“Forcing yourself to do something you hate, so you come up with something you’d rather be doing.”

On Inspiration:
- Surround yourself with creativity
- Cut out distractions
- Nature
- Get away from the computer
- Try unknown applications
- Nostalgia

On Strategies:
- Don’t restrict the flow of ideas (quantity– make lots of ideas!)
- Make it look cool
- Don’t present the client with more than one comp

On Uniqueness (wheaties):
-  Be fearless
- Listen well
- Collaborate well
- Understand clients
- Have principles

Things to keep in mind about tablets:
- Context is important
- Very portable, so location is important
- What content is used?
- Keep in mind where a user’s thumbs are when holding a device

Skeuomorphic Design:
- Animations and transitions are very important!
- Ergonomics
- Interaction proximity

Check out:
- teknision.com
- Julian Dolce 
- Scott McCloud

What makes a great UX (User Experience) designer? (i.e. How not to be a board monkey)

1) Passion
- Love what you do
- What gets you up in the morning?
- Do you have pursuits outside of the office?

2) Mental Quickness
- Speed chess (sometimes in interviews!)
- Manipulating interactions to create opportunities to act
- 3 steps ahead

3) Creative Vision
- Don’t hide or make excuses

4) Strategic Acumen
- Understanding business realities
- Defending design choices
- Client-facing readiness
- Be able to sum things up in a sentence

5) The Fundamentals
- Communicating vision
- ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ challenge
- Portfolio
- Not having to think about the basics

6) Attention to Detail
- Visual polish
- Spelling mistakes?
- Giving more than is asked for

7) Zoom Control
- Being able to see both the worm’s eye AND the bird’s eye view
- No tunnel vision

8 ) Comfort in Numbers
- Knowledge of analytics
- Knowledge of past clients, project performance
- Education

9) Translation Skills
- Talking to designers, developers, marketers, etc…
- Keeping a reading list / blogroll (good idea to make this public)
- Having a background in other fields

10) Awareness and Inspiration
- Ability to abstract ideas
- Ability to communicate

11) Platform Jumping
- Understanding nuances
- Pushing platforms’ capabilities
- No dead ends

12) Lessons Learned
- Know biggest failures and what the response was
- Intangible knowledge
- Learn from mistakes

13) People Skills
- Would you want to go drinking with this person?
- Know the line
- Making other people look good

Check out:
- epicmix.com 

General Tips:
- Use your “other skills”
- Execute well to distinguish yourself
- Delight and surprise your users
- Determine your personal goals, write them out, and post them where you can see them
- Work towards your goal every day
- Work on projects you enjoy and which excite you

1) Tips for developing mobile apps:
- When drawing with OpenGL, use a sprite map (Atlas)
- If you want to make a paid app, release it for iOS, not Android
- Keep updating the app– make it as good as it can be
- Don’t get a publisher!

- Pricing:

• $0.99 is recommended due to increased volume of downloads and to reach as many people as possible, but…
• Free is empowering– it gets you a user base
• Don’t release your “lite” version right away, wait until you work out the kinks
• Make the free app better than the paid app

- Marketing:

• External social (hype outside the app– FB, Twitter, etc.)
• Internal social (using social media in your app)

- The App Store:

• App Store factors are not actually random
• Every great app will eventually be featured
• Take advantage of being featured
• Make a product that users will review favourably
• Keep file size under 20mb!

Look up:
- Cocos2D (iPhone API in Flash)
- Tiny Wings 

What is UbiComp? (Ubiquitous Computing)
- The internet of things
- Smart spaces
- Pervasive computing
- Devices talking to each other in context
- Shaping services and objects
- [Examples include: Arduino-driven objects, RFID, QR codes, proximity sensors, etc.]

1) UbiComp is small
- Physically small, small footprint, small investment

2) UbiComp is cheap
- Monetarily speaking
- Easily damaged but doesn’t matter

3) UbiComp is simple
- Intuitive, and with limited functionality

Look up:
- pachube.com 

Why marketing?
1) To attract clients and talent you want
2) To shape your image
3) To create a following of ambassadors who will promote your product spontaneously

• Word of mouth
• Social media

Make a Plan
1) Define what you want to do (objectives). Be specific! Use dates!
2) Who is your target audience? What industries are they in? Don’t target other designers!
3) What is the message you want to convey to the market about how you can help them?
4) Which tools are clients using to get their information about their industry? What are they reading/watching?
5) Fill in the blanks: I can spend ____hrs/week and $____ /month on marketing
6) Make an action plan of steps over time and put it on your calendar

Tools to Use (pick and choose, you don’t need all of them)
- Make friends with journalists
- Give away work for free
- Use social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (recommendations! and groups))
- Make a lab– share your tinkering, it shows creativity in our free time
- Show your personality– make friends with or “friend” your clients
- Make your work wearable (i.e. Threadless)
- Write!!

• Start a blog (only write about what you know about though)
• Every project should have a press release

- Build an app
- Make leave-behinds (cards, postcards, merch, etc.)– make them memorable!

Additional Tips
- Encourage participation
- Provide useful content
- Remove the bullshit (no salespeak)
- Be consistent
- Listen to feedback
- Be humble
- Be fun!

Look up: (same deal as before, these are notes I made about people/companies/projects to look up later. Red means I have looked it up already, green means I haven’t)
- Mark and Phil (company) 
- Facebook ad system (for knowledge)
- Icon Buffet
- Common Craft
- The Barbarian Group
- Cinder
- helpareporterout.com
- Scott Stratten (@unmarketing)
- Rule29 (facebook)
- Brian Reich
- hasthebest.com
- Carrot Creative
- RDQLUS
- Viget Labs
- Why Businesspeople Speak Like Idiots 

What is the “Abundance”?
- The availability of information
- Cheap computing
- Open source
- Merging of art, technology, science
- 24/7 collaboration

How do you harness this abundance in your project?
1) Define goals and parameters (be as specific as possible) of your idea to get a certain direction.

