Category: randomness

Giant Conf Day 1 Take-Aways: Skillsets of a designer and Designing for Experience and Memory

Recapping a couple of things that stuck with me from the 1st day of the Giant UX Conference.  While there’s was a lot of content to cover, it’s always interesting what was sticky and catches my attention the next morning. The presentation by Patrick Neehman on “hunting unicorns: what makes an effective UX professional” got my head spinning a bit. Having had the experience of growing a design team from scratch, a lot of what Patrick resonated. Especially him identifying the lack of definition around our profession. Specialist vs. Generalist I’ve mentioned before that we hire generalists, not specialists. Patrick’s talk confirmed: UX is […]

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Agile Design: Crafting a User Experience Collaboratively

       

The collaboration between a front-end developer and talented designer is how amazing user experiences get built and refined. Our team does periodic design reviews here at SPARC to review design quality and discuss the design process – what’s working well and what can be changed. Lisa and Harrison are both extremely talented team members on different ends of the design spectrum. Lisa’s crafts beautiful UI & can take a client’s brand and make it sing. While Harrison is a front end guru who helps translate Lisa’s ideas into a User Experience. They’ve worked several commercial projects together and have arrived […]

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Always be creating value – Or my evolving role as design director in a start-up.

        

I have the best, and scariest, job in the world. When I’m doing my job right, everyone else is busy and I have nothing to do. And this isn’t to say there’s nothing to be done, I just haven’t discovered the next design project yet. My job is to insure everyone else is productive & happy, before I worry about myself. My job is to put my self out of a job. And then repeat that process over and over again. As we approach the holiday season, there’s a lot of change in our office. Like physically: we’re moving furniture to accommodate another 60 friends. And […]

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Basecamp archeology

  

So we use basecamp A LOT or internal design communication, and cataloguing the random ideas that make life amazing. We use basecamp so much we’ve created around 212 projects in a little over 24 months. A few of the better basecamp projects include titles such as: Brad’s really bad Venture ideas Captains log DayCareForSmartPeople.com Sparc Skunkworks #EvenYourKidsThinkYourDumb Had a co-worker heading out to my old stomping ground of the South Bay of Los Angeles. Decided to make him a checklist in Basecamp of bars to visit. I give you “Where should Andrew drink in LA“. Hermosa Beach – best bet. […]

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Follow up on the “Agile Design” post

We re-posted a few thoughts I had on the Agile Design to our mothership blog on sparcedge.com and it attracted some interesting comments on reddit. Got me thinking a little more about the intent of what I was writing and any confusion it may have caused. Probably would have been a better idea to approach the subject in a series of smaller more focused posts, but fuck it, I don’t have that kind of foresight. These were a few comments that really got me thinking: RE: What is this Agile Design you speak of? “Agile Design” is a design process tailored to work closely with developers […]

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Digging out of my own artistic mess!

  

There are few breaks in life as a parent, but i’m currently enjoying a short one as Heidi & Naish are up North in the wilds of Minnesota. Since’s Naish birth, my home office (studio?) has become a dumping ground of bills, broken electronics, unread magazines, and anything else that comes along. While it’s gathered a very nice “patina” of artistic clutter, it’s also just becoming an unworkable, disorganized craphole. So much so, that my 5AM wake-ups to “work” usually just involve trying to find space to put a cup of coffee down.

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Giant UX Conference recap: thinking about the “whole” user experience

Rolling through the final day of Giant UX conference here in Charleston as I began to think about what I’d take away from it. It’s been a great experience meeting new people and filling my brain with what I hope to be some actionable new ideas. So much saturation, what would stick. Maybe it’s because so many speakers oriented themselves to speak about not just design, but experience design. There were several folks, including Jared M. Spool & Samantha Starmer, who hit on this specifically. Jared used references about how the apple store is a vital part of the UX of an Apple […]

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Using Keynote during your design process

     

Using keynote as an organizer for your thoughts during the design process: Create an outline or screen inventory towards the story I’d like to tell. As I’m working through the wireframes, I’ll record my thoughts as bullets into the keynote Formatting your thoughts – keep it simple, go high level then break out specific UI elements. Most importantly – always be ready to present your ideas, at any stage in the process. Formalizing designs in a presentation has it’s advantages: Keeps you focused Keeps the audience focused Is portable – can be emailed later w/out lengthy explanation Is progressive – […]

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The career of a modern designer.

      

Sitting in a kick-off meeting, little tedious, sometimes steals your energy. Simultaneously reading email, IMing, listening to the client, giving feedback. Occasionally thinking how lucky I am to be in this room, in this conversation, & what/who we’re designing the software we’re creating. Don Draper now builds software for a living. Clicking through the email subscriptions and discovering a conversation about why they’re doing software vs. advertising. nice. These are the small points of validation when you think your life/career works more like a series of winding rivers, and less like a decision. http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025950/why-i-left-advertising-to-become-a-software-designer There are some great gems in […]

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Creating an “Architecture of Participation”

      

This past Thursday I was fortunate to hear Bill Taylor of Fast Company speak at the Charleston Chamber of Commerce annual event. There were a lot of components to his talk that sounded like the culture we’ve created Sparc. The phrase that caught my attention was the “Architecture of Participation“. There have been many times that I’ve thought of gathering the right people in a room as being an “architect” of people. My friend Taylor seems to be an expert at that. Or when my developer buddy Josh “architects” a solution by knowing what technologies play well together & essentially […]

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