BlaringSmelly

Couple of us designers attended tonight’s Puget Sound SIGCHI event hosted by Google at its Fremont office. The location wasn’t new to Tab and I. 4 years ago, we both worked for the same design firm. The firm’s office was the very location Google’s at now.

This was my 2nd time attended UX event hosted by Google. From past experience, I knew the meeting room is going to be a mad house. We arrived early enough this time to score ourselves a decent spot. There was even time for a quick tour to Googl’e usability lab and eye tracking device.

The speaker tonight was Jake Knapp, UI designer at Google. Jake shared his typical day at work and how things got done in this fast pace and engineer-driven culture.

His talking points were pretty straight forward, and were already adapted by companies practicing Agile Development Manifesto. One tip particularly got me interested was the importance of presentation to UX professionals.

How design concept is conveyed to the entire team and generate great feedback relied heavily on designers’ ability to give good presentation. Just like any design project, presentation should have a goal, start from paper and sketches, and plan out a storyboard that’ll help to get your point crossed.

A list of rule of thumbs:

• Follow the 3-word rule: 3 bullets and enough said
• 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki: 10 slides, 20 minutes, and make sure use 30 pt fonts for your slides
• Be careful presenting mock-ups. Drawing is a better alternative, as the focus will not be on the design details. Also drawing invites people to participate.

Jake’s talk ended with resources on tonight’s topic:

• More tips on presentation skills, check out Presentation Zen.
• Tech tricks, tips, and downloads for getting things done - Lifehacker.
• You Tube - David Allen: Getting Things Done (46 minutes)

Running into Yahoo’s personalize travel site was entirely an accident. I was goggling for some travel information. One of the links led me to Yahoo’s travel destination page. The information was somewhat useful. But things started to get interesting when I noticed an “Add to Trip” feature by the destination info.

Since I’m collecting information on several locations, and I would like to compare them under one common area. I started adding photos and information I came across. Before I knew it, I’ve compiled a list of destinations. They were also pinpointed on a map view. And later when I did a search on airline prices and saved one of the better deals, it too showed up in My Trip.

My travel plan was putting together all by itself without me realizing it!

Knowing my travel plan started to take shape, I was ready to invest more time into this unknown territory. I tracked down MyTravel page under Yahoo! Travel. Other than the recently put together My Trip Plan, the page itself was, naturally, not one bit personalized. Big yellow sticky were playfully placed on sections of the page, providing hints and focal points of areas I can get started.

Personalizing these pages was hardly any hard work. So more time was invested. Then I found out connecting My Travel with my flickr account, my past travel photos will show up oh my travel pages without having to upload them.

Pretty sweet setup for travelers alike, my only complain about My Travel so far is it’s sharing amongst friends and family was overlooked.

Lately I’ve being using blaringSmelly as a guinea pig to test out WordPress themes and getting familiar with new features from its recent version upgrades.

The reason is simple, i want to redesign my website. And I want to use WordPress as my admin tool.

In the past, I update my website only when I was out looking for job. This time I actually have a different agenda. My website redesign will leverage design methodologies I’ve observed over the years.

The scope of redesign is more than those meet the eyes. Currently I’m in planning and research phrase. The redesign project will put my understanding of design process, principles of information architecture, and user-centered design in good uses.

And that, is why blaringsmelly has being changing appearances more frequent than [insert celebrity’s name here].

Ktula spurred my curiosity about HDR (High Dynamic Range) with a link to series of amazing HDR photos in flickr. These photos pick up the most intense colors spectrum one rarely sees in natural themed photography. And the details brought up by the color depths were simply startling.

So I started playing around with the software with series of snapshots taken in the office. Not sure if it only works with outdoor open sky images, both photo sets turned out rather disappointing. I have yet to figure out the key to good HDR images. At this point, Photoshop is still my preferred color manipulation tool.

The other day I was talking to the new contractor Jonathan. On his desk was a tiled coaster featuring the illustration of one of my favorite artists, Jenna Colby.

Jenna works on different media: paintings, crafts, sculptures, toys, wearable… A child-like character lives in the world of Jenna’s arts. The character has a Zen-ish quality as she encountering other creatures or lost in her own thoughts.

Perhaps it’s the character’s insect looking profile, her unreadable expression, or Jenna’s painting styles that blur our perceptions between illustration and watercolors, there is a subtle eeriness that tuned down the cuteness and brought serenity to it.

I made a little happy noise and told Jonathan how much I like her works. Jonathan told me he became friend with the artist and ended up with bunch of her coasters. The next day, he brought a pile of coasters in and let me pick one to keep.

