biggest problem for small Web design firms (primarily in startups) is the lack of resources that enable exploration. Designers need to be able to make wrong decisions, so that they can clear the view, and find the right ones.
I will admit that I am also to blame for enabling customers to rush the design process in order to cut the cost of the project, or speed it up. Recently I have decided to put in whatever effort necessary in order to prevent this from happening. This includes everything from making better decisions about who we accept work from (are they “getting” what we do), to making sure the resources are there to enable us to deliver our best work, to managing projects better (online tools such as Basecamp and Apollo are tools, not project managers).
Kick–Ass UI from Lovely Charts for iPad.
Slides From the “Design For Startups” Workshop
I’ve finally took the time to upload the slides from the presentation part of the workshop.
You can also view the presentation notes in this Workflowy document that will hopefully allow you to get a glimpse of what was it all about. Everything is in Serbian by the way, sorry guys.
Our Faves
For a while we’ve had a problem of decentralized inspiration database. Both Stefan and I have our own ways of staying current with the trends, and places we monitor for inspiration.
However, we wanted a place where we could collect interesting visual bits we come across all the time. And it’s not just the matter of collecting and curating, we wanted the ability to add additional commentary in order to flex our brains (explain why we like something).
Without further ado, we present the Superawesøme Faves.
We decided on a “wall of posts” approach through the use of jQuery Masonry, a great plugin by David Desandro that does the job for us perfectly. We are hosting the site on Tumblr, so you can follow it, but if you’re not a Tumblr user, feel free to grab the feed.
For now, we plan to use it solely as a place where we can store interesting visuals, fonts, interface elements, and images in general, but in the future we may explore different forms for posting as well.
Orange/Blue Contrast in Movie Posters →
Hollywood is abusing the orange/blue complementary color pair. Consider the psychological implication next time you are coming up with a color scheme.
Nice Custom Page Titles for Textpattern Sites
It’s no secret that Superawesøme ❤ Textpattern. We love working with the CMS, especially because of the special way templating is implemented that’s super–easy for a designer to understand.
One thing that’s kind of difficult to achieve, is the complete customization of the page titles. For some reason, I like a site to be completely customized, and I am really happy Textpattern offers this level of fine–grained control over content.
Customized Page Titles in Textpattern
I usually have a couple of rules when it comes to page titles:
- I want a special title on the home page,
- I want a special title on the section lander,
- I want a special title on the category lander within a section (for articles that are within categories, and sections),
- I want a special title on the individual article page.
In order to achieve this, use this Textpattern template code:
