Bounce : The lightweight version of ZURB’s Notable app. Both allow you to capture websites and share feedback on them. Speaking of jobs (previous post), ZURB is seeking an Interaction Designer for its San Jose offices. Relocation assistance offered. Help create killer stuff just like this. … Read the rest here
I’ve never over-run on a talk. Ever. Usually I embarrasingly finish around 10 mins early, leaving plenty of time for questions. Until last week at Future of Web Design that is. When it came down to the last 5 minutes, I realised I had a lot more to go, and had to really hurry the last couple of sections. Thankfully the feedback so far has been positive, but I promise this will be (probably) be the last time I talk on this subject. … Read the rest here
This year will be a busy one in terms of speaking events. I’m currently crafting a brand new talk titled, “The CSS3 Experience”. It’ll focus on enriching the experience layer with advanced CSS and CSS3. Everyone can easily add enhancements to to their designs when focusing on the interactions and events that happen on the page. And by targeting the user experience with these new and evolving standards, you can start using these flexible techniques now, on any site, with less worry. Well damn, that sounded rather pitchy, didn’t it… Read the rest here
Tickets for the UK ’s premier user experience conference are now on sale . The great thing about putting together a conference like UX London is that, as a user experience consultancy ourselves, Clearleft gets to set up exactly the conference that we would want to go to. And yet again I’m massively excited about who we’ve lined-up for 2010: Bill Moggridge, Scott McCloud, Peter Morville, Liz Danzico, Josh Porter, Kristina Halvorson, Whitney Hess and Jesse James Garrett to name but a few. Details of the workshops are still being finalised, but you can expect to learn more about running Agile UX teams, using comics as design tools, understanding patterns for discovery, designing to influence behaviour, using metrics effectively, applying psychology to interaction design and loads more. UX London is designed to be the conference we at Clearleft want to go to, and that’s probably why it was so successful last year… Read the rest here
This month’s .net magazine (#196 December) features my article ‘Design the perfect icon’. focussing on icon design for websites, rather than for software. It expands on the talk I gave at @media earlier this year Icons for Interaction This is my first really big magazine article that I’ve written, and found 5500 words much harder than I thought, and probably won’t be writing another one in a hurry! However, I’m really pleased with result, and it’s given me an idea of how much harder it would be to write a book. … Read the rest here
Sitepoint has recently released a book called Fancy Form Design . Sitepoint was kind enough to provide me with a copy of it and being only 176 pages, I was able to finish it in short order. Fancy Form Design is a quick read and has a clear focus: design quality forms. The book is broken down into 5 sections, each building on the one previous using a single project over the scope of the book. For a multi-author effort, this is impressive and appreciated. The first chapter talks about form elements including browser built-ins such as checkboxes and select menus. … Read the rest here
I had an epiphany and I hope somebody at Adobe has been paying attention to the HTML5 developments. Adobe is well positioned to take advantage of emerging browser features, most specifically canvas. As great as canvas is, having a visual tool to assist in taking advantage of that would be ideal. Such a tool would smooth out the rough spots of cross-browser issues and could provide a set of pre-designed widgets and interactions that could be quickly dropped into any project. Flash developers would likely find it an easy transition to building canvas-based tools. It’d be easier because of their knowledge of animation and because of the similarities between ActionScript and JavaScript. … Read the rest here
I had an epiphany and I hope somebody at Adobe has been paying attention to the HTML5 developments. Adobe is well positioned to take advantage of emerging browser features, most specifically canvas. As great as canvas is, having a visual tool to assist in taking advantage of that would be ideal. Such a tool would smooth out the rough spots of cross-browser issues and could provide a set of pre-designed widgets and interactions that could be quickly dropped into any project. Flash developers would likely find it an easy transition to building canvas-based tools… Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been taking a bit of a break lately. But there’s some exciting stuff coming up in the not too distant future. Excuses, Excuses Despite the temptations of ever-warming weather, I had to throw most of my free time towards a new presentation for An Event Apart and @media last week, and on a gameplan for teaching in the fall. Well, that and sometimes I just don’t have much of anything to say. Rather than drop posts on here that I don’t care about, I decided to take a few weeks away from this site to recharge. … Read the rest here
Last week I had the pleasure of attending @media 2009 in London, where it has to be said, I had the best conference experience I’ve had for a long time. I prefer the more cosy nature of the event – a single track, not too large and overwhelming quantity of people, and simply great talks. I can’t pick one favourite presentation, as I came away feeling really inspired and energised by everything. It was also the last @media curated by Patrick Griffiths, who is moving on to follow other passions (from next year the conference will be in the able hands of the Web Directions Team ). I want to take this opportunity to thank Patrick for encouraging me to talk, and giving the best possible environment to do it in. … Read the rest here
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to set your alarms or calendar notifications as tickets for dConstruct go on sale this Monday at 11am. As always we’ve scoured the world to bring you an amazing line-up of speakers. People who educated, entertained and inspired us over the last couple of years. We’ve got insightful speakers like Adam Greenfield , author of “Everyware”, talking about ubiquity and location, or Russell Davies from Wired Magazine talking about the rise in post digital culture. We’ve got entertaining and educational sessions like Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel ’s excellent talk about interaction paradigms in science fiction movies. … Read the rest here
