BlaringSmelly

On Wednesday’s TC511 Visual Media, instructor Tom brought a case of wines to the classroom. This is the final week for this quarter.

For me it was a hefty 10 weeks of classes, readings, assignments, and presentations. I got a lot out of the class, It’s time well worth spending. But it became such a big part of my life I felt I hardly have time for fun anymore. So despite an excellent course will be taught this summer quarter, I decided to take a break from school. Summer is too short in Seattle. I feel I owe it to myself to slack a bit during my favorite time of the year.

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?

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

http://prismgirl.org/contents.html

Gorgeous gorgeous site, but so hard to navigate. As I’m currently involved in website architecture and usability at work, I am increasingly bugged by ‘designer’ sites that hide or have no obvious navigation menu.

What’s the value of a website that can’t be browsed with ease? Users can’t get to the stunning graphics, the rocking animation, breathtaking photography… then what’s the point making them available online? It is hardly ‘available’ if one can’t get to it.

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php

This is an excellent resource of development terminologies and solutions to common user interface problems (known as Pattern).