2) Start with what you already know. You are not limited by tools.

3) Search is the ultimate tool.

4) Use open source software– it lets you see how other people solve problems, and is modifiable for your own needs

5) Be language agnostic. [For the non-developers-- design for the largest possible audience and don't lock yourself into proprietary programming languages and applications]

6) Prototype your ideas first.

7) Be part of a community. Make connections– inspiration can come from anywhere! Be active in these communities as well.

8) Just start.

9) Get in a state of flow.

Companies/people/projects I marked to look up (red means not looked up yet, green means it has been)
- Johnny Chung Lee and the Wiimote Whiteboard
- Obscura Digital
- Peter Root and Ephimicropous (sp?)
- Sunflo(w?)– a Processing sketch
- Evan Roth -> Graffiti analysis

Current Portfolio Layout (as of February 12)

If you’re not the least bit interested in web design and development, you can probably skip this post. It’s basically going to be a jumping point for the redesign of my portfolio site (the main site on this domain).

So, it’s that time of the year again– the time where I start applying for jobs and spending hours writing cover letters and tweaking my resume (this may change too… more on that later). Although there are some interesting prospects on the horizon already, one major step for any multimedia student applying for jobs is to re-do or revamp their portfolio for submission. Last year, I was actually late (I re-did my site while I was employed at the time, not before getting the job), but it ended up not mattering too much for that job anyway. This year, if I want any sort of design or multimedia job which is actually relevant to my program, the renovation of my portfolio is of the utmost importance.

Now, web standards have been changing a LOT over the last few years. HTML5 finally appeared, jQuery has become commonplace, the CCS3 spec has been steadily advancing towards full cross-browser adoption, mobile internet devices have taken over the world, social media is everywhere. So what does this mean for my redesign? It means I have to finally change my method of working on websites. It was all nice and easy when most people had 1024×768 desktop or laptop computers on which they did most of their internet browsing. Nowadays, if your website takes longer than 2.1 seconds to load completely on an iPhone’s tiny display, you’re screwed (I made that number up, by the way). So, keeping this in mind, here are the problems with my current website:

1. Horizontal scrolling below 800px. This is especially annoying when I’ve “snapped” my window to the left or right on my Windows 7 laptop, and have to scroll sideways. For years, and perhaps even decades, one of the top rules of web design has always been- “never make your visitor scroll sideways!” Not only is it annoying, but the layout also breaks rather badly when one does scroll sideways. Whoops.

2. Plain. There’s no personality in the design, really. There’s plenty of personality in the content, because I tried for that deliberately, but for some reason, the design looks very uninspired. Mind you, it is quite nice and neat and clean, but it can be those without being bland.

3. No mobile optimization. This is a direct result of my not owning a smartphone, but that’s really no excuse. Now that it is fairly easy to customize one’s layout for mobile devices and netbooks, there’s no reason I can’t do that and save people a lot of scrolling on mobile devices.

4. Weird PHP page structure. I do try and minimize my URLs as much as possible, but they are neither memorable nor nicely linked.

5. Social media “dabbling”. I have links to my LinkedIn, Flickr, etc., but they are afterthoughts, not design features.

6. Layout disconnect between the main site and the blog (this site). They don’t even look like they belong to the same person.

7. No room for additional information about my bigger projects (or ones I am very proud of).

I’m sure there’s more, but this is what’s currently coming to mind. How am I going to fix these in the redesign? Like this:

- Main layout and navigation 650px or less (or whatever doesn’t make me scroll sideways when I’ve got my window “snapped”)
- Better design– more colour, better typography, no more Courier New as a body font– but still preserving the simplicity and clarity
- Mobile stylesheet(s)
- URL rewriting to make them shorter and memorable **I just tried this out on the existing site, and it worked! Excellent
- Feeds from one or more social media sources (I’m thinking Flickr)– or at least, have them featured more prominently
- Redesign of the blog layout to match the portfolio layout
- “Featured Projects” section or area

This is what I’d like to accomplish. I know that given enough time, I can make it work– the key is, can I make it work given that I really don’t have much time at all? We’ll see.

Three words: They Are Awesome. What I really like about them specifically is/are the following:

1. Attitude: Their attitude towards customers and customer service is great. They project a casual, approachable, informal-yet-friendly feel, and they even occasionally manage some well-placed and funny humour. Their business card creation process is intuitive, simple, and streamlined to work well with both experienced users and beginners.

2. Quality: Moo really commits themselves to provide a quality product and experience. Their card quality is excellent, printing quality is fantastic (and for the non-designers, you are not required to worry about things like CMYK or DPI unless you are uploading your own designs… and in that case, you probably know something about it anyway). Shipping is cheap and fast (even to Canada), and they keep you updated on the status of your order throughout (via Little Moo, the print robot ).

3. Price: Of course, the clincher. Including shipping, environmentally-friendly cardstock (which is extra), and a 50-set of full-color, double-sided business cards, my total order price was around $33 CAN. EXTREMELY reasonable, especially considering I paid pretty much that same amount last year for utterly sub-par business cards (see last post for the story). Simply amazing. By the way, if anyone has been convinced that Moo is the right choice for their next set of business cards, I have a 15% off coupon for you (which I can’t use) if you buy a 50-set of business cards. Oh, and did I mention that you can pay using Paypal? Automatic +25 points in their favour .

4. Customer Service: I submitted a question about referral programs to them through the form on their website, and got a friendly and helpful response within 10 minutes. Now that’s customer service!

So that is it. My love of Moo knows no bounds. Use them if you need cards of any type. As a graphic designer, I approve wholeheartedly.