Every once in a while I come across something that makes me say “I would have loved to have had a hand in making that”. The new TRON teaser trailer is no exception.
Two words. Light Cycle
It’s easy to think of a web site in terms of the teams who participate in the project: content, design, information architecture, hardware, platform, application development. But it’s the user who ties all the parts together: the user experience is the end-product of a web application.
This is why people freak out about user experience design, or UxD, these days. We can define and justify and normalize everything we do during the course of a web project by referring to the user experience, and we can keep this experience in mind as a theoretical model to help us make decisions along the way. Read the rest of this entry »
The Helen Marie A-List is a video interview series, featuring creative thinkers who are using design and code to produce engaging experiences. We’ll shine the spotlight on artists and developers and everyone in between. The “A” in HMA-List does not stand for alpha or first but authentic.
Check back next month for a new installment.
Tucker Viemeister is Lab Chief, heading research and development at Rockwell Group. The Lab recently made an interactive introduction installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was a founder of Smart Design where he helped design the widely acclaimed OXO “GoodGrips” kitchen tools. He also was president of Springtime-USA, a partnership with the Dutch industrial design company, he helped to found Razorfish’s physical design capability and frogdesign’s New York office.
A graduate from Pratt Institute, Viemeister has worked for clients like Apple, Corning, Gap, J&J, Jet Blue, P&G, McDonald’s, Timex, Levi’s, Motorola, Vodaphone, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nike, Toyota, Viking, and Kate Spade. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Architectural League of New York, chair of the Rowena Reed Kostellow Fund, president of the International Design Network Foundation He was called “scruffy brand-meister” by the Architect’s Newspaper (2/06) and New York Magazine selected him as a “Living Design Innovator” (10/29/07). He teaches at NYU’s ITP, holds 32 US Utility Patents and was named after a car.
Back in the day, Drupal was for us a platform of necessity. There was a lot to dislike about it: no object architecture to speak of, patchy module support, enormous amounts of spaghetti sprawling through the hooks-based function names, a lot of messy UI, and a deep knowledge of magic words needed to theme an element or alter a behavior. And on the design side, there was this seemingly deep-set predilection towards boxy pages.
Then we really started using it. Then Drupal 6 dropped. Now, D6 is our development platform of choice, and our default platform for many kinds of projects. Here are a few types that range beyond the typical “site with managed content” category.
I met a writer the other night who has spent months freelancing for a prominent national magazine. The magazine had enjoyed a reasonably popular web audience, including a community of frequent posters to its bulletin board. The community was mostly middle-aged, middle-American women who used the magazine’s online space to chat and bring up issues that were loosely related to the magazine’s content.
It was an open question how best to take advantage of this community to benefit the magazine. But instead of starting with obvious questions — Who are these users? What do they care about? How can we increase their enthusiasm for our brand? — someone high up in the magazine’s interactive food chain had a classic technological panic. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s easy to forget that we work in a new and strange industry. We surround ourselves with ourselves, so we take the nature of our product for granted. But for the majority of web users, we create virtual products — they take up no space; their size, complexity, and location are indeterminate; they appear and disappear from the screen in an instant. So how to value their worth?
There is a vast matrix that exists in my mind (there are also other, emptier spaces of such magnitude that we dare not approach). The matrix maps functional requirements, content structures, and media assets against out-of-the-box Drupal functionality, popular and flexible modules, and theming methodologies.
This matrix exists in a Platonic form where all of the requirements and conditions map neatly to available functionality and structures. It’s only when I populate it with the real-world facts of a project that gaps emerge. Those gaps identify the responsibilities and data structures that we’ll need to delegate to our own modules. Once we group these by logical or functional affinity, we have our module strategy.
Update, April 2009: Change.gov seems to have changed their video player size, so the working example in this entry no longer has a strict correlation between the video player and the image replacement. The principle still holds, though, and it would be an easy fix to create a new replacement image using the naming conventions below. — msh
Happy 2009! OK, back to work.
Note to developers and designers: you still can’t layer HTML over Flash, and you still need to design around it. Sad, but true. For instance, this page on change.gov has the classic problem: a Flash video player at the top of the page, and a menu that draws a layer on rollover. The two are not friends.
What’s in a web page design, anyway? If you abstract away the colors, textures, imagery — all of the elements we call the “look and feel” — what’s left?
Mmm, boring list. That’s good, though: this should not be the exciting part. The exciting parts should be the purpose and content of the web site, and the look and feel that give it life — the struggle and the glory of web design. The elements in the list above should be the basic tools, not the wheels you’re going to reinvent in order to make your site the greatest thing ever to happen to the web.
Now, we at Helen Marie think the web is very cool. That’s why we’re in this business. We get excited on a daily basis about all manner of new design and interface ideas and technology. (Personally, I discover a new way to love jQuery almost every day, and that’s exciting.) It’s this constant fascination that energizes each one of our projects, and that we hope to find reflected in our clients.
Part of our job is to focus this enthusiasm into disciplined decisions about how best to serve a particular client and a particular project. We have a lot of healthy arguments that start with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” The question is often followed by, “I agree, but we shouldn’t do that in this case because….” Or, just as often: “That’s great — but let’s consider that for phase 2.”
We go through this in order to avoid three big pitfalls: building more than the client needs or can immediately use, rejecting new approaches or techniques because we’re unfamiliar, and committing to unreliable approaches or techniques because the coolness factor affects our judgment. We wrestle with these issues so you don’t have to.
