thirtyonethree

Yesterday I read an article by John Dilsworth on NorthTemple. The article came about as John considered the question, “what is the one skill that can make the most positive impact in your profession?” John breaks down the work that designers are called to do into 3 categories

• understanding
• identifying
• crafting

He goes on to talk about the work that must be done under those categories and then lists some skills a designer must have and sharpen to be successful in that work. He also lists some specific skills that a Web site designer or interaction designer must have. It is a good list to check and determine where growth needs to occur.

Thanks to Cameron Moll’s Premium linkage for bringing this article to my attention.

Here are some memorable points from Dan Rubin and Bryan Veloso’s talk, Design is in the Details from Webmaster Jam 2007, get MP3 of talk from RSS feed. I listened to this talk over my Christmas vacation. I listened to it again this morning. I had immediately applied several of the things they talked about to my personal site and have integrated into my design process.

• Let your layout breathe - CNN.com is a great example
• Consistency of spacing or use multiple scale
• Use range kerning in headlines (with larger font size)
• No hanging widows - Shaun Inman’s Widot plugin
• Alignment - aligning elements can make a huge difference
• Black is not black and white is not white - consider using #333 or #CCC instead of default black and white
• Flat is boring - create some depth
• Adding a pixel to add interest - as one border (they used example of Mint’s dashboard)
• Know when to quit

I found out about this site today, Internet Archive. It archives the code so if you no longer have the images in on your domain, then you will not be able to get a full page archive. It is an interesting idea. I found out about the site in a discussion with my team leader about archiving our company history.

Here is the site’s description:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

I was a freshman 20 years ago when Danny Manning and the Hawks last won the championship. It was a great game and what a last second shot by Mario Chalmers. This year was an exciting run. It feels great to be a Jayhawk.

One of my interests of late has been to learn the fundamentals of design. I was really challenged by this after doing an all day seminar with Luke W at UI12 in November. Here are some of the resources that have been helpful to me:

• Site Seeing - Luke W’s book that covers much of the content of the one day seminar I attended. One of the things I got out of it was thinking about hierarchy on a page. Thinking through the hierarchy of content and then coming up with a visual organization on the page to support that message. I also liked the idea of thinking of design in terms of visual organization and personality (often what we call look and feel). I have been challenged to consider visual organization first and then to come up with a personality for the site that enhances that organization and the message that site is trying to communicate.
• Principles of Design series on Design Meltdown - I liked the use of examples from other Web sites that supported the principles discussed in these articles.
• Exploring the Elements of Design - I saw this in a Border’s bookstore in Boston while attending UI12. I have enjoyed going through this book. It is filled with lots of examples mostly from the graphic design realm.
• Universal Principles of Design - This is a book that Andy Rutledge suggested to me. I am looking forward to reading it. It contains short chapters on different design such as 80/20 rule, Fitt’s Law and Gutenberg Diagram.
• Principles of Design, Elements of Design, Designing for the Web, and The Principles and Elements of Design articles on Digital Web - good primer articles to get familiar with the principles and elements of design. This was the article that I first read and then wanted to go deeper.
• Contrast and Meaning - Article by Andy Rutledge