Friday, December 09, 2011

As the end of the year quickly approaches, it’s easy to feel run down and uninspired when it comes to design work and projects.  Doing work for clients is great, don’t get me wrong.  It pays the bills and it puts food on the table.  But nonstop client projects might put creativity into a rut. When looking at the new year and gearing up for new clients and new opportunities, don’t forget to look at yourself and your ideas for potential projects.

I’m excited to be working on great client work but I’ve found myself just as thrilled to be starting some personal projects that I’ve been mulling over for the past year (or so).  These are a little outside of my normal work and will be as challenging as anything I’ve ever worked on in the past, but I can’t wait to get them started and see what happens with them.  I’ll reveal more information closer to the individual launches, but until then remember to make time for yourself!

Posted on 12/09/11 at 02:03 PM by Tim - Categories: Design Tags:

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Friday, November 25, 2011

With any project, the design of the interface can make or break the usefulness of the final product.  During the process of laying out the project board, I was in a state of constant flux, adding elements, removing elements, adjusting their size and visual weight to find the right combination that worked.

Starting with Panic.
The seed for this project was planted, as mentioned before, when I read about the Panic Status Board.  This thing is amazing, and I’m still in awe of how beautiful, and more-importantly, how functional it is.  It was the benchmark.  I went to my drawing board with many ideas, possibly too many, flowing onto the paper.  Before long, I had a mess on my hands.  I didn’t like any of the ideas that I was coming up with.  I didn’t want to do a complete hack-job and rip off the Panic design.  I did (often) check back to their project board post and studied their images feverishly, comparing them to my sketches and wondering why solutions didn’t have the same impact.  It didn’t take me long to understand the reason.

I wasn’t focusing on what I needed, instead I was cramming the items that Panic had employed into my board, where they didn’t belong.  My needs for this board were simple, a quick view of my projects that were in progress and on the horizon.  Simple as that.  Back to the drawing board.

With a much clearer vision in place, I laid out the items that I needed and tossed the “wish-list” items onto the back burner.  The result was a clean solution that would give me the information I needed at a glance.  Just as planned.

The more things change.
After diving into the Photoshop layout and markup stage, I discovered more adjustments were needed so the look (once again) underwent another round (or two) of changes.  The flexibility of ExpressionEngine let me quickly make changes on the fly, review them and go on without wasting too much time.  Now that things were taking shape, it was time to fine-tune and refine.

Posted on 11/25/11 at 10:31 PM by Tim - Categories: Design Tools Tutorials User Interface Workflow Tags: Expression Engine, Project Board

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

With the launch of iTunes Match I’ve encountered one of the first Apple products/services that has truly baffled me.  It’s not the service itself that’s causing the confusion, rather the signals that it sends me.  First, a little background information.

All (or most) of your music in the cloud.
While it’s not the first cloud-based music service to hit the scene, iTunes Match is the one that makes the most sense to me (thanks to years of iTunes purchases coupled with a steadfast dislike to purchase multiple copies of music just to have them available on multiple devices).  Other offerings from Google and Amazon let you stream your music to your computer or mobile device for easy listening but they can take a while to upload content that wasn’t purchased through their services.

iTunes Match takes a slightly different approach where you can access not only your music purchased from Apple, but also any of the other music you might have added from other sources such as ripped CDs or Napst…eerrr…friends.  The difference comes in where Apple is only scanning your library and matching this music and granting you access to (usually) higher-quality version of music that you have in your library.  You can upload songs that aren’t available in iTunes which can mimic the storage-locker-style approach that both Amazon and Google have taken.

Say what?
Signup for this service is straightforward, I’ll admit that right now.  The confusion and mixed signals sets in after the matching process begins, and in some cases fails.  The error messages that Apple has implemented aren’t very “Apple-like”.  They’re confusing.  They don’t give the whole picture, or even a snapshot for that matter, of what the real issue is.  In addition to the cryptic error messages, Apple has brought new iCloud icons into play that, unless you have a legend for, you have no clue what they mean.  Thankfully Apple has shed a bit of light on this issue.

Issues and interface inconsistencies aside, I’m loving iTunes Match, though it keeps sending me mixed signals.

Quick Tip
The November 19 episode (#143) of We Have Communicators makes mention of a MacWorld article that explains an iTunes column sorting option that is extremely handy when dealing with iTunes Match music.

“One way to cut through the confusion is by turning on a new view option in iTunes. Choose View -> View Options and check the iCloud Status box. This will add a new column to your iTunes list detailing the status of every item in your library.”

- Jason Snell of MacWorld.com

A very handy tip indeed!

Posted on 11/23/11 at 11:28 PM by Tim - Categories: Apple Apps & Software Design Tutorials Tags: iCloud, Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player, itunes match

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Monday, November 21, 2011

When I set out to create an online project board powered by ExpressionEngine, I wasn’t sure how the project would turn out.  After seeing the setup that the guys at Panic created, I immediately lusted after it, but quickly realized that I didn’t need all of the bells and whistles that they were implementing.  My solution needed to encompass two main aspects.  It needed to be simple and it needed to be clean.

Before working on any of the interface elements I made sure this project had a solid foundation and would be able to give me the information I was looking for when I needed it.  As mentioned in my latest Thinking Out Loud post, preventing scope creep was important, but some additional items did find their way into the process.

Custom Fields are your friend.
The main reason I opted to build the project board with ExpressionEngine rather than creating my own front and backend system was the sheer power that’s under the hood of an EE system.  I can create a custom template, a custom input channel, and top it off with custom fields that will do exactly what need them to do.  In short, it’s the smart thing to do.

Making a list and checking it…many times.
After setting up the template and the channel for the project board, I needed to set up the fields that would make everything work.  After jotting down some initial ideas that I needed, I began thinking about this project down the road and had visions of where I could take it and what it could turn into.  The result was a list of entry fields that go beyond what a project board needs, but laying this ground work in the beginning will make expanding the functionality easier in the future.

Power and flexibility.
I’ve never paid too much attention to the Custom Field possibilities that ExpressionEngine offered until I began working on this project.  Once I started looking around, I was shocked at the variety of field-types I could choose from.  I had wanted a dynamic, JavaScript-driven date box to handle my project Start and Due dates, figuring I’d need to either build one myself or find a suitable option through searching.  No need.  One of the field types is a calendar-style date selector.  Here’s a brief list of other custom field-types:

• Text Input
• Textarea
• Checkboxes
• Radio Buttons
• Multi Select
• Date
• File
• Relationship

There are some additional field-types that become available when you install select plugins and modules.

Posted on 11/21/11 at 08:35 AM by Tim - Categories: Design Tools Tutorials User Experience User Interface Workflow Tags: Expression Engine, Project manager, Project Board

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Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Does this sound familiar: you’re working on a project and discovering many new additions or even new projects that could be built off-of or from it?  I’ve encountered this experience on many past projects and the most-recent instance made me take a few items into consideration.

Posted on 11/16/11 at 11:37 PM by Tim - Categories: Podcast Thinking Out Loud Tags: Project manager, Scope creep

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