Recently in Design Category
I recently had a great opportunity to work with the brilliant minds behind Help Remedies - who have created some beautifully designed healthcare products. T&E of LittleFury did the branding/identity and packaging.
My little contribution to all this can be found in the bored section of Help's website - where I created a handful of pieces of what can best be described as fun.
Really looking forward to seeing more from Help, and can't wait to find some of their products in my medicine cabinet (or displaying them on my shelf to impress visitors - they're that good looking!).
I'll be going to a few interesting events in the next two months:
April 26 GoRuCo (Gotham Ruby Conference)
from the site: "A technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers interested in all things Ruby."
April 30 Visualization Day at CUNY
This looks really interesting, with presentations by Ben Schneiderman and other HCI & Visualization notables. The conference is free, which is always a plus.
May 12 - 14 Where2.0 in Burlingame, CA
I've been wanting to go to this conference for a couple years. Always a great line-up of speakers and lots of interesting people and projects. This year's Where2.0 should be excellent - with all the LBS apps and platforms that are launching.
May 17 Smart/Models (AIGA/NY Biz Conf)
AIGA/NY has put together a great looking conf featuring a diverse group of designers and producers discussing... the biz. I'm especially looking forward to Jason Fried's talk on 37signals' approach. There has been a lot of talk about new business models in the creative space, and this looks to be a great round-up of some super intelligent people with highly innovative ideas and methods.
IxDA put on a great panel event last night on Sustainable Interactions. ITP's Tom Igoe and Core77's Allan Chochinov stole the show, pushing some difficult concepts and posing difficult questions to the rest of the panel, and the community.
Highlights in bulleted form:
- Sustainable design is stupid.
- Design is political.
- Interventions.
- Sick Building Syndrome.
- "Global warming is not trying to kill us... and that's a shame."
- Keeping track. (a la Bruce Sterling's spime
- Artifacts vs. Programmes.
Sustainability is (if not recognized directly) an issue within the field of interaction design - from physical to digital to behavioral.
I've got tons of thinking to do, and some potential projects to work out. All in all a good night.
I've renamed my ITP thesis project Polarizr... since PolarWeb just sounds... stupid. The website and Firefox extension will be made public [well, it will be in exclusive, invite-only alpha] this weekend.
I've been working on a couple link visualizations for the browsing history network dashboard section/functionality... here's a sneak peak:
I'm not sure if the original PolarFox extension will be ready by next Wednesday May the 3rd (Has my 2 years at ITP gone by this fast? Crazy), though I will continue development [albeit slowly, gotta pay rent].
Check out the slides for my final Thesis Class presentation [with Nick Law].
Mog is a web-based social app for sharing musical tastes. Think Last.FM, MySpace, community blog, blah blah blah. Honestly, I don't like it at all. Why? Stupid name, Bad user interface, lackluster and unintuitive profiling, and really, not a robust or substantial enough concept.
After registering, the first thing a new user sees is a god-aweful group of blocks. Like the old New York Times, but poorly designed, with no reason behind the placement I could see. A good many of the blocks seemed like filler, and the entire concept hedges on the downloaded player. The attempt at transparent interfaces (hollar at you AJAX) is crap, not at all what it could be.
Registering was as far as I got. Is as far as I will ever go. The greatest thing about Mog, for my intents and purposes, is that the whole mess provides a bad example... A positive negative. WRNYC will not be like this. I promise.
Its good to see that some people are thinking critically about web 2.0 technologies, namely AJAX. ThinkVitamin throws up a good read on the pitfalls presented by irresponsible use of AJAX.
Little Flash ad I did for Match Fine Print