This is the best gift I have received from fellow colleagues. Yellow sticky notes were my coasters since I started at BFG. Jenna coaster has definitely added a splash of colors to my monochromatically black office desk.

Friday morning, little pass 10:30am. Quickly I finished replying work emails and walked through some tasks with our intern. Then like a gust of wind, I ran off to the bus tunnel to catch the 73 express. My destination: University of Washington campus.

Not until I was in the bus speeding on I-5 northbound, I realized it has being exactly 10 years since I last ended my school life.

I didn’t expect I’d go back to school. For years, I believed the real learning came from working in the field. I stand correctly. But overtimes, new attitudes and methodologies are merging and shaping the world of web based design. The more I exposed myself to the new design principles, the more I felt that acquiring such knowledge through job force were limiting and difficult to come by. Everybody is talking about it, but nobody has the absolute answers.

So I applied to the User-Centered Design certification program in University of Washington, going back to the good old academic learning. To make sure I can handle school and work at the same time, I took only 1 weekly course this quarter. The course, “Seminar in Technical Communication”, will invite speakers from various technology fields to talk about their experiences in applying user-centered design process to actual software development.

After the lecture, I took advantage of the nice weather and walked my way out of the campus. I’m enjoying every bit of this is because this is so out of what I’m accustomed to between working and being a home buddy.

Heard something rather depressing today. In a meeting, a project manager asked to hire several production artists, one of the top executives went “Isn’t that what Janet and Copper are doing?”

Seriously, that sucks. I learn to live with family and friends’ blank look when I explain what I do, or “The PhotoShop go-to gal” remark. But when it’s the people whom don’t have the slightest idea what they are paying me for, now I’m really depressed.

What is a UI designer to do to get some respects? Hanging on my cubical wall are 5 on going project wireframes, black & white printouts of lines and notations. Back to back in my outlook calendar are meeting requests for upcoming usability testing.

I populate internal wiki with competitors’ UI analysis. I study leading online application trends and design patterns. I work with pm on features specs and infrastructures. Then prepare style guide, mockups and documentations for development team.

My current reading is O’Reilly’s “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”; the next lineup is “Killer Web Content” by Gerry McGovern. And by the way, I’m enrolled in the UW’s User Centered Design graduate program starting January.

So which part of what I do qualified me a production artist?

At today’s weekly artists lunch, game studio artist Jeff showed us some amazing things you have do with Photoshop’s brush feature.

He demonstrated turning photographed brushes and flower into brush tips, then create naturalistic scene by setting depth, size and color variations.

Itching to try out this new technique, I threw together this quick practice piece. I’m still far from proficient with customized brush.

Patterns Library
Welie.com specializes in patterns in interaction design, their patterns library cover a wide range of patterns common to current online interaction interface
http://www.welie.com/patterns/

Apple Human Interface Guidelines
From design process, characteristics of a successful software, to user experience with Apple products, this is the designer must-read of UI design.
Link to Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Last month there was an unofficial contest between designers to come up with a sweatshirt design for employees that are going to a 7-day company paid Alaska cruise.

We don’t get to do lots of print projects these days, not to mention something as cool as wearable. I had even more incentives because I was going to the trip and naturally I wanted my sweatshirt to look GOOD.

Narisa and I had a brief brainstorming and came up with 3 design concepts. First design was vintage travel posters inspired, illustration of traditional woodprint line art style featuring Alaska snowy mountains and forest scene on the backdrop, and our company mascot Felix at foreground.

Second one was spine off of the classic “I LOVE NY”, with love appears the shape of heart.

The third one is Tiki party drink. The design is a Mai Tai cup with a little cocktail umbrella hanging off the top. Where Tiki god face on the cup is replaced with Felix. Sounded corny? It’s actually my favorite concept of the 3 and I had most fun with it.

Tiki cup theme was designers’ favorite but the decision maker thought otherwise. The direction was to incorporating “I LOVE Alaska” tagline with the poster style Alaskan mountain View.

I was a little disappointed my top choice didn’t get pick, but the alternative was not so bad either.

Because the complicity of the vector arts to make up the scenic portion of the graphic, the screen printing shop asked me to separate the 2-color and send it to them as 2 separate files. Damn it, I thought that was supposed to be there job!

During the cruise trip, many of us, including myself got complimented from other passengers of our hoodies. I was even stop by a store clerk at Ketchikan, asking me where I got my hoodie. After telling her this is just company gift to employees, she said we should totally sell it online. She was very certain it’s going to do well. And to thank me for my involvement in this project, I got a $100 gift card to local fancy restaurant Wild Ginger.

All in all, the sweatshirt project turned out good.