Fresh

SXSW Interactive is almost here, so those months of giddy nerd anticipation are almost over! Hooray! But wait, have you studied the schedule yet? Picked your top panels? Perused the party lists? Researched the must-try restaurants and food carts? No?  Well don’t panic yet, you still have a little time. And to help sort through all the madness I’ve compiled a list of tools and sites that are helping me do some pre-planning this year. As a mere SXSW Sophomore I’m far from an expert on the conference or on Austin, but hopefully this post will help you get organized a little bit.

Finding Promising Panels

Sometimes a panel or session that looks amazing based on its short description in the official SXSW handbook turns out to be, ehhhh, not so great.  And of course the one you decided NOT to go to was the must-see panel of the day.  Although you’re not going to pick winners every time, you can help yourself by doing a little research beforehand.

(more…)

I think you should go to this!  (Maybe I have a painting in this show.)

Outlook features 25 artists that graduated from Portland State University’s art department between 2005 and 2009. The show is being guest curated by Chicago art critic and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago James Yood.

Yood is also giving a free lecture (open to the public) “The Persistence of Place” Monday,  November 16, at 7:30 p.m. Learn more here.

Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 7th, 2009 6-9pm

Exhibition:
Thursday November 5, 2009-Friday, November 27th, 2009
Monday-Saturday 10-5

Where:
Autzen Gallery, Portland State University
2nd Floor, Neuberger Hall Room 205
724 SW Harrison ST, Portland, OR 97201

If you didn’t get a chance to check out Zach Johnsen’s Acid In The Ice Cream show, which was held at Backspace last December, he’s at it again but this time in his own studio!

Date:
October 24th, 09′

Time:
6pm-11pm

Where:
North Coast Seed Building
2127 N. Albina Ave.
Portland, OR 97227

I’ll let the visual aids do the rest…

He will also be celebrating the launch of his two new websites www.zenvironments.com & zachjohnsen.com so make sure to check it out!

To start, I must say that the people I am about to write about are very close friends and loved ones, and this may give me a biased journalistic angle. I am confident, however, that you will agree with me that they are noteworthy creative people, doing progressive and cool things.  I hope that this insight into their world inspires readers to subscribe to their blog, buy some of their wares, attend their event, go make something themselves, or better yet, all of the above.  I give you How We Develop and Content 09.

How We Develop is a collective of creatives based in Portland centered around their passion for fashion, Art, Design and creative exploration as a whole.  Clothing designer and seamstress Gretchen Jones, Jewelry designer Anna Korte, and graphic designer and illustrator Ada Mayer met through mutual friends, and began working together immediately in 2008.  Gretchen and Anna both enlisted Ada’s help with their respective identities, marketing efforts and web presence, and the alignment of their tastes and creative aspirations led to the birth of their blog, How We Develop in the summer of 2009.

(more…)

WEB Visions, a conference in Portland about everything web starts tomorrow. As part of the conference are the 2nd annual  Webvisionary awards and celebrates fantastic work from categories from motion graphics to blogs. This year two projects from the eROI team have been nominated and have made it to the finals. Our team of web ninjas will be in attendance with cameras in hand hoping for yet another reason to continue drinking.

(more…)

There’s a lot of information out there on the interweb – information about you, your business, your competitors, your favorite products, your friends, your cat, your cat’s friends, etc. etc. RSS feeds allow us to subscribe to streams of information from certain sources or on certain topics, but oftentimes our feed readers fill up with irrelevant information that we have to parse through to get to the good stuff.

Using Yahoo Pipes you can get practically any kind of information on the web, strip out the stuff you don’t want, reformat it in a way that’s easier for you to digest, and spit it out in a shiny new RSS feed suitable for your reader or maybe even your info aggregation website!  Sounds super awesome and easy right?

AHH! What the hell is all THAT?  Save me! Take me back to my regular feeds and never show me that mess of blue boxes and squiggly lines again!

OK, yea, I know it looks intimidating and confusing, but really, it’s not that bad.  If you start fresh and take things one step at a time you’ll be Piping up a storm in no time.