When CSS animations were first introduced in Webkit back in 2007, I expressed my concerns that CSS may not be the best place for it . Sound cool? I don’t think so. Not only does it make CSS more complicated, it makes JavaScript more complicated, too. Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example , a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
The rule of thirds and ratios such as the golden section are fantastic methods for achieving designs that feel cohesive. The problem is these principles don’t really apply to web design. Golden Ratio: When the ratio between two numbers is the same as the ratio of the sum of those numbers and the larger number. Basically, a+b is to a as a is to b . Also referred to as the “divine proportion” from its frequent occurrence in nature. … Read the rest here
I recently received a wireframe from a potential client outlining their plans for a new homepage, which in itself was pretty impressive. It showed that the client had knowledge of the industry as well as a good understanding about the importance of planning. To produce this wireframe our prospective client had used a relatively new tool called Balsamiq, which aims to capture the sketchy nature of hand drawn wireframes with the utility of a GUI application. On the surface this seems like a really good idea and it obviously allowed the client to produce something relatively quickly with little or no prior experience. As such, I think a tool like Balsamiq does have a place in the non-professional market… Read the rest here
Gestural (touch) UI is gaining momentum as a suitable companion, and in some cases worthy replacement, to the traditional UI via peripheral device input. Of course, with this momentum comes revised thinking about how we design for interaction. To this end, San Francisco-based Punchcut, an agency specializing in mobile design, threw together a very brief video demonstrating five considerations to keep in mind when designing for touch. (Beautiful job on motion design btw, guys.) The more detailed article that preceded the video can be found here: Design Considerations for Touch UI . … Read the rest here
I was reviewing analytics data for Authentic Jobs this morning, and some figures emerged that are remarkable, but also somewhat unsurprising: For the same monthly period one year ago, visits to the site have increased by 45.9% and average time on the site has increased by 22.9% . For the same annual period one year ago (technically two years ago), visits to the site have increased by 76.0% and average time on the site has decreased by 5.1% . I say somewhat unsurprising because given the current economic climate, one can assume traffic to online job boards has increased in the last 6-12 months. Indeed, a recent report from comScore confirms this assumption: Job search ranked as the fastest growing U.S. online category in 2008 . Had comScore’s study included other countries, the same trend would likely have emerged. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
I’m trying to cut back on travel and speaking dates this year, but I’ll be out and about a few times. If you happen to be attending any of these events, be sure to say hello! Not the Same Old Story , SXSW Interactive, March 14, 11:30am I’ll be moderating a panel exploring how people from different backgrounds tackle the problem of design and storytelling online. From the description: If the web provides so many ways to connect with audiences, why are we all stuck telling the same story with our designs? Hear from a panel of storytelling experts on the importance of narrative and art direction online to break away from static and boring experiences. I’m honored to be joined on the panel by some very talented folks: Nicholas Felton, feltron.com Daniel Burka, Creative Director, Digg/Pownce Emily Gordon, Editor-in-Chief, Print Magazine , Emdashes.com Ian Adelman, Design Director, NYMag.com The Influencers , DOT DOT DOT, April 15 The upcoming Interaction Design Masters program at SVA is really building steam, and they’ve been giving back to the community with a free monthly lecture series called DOT DOT DOT. … Read the rest here
View from on stage as I’m preparing to speak at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008. I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile ), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things I’ve learned. Though this list is geared towards one-hour sessions rather than panels and workshops, some of the same principles apply… Read the rest here
There’s a lot of sneering about end of year lists, but I love looking back personally, as well as reading others (like Jeremy and Elliot ) as well. Anyway, I’ve been doing it since 1990, so I don’t see why I should stop now… Music With the exception of Vampire Weekend, 2008 didn’t have a great deal that excited me musically. So much so, I didn’t list any favourites for that year. In contrast, there has been a shipload of albums that have done it for me in 2009 (and in no particular order): Silversun Pickups : Swoon Placebo : Battle for the Sun Phoenix : Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix The Clientele : Bonfires on the Heath Mew : No More Stories Are Told Today… (long pretentious album title, but another great Mew album nonetheless) Yeah Yeah Yeahs : It’s Blitz! Mos Def : The Ecstatic Mastodon : Crack the Skye Pelle Carlberg : The Lilac Time Bat for Lashes : Two Suns Bombay Bicycle Club : I had the blues but I shook them loose Brendan Benson : My Old Familiar Friend The Duckworth Lewis Method : The Duckworth Lewis Method Idlewild : Post Electric Blues Imogen Heap : Ellipse Editors : On this light and on this evening Kasabian : West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum Graham Coxon : Spinning Top School of Seven Bells : Alpinisms iTunes also tells me that the most played tracks this year were Silversun Pickups’ “Panic Switch” and Placebos’ “Bright Lights”. … Read the rest here
Ticket sales for UX London launched today so I thought I’d take this opportunity to outline what we’re trying to achieve with this event. A lot of industry conferences are what I’d describe as “talking heads” events, where well known speakers stand up for an hour and give the audience a big does of inspiration. I love these type of events and this is essentially what we do at dConstruct . I always come away with a head full of ideas and an a renewed interest in my profession. The one criticism I hear is that, while these events are inspiring, you don’t usually end up learning new skills. I think a lot of people blame the speakers or conference organisers for this, but I actually think it’s down to the format… Read the rest here