UI and the Rest

Raleigh, North Carolina, is stuck in the midst of a snow storm. By my standards this is not a snow storm but rather a minor irritation. But since everything is shut down I decided to create a new blog theme. I had a few hours to kill and it seemed like a good idea, actually it was. I popped open my favorite IDE and started writing CSS, in about an hour I had come up with a theme and the general look and feel; which is what you are looking at right now. I know there are a lot of little things left to do, there always is when creating a theme, but hey… there is always tomorrow since we are snowed in. Check out the before picture… (more…)

Posted: 30th January 2010

About a week ago I received a copy of The Smashing Book in the mail. I thumbed through it on the first day and it seemed that there was great information on each page. I decided to sit down and start reading the book from cover to cover. I am glad I did. After over 15 years of creating web sites and applications I thought I was pretty aware of most things web, boy was I wrong. The Smashing Book is a collection of articles written by designer/developers on topics ranging from layout to fonts; colors to site optimization; conversion rates to branding. This book has it all for the UX web professional. Could it be the new ‘Bible’ for UX developers?

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Posted: 30th January 2010

After a long hiatus from blogging, and a short vacation, I was finally able to catch up on some reading. So to kick off the new year here is a review on one of the books I just finished, The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.

The Laws of Simplicity is a concise summary of John Maeda’s thoughts on design. I found this book to be an awakening of subconscious design principles we already posses. It was not a text book explanation of esoteric theories from an academic. All of the authors ‘laws’ were related to real world observations and application. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is involved in product development of any type, and especially for those involved in software.

To quote the author’s mentor “Be a lightbulb not a laser beam.” Read the book and you’ll get an illuminated feeling and a better understanding of your own thoughts on design.

Posted: 13th January 2010