Meet Dawn Foster (fastwonderblog.com, Twitter: @geekygirldawn), RSS wrangler extraordinaire (among other things).  She has a full library of example Pipes and tutorial videos to get you started.  And if that’s not enough, she has just announced her first Introduction to Yahoo Pipes training course.  Here’s all the info you need:

What: Introduction to Yahoo Pipes

When: Thursday, May 7th, 3PM – 5PM

Where: Webtrends Classroom (851 SW 6th Ave, Suite 1600 | Portland, OR 97204)

How Much: Students/Freelancers/Unemployed: $100.  Early bird (before April 23): $150.  Late registration (after April 23): $250.

Prerequisites: You just need to set up your Yahoo Pipes account prior to the class (don’t worry, it’s free!).  If you have a Yahoo account already (and you do if you use Flickr), just go to pipes.yahoo.com and log in using your Yahoo credentials.  If you don’t already have a Yahoo account, go ahead and get one here.

Even if you already know a bit of Pipes, I have a feeling this would be a great class to get to know some of the more advanced features.  I know that I could personally use some tips and tricks from a power user.

One of the reasons I love web design is because there is so much opportunity to pull knowledge and inspiration from other disciplines. The SXSW panel “Playing on! Interface Lessons from Games” let me do that, and it dealt with video games, which are just fun. The general idea of the panel was:

“We know we will have succeeded when non-game interactions provide the same level of emotion, feedback, progress indication, innovative controls and social involvement that games supply.”

The points that really resonated with me the most were their discussion of “progress indication” and “social involvement” and how those apply to the work we do in web design.

(more…)

While at SXSW, I was bombarded with concepts, names, and countless tidbits of knowledge throughout the panels, presentations and keynotes I attended. Christina Wodtke gave an informative presentation on Information Architecture. UX Team of One presented by Leah Buley of Adaptive Path and Design for the Wisdom of Crowds with Derek Powazek were terrific presentations covered on Fresh here and here respectively. The topics that I enjoyed the most involved user experience design concepts, human computer interaction and how cognitive sciences influence it all.

Some of the most popular web applications exist to satisfy basic human needs. Organizing and sharing information. Symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships within groups. These are well researched patterns of human behavior. Technology is a chaotic, constantly evolving mess but behind all the innovation is our own innate desires that bring it all about. Where technology is fleeting, trendy, and a futile struggle with obsolescence, designing for human interaction with technology can be timeless. Interaction designers and developers are conduits for translating human behavior into effective uses of communications technology. In order to craft experiences that influence behavior we can employ aspects of psychology, anthropology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science.

(more…)

What are we even talking about?

Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On was a popular panel that discussed limitations of web typography, myths about web typography and how to dispel them, and talked about overcoming constraints on the web to create typographically beautiful websites.

What is all the fuss about fonts on the web?

The first question the panelists were asked was, “Why are designers still bitching about typography?” After the giggles subsided, the top reasons they gave were:

• frustration stemming from having such a limited palette of available fonts
• the complexity and consistency involved in getting your type to render as intended

Basically, type on the web can be a pain in the ass. There are a decent amount of web fonts, but not all are attractive (Papyrus, anyone?), sometimes you have to use the corporate font specified in a client’s brand guidelines, and regardless what you do, everything can still shift around. A user could increase their font size or have a different default font specified for their system and throw off your whole groove.

Are there solutions?

There are several. Many people make their fancy titles into images, which does work, but then you’re faced with how to keep that text on the page for SEO; others use an image-replacement method like SIFR, but that involves Flash and can get pretty tricky in terms of line-height and making sure it doesn’t do something funky with punctuation or line wrapping. The “new” thing on the scene is to try out @font-face.
(more…)

One of the best panels I saw at SXSW was “UX Team of One”, presented by Leah Buley of Adaptive Path. Buley delivered a fast paced, info-packed presentation on how to deliver kick-ass UX design with limited resources.  While a lot of panels at SXSW are more esoteric and high-level, “UX Team of One” was all about being in the trenches and getting design work done.  Throughout the whole talk I was furiously scribbling notes on practical tools and techniques for generating ideas quickly and efficiently.  But you won’t need to read my chicken scratch notes, she has all the resources, worksheets, slides and inspiration collected on her website.  Best of all you can see a video of her whole presentation, recorded by an audience member.  Sync it up with the Slideshare slides and it’ll feel like you were there.

(more…)