Posts Tagged ‘work’

Verdana_Arial
A minor victory at work had made me a happy designer. During a demo run, I noticed the newly implemented feature still appeared in Verdana. Many moons again a request was made to have Verdana replaced with Arial. The engineer assured the font couldn’t be Verdana because the code is new. She said the smaller font size might have me mistaken it to be a different font.

I was not convinced. But I didn’t continue this discussion so we can proceed with the demo. After all the sprint tasks were demonstrated, we returned to the same screen. I brought up the font issue again. I half jokingly asked the engineers to humor me by proofing me wrong. I’ll shut up when I see the code is indeed Arial.

Engineers were happy to take on that challenge. We went back to their desk and started checking the code. There were hundreds of inline CSS to go through and it was hard to pinpoint to the right one. One of the engineers suggested nesting the font style in the top-level code then run the program again. As I have suspected, the font used was not Arial. The engineers finally agreed.

090225 fortune cookies!!

Back to work after the Mexico trip, I was greeted by 6 oversize bags of fortune cookies and a giant fortune. At first I thought those were tortilla chips. When I realized they were just flat fortune cookies. I started cracking up. I knew exactly why my desk was pimped by fortune cookies not tortillas.

2 days prior to my vacation, I went to a workshop in Portland, OR. Narisa, Gina, John and I took the train from Seattle to Portland. I bought a box of fortune cookies for everyone to snack on. But that night I started munch on the fortune cookies and finished most of them by myself. I confessed my terrible crime to my fellow train-mates. But who can resist the thrill of finding different fortunes inside each fortune cookie?

090225 toys and cookies

Thanks to that trip to Portland, now I have fortune cookies pouring out of my drawers, coffee mug, among my toys, even in my Kleenex box (I get a nice scent of fortune cookie when I blow my nose). The fortunes were just hilarious. Us designers repeatedly getting “Look for new outlets for your own creative abilities”, while our PMs were getting fortunes said “It would be wise to cut expectations in half.”

090225 fortune

Shortly after Erich reported his company’s legendary 9-hour all-staff meeting marathon, the company I work for scheduled Tuesday our first quarterly meeting of the year. We were promised food (the unhealthy kind), drinks (2 alcoholic ones and unlimited soda and water), and 2-hour free play at Game Works.

The real meeting was kept under 2 hour. We were (or at least I was) entertained by customer story shared by support team, hat tossing to new employees, cash and reward giveaways, short video montage of popular games from studio and people behind it.

Then Game Works time!

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:

office desk shot

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.