Had a few minutes over to finish my short presentation on education reform, I hope you like it. Feel free to ask about anything you feel I’m neglecting to mention, should extrapolate on or if you think I’m just plain wrong.
Another business card design, this one with a slightly less hidden fetish for the mint/new spring green that I really like. For some reason this color represents the color of sunshine and happiness for me. Has something to do with new leaves on birch trees in spring but that’s as far back as I care to identify the emotional response.
Minimalist color bombardment
The card had, besides the clear fetish for green, a slogan about design that I regularly use as a mantra and a short pitch about why I can help improve your product. Not the most convincing one I’ve written but still alright. The typography of the pitch is a bit dodgy as the wording wouldn’t let me balance the characters by reshaping the sentences. Might return to this one.
I realized last weekend that I’m missing a proper business card. Time to design one.
And since I’m at home, sick but not dying, I took the time to do a couple of sketches.
Minimalist Typographic Business Card
This card is based on the very popular typographic design posters you’ll find floating around the web. Complete with a more minimalist front with the logo from my current WP theme design (not launched, still sketching and tweaking)
These are just sketches for my WP theme. Just getting ideas out to test them visually. Experimenting with design is really an awesome process and I wish we had the tools to do the same with interaction without involving a group of developers and spending a lot of money.
Portfolio showcase design
Experimented a lot with gradients and feedback as if the objects had a real world existence.
Worked pretty well but not at all to the degree I was looking for. Getting users to experience fake tactile experience through Gestalt Closure is really hard without sound.
Blog with portfolio images
Here I tried relying more on the grid to make the site look structured and clean. But I bailed out in the last minute and added a few details outside the grid that didn’t work at all.
lifestream design
Here I was just trying to present a lifestream that could work as a living resume of my entire life. Before long I realized that what I really was designing was an XML feed. Not at all what I had set out to do.
Interactive businesscard
Testing out the idea of a virtual business card. But it started feeling cheap really early. The point of a business card is to be able to hand it around. A website doesn’t have the same appeal for the function. If I wanted you to find out exactly who I am I’d probably hand you my resume, not my site.
Lifestream with a presentation of me
This was one of the most interesting models I tried. Another fake spatial space website but with equal amounts of information about me and information that I wanted visitors to see. Worked pretty well but ended up a bit cramped. Not far from my current direction though.
My friend called me a few minutes ago.
Friend: Hi J, what are you up to?
Me: I’m working.
Friend: I thought you were sick?
Me: I am.
Friend: So why are you at work?
Me: I’m at home, got a fever and feel terrible.
Friend: …and you’re still working?
Me: Yeah.
Friend: What the hell is wrong with you?!
Me: …I honestly don’t know.
Change is of course always hard, but I’m not talking about personal change here but about change in organization and how companies and industries work. We have a lot of current examples with now with the entire Music and Mobile phone industry plunging off the revenue cliff like lemmings.
New ideas tend to come from people who have a lot of time on their hands. You see, there is something about our minds that just makes us crave new things. This might sound strange as we’ve all had grand mothers and friends who just put up a fight against everything new. But we are slightly skewed as witnesses towards these events, they’re not against new things you see. They are just a bit frightened that what people are pushing for might make what they were doing sound wrong or stupid. Basically, we’re all afraid to be laughed at.
But we still love to learn new things, most of us travel or read or watch movies. And while we often do pick out favorites just to be safe we always got those favorites or find new ones because we learn as we go. Fast or slow, we all learn and move on. But the process takes time.
This is why youth always seem to be full of fresh ideas. Sure, many of them have been tried, not all youngsters check before they start to wave red flags, but certainly not all of them. This is because young people have more free time to indulge and learn new things. Name any period in your life when you learned more than as a student? Can you honestly say that most of what you learned happened in classrooms?!
And this, alarmingly, is the problem. As companies get larger and the people working for them are more senior they get busier and busier. Which leaves less time for learning. While people are promoted because they do excellent work, they usually struggle to keep doing excellent work and thus have even less time to indulge.
Because of this we end up with a pyramid of ideas and power that is completely polarized and slightly ageist. The broad bottom is made up of mostly young people with most of the ideas while the upper parts are made up of mostly older people with less modern ideas. It’s not the fault of any of them. It certainly isn’t intentional. But it’s bad for the company and it leaves the company less open to change. Not because the people in charge don’t believe in change, but because they haven’t had time to live the change that has already happened.
An old saying is that winners work hard and play hard. I would argue that because they work hard and find the time to play they are still agile and current enough to be winners. They have all the experience and still have had time to learn the modern ways of doing things before Google took over the market.
Ah, you’ll now think, or did earlier, what about companies such as Google? How can huge organizations like them stay current?
Well. They don’t. Not completely. But they are fighting this trend by letting their employees use 20% of their time to work on their own projects. A few other companies use similar strategies but Google is the most famous promoter which is why I chose to make an example out of them.
No one can stop change. We have to move with it or be left behind. This includes the Music industry, Mobile phone producers and web start ups equally. Maybe using a bit more time for playful learning can give us a competitive advantage?
Oh, and “free work time” is also the only way to motivate people working creatively apparently:
Sometimes we need to put our ideas into words just to understand them ourselves. This is because the limitations in our language to describe ideas force us to make them more structured and less fuzzy around the edges.
We don’t always do this however, which is a bit sad since we only communicate a fraction of our ideas.
I think about this often when I’m talking with friends. Because it is only when I’m talking to another person that I really flesh out ideas enough to make them understandable and usable.
Last night I had a great conversation with an old friend and I am pleased to share with you a few of the ideas we discussed here. I’ll post them later tonight or tomorrow but I will say that we solved fear of death, the reason for religion and why the last Harry Potter book was a bit of a anti climax.
It seems most of you are only here to find out who I am.
Fair enough. I’ll make a better presentation of myself soon.
Minigore is a small promotional iPhone top down shooter created by developer Mountain Sheep. It was launched to get a publishing deal to an adventure game based on the characters, gameplay and art style that sets Minigore apart.
So far so good. That Minigore is one of the best looking and most polished feedback titles in the App store doesn’t make it any less good.
But what I really wanted to talk about is the seamless music experience. Minigore takes advantage of iPhone 3.0’s API for the iPod player. Which means it won’t stop your music when you launch Minigore. On the contrary.
The music plays through the loading screen as well as the menu and into the game itself. The game also understands that music is playing and doesn’t play its own soundtrack.
Compared to playing Minigore there can be no more persuasive argument for creating seamless experiences. Whether through sound, interface or social functions. Seamlessness really does add enormous amounts of emotional goodwill to your product.
Don’t believe me? Try it yourself, it’s 99 cents and worth every penny.
With Snow Leopard out and another event planned it was time for the annual iPod update.
This time Apple released faster versions of the iPod touch for improved game experiences. An iPod nano with a camera and a few new colors for iPod classic and shuffle.
But the real news is iTunes 9. iTunes has finally been updated with a few small but essential additions. iTunes has for the last 3 years or so lagged terribly behind the rest of Apple’s products both in interface and useability. So this was about time. But it wasn’t the complete overhaul we were hoping, not an iTunes cloud sadly.
iTunes 9 has limited content sharing over LAN for home users and a revised interface for the iTunes store. Which was badly needed. But besides that the changes are minimal and of little interest. Hopefully iTunes 9 was just in preparation of iTunes 10 which hopefully will be a drastic improvement.
Let the rumors commence.
