Todays WACOM winner: John Bruce

John - make sure that you come visit us at the Electric Avenue, you must collect this prize during the event.

Congratulations!

Electric Avenue...

...on the fifth floor of the Venetioan, is where you can find the screenedit film crew. We're the guys with the camera.

Please connect with us and give us a short interview, remember - one lucky participant will win a WACOM tablet every day!

Interview with Andy Clarke...

Click here to see our interview with Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design consultancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and creative director, his clients include local and national businesses, charities and government bodies and he has designed for The British Heart Foundation, Disney Store UK, Save The Children and WWF UK.

Andy is a member of the Web Standards Project where he redesigned the organization\'d5s web site in 2006. He is also an Invited Expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group. Andy regularly educates web designers on how to create beautiful, accessible web sites and he speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide. Andy also managed to find time in 2006 to write a critically acclaimed book, Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.

Screenedit @ MIX:

This week we're in Las Vegas at Microsoft's MIX 07 event, we will be talking to the key players about interaction design, including most of Microsoft's User Experience Evangelists. We will also be gathering feedback and reaction from attendees, we're looking forward to seeing if the event lives up to the hype!

Competition:

If you've managed to get your hands on a ticket, please come and find us. We are filming interviews across the 3 days, and looking for potential stars! We have lots of swag to give away, anybody who goes in front of the camera will be entered into a prize draw and each day we will be giving away a fantastic WACOM tablet, thanks to the Expression team ;-)

Winners will be anounced on this blog at the end of each day.

Watch this space and we'll post our location so that you can find us!

More to follow...

Joshua Hirsch and Nike Air... ...plus more reaction from FOWD.

We are really pleased that Joshua Hirsch managed to speak to us at the FOWD event, you can see his interview here, if you haven't already checked out our homepage.

Josh is responsible for the Nike Air site, check it out in the exposure gallery. It is an awesome site and really demonstrates what Flash is capable of, in the right hands.

We've also got more reaction to the FOWD event from; Andy Clarke, Mike Downey and Steve Burnard in our features section.

Next week: MIX '07 - Don't miss it!

Interview with Mike Downey

At FOWD we caught up with Mike Downey, he is the Sr. Product Manager for Apollo at Adobe Systems. Mike has been passionately involved with web technologies since the late 90s when he began working with software like Macromedia Flash, which became the standard for motion and interactivity on the Internet.

Click here to watch his interview.

MOO.COM added to exposure...

Click here to visit the exposure gallery

Rei Inamoto

Yesterday, at FOWD, we were extremely lucky to get an interview with Rei Inamoto. Rei is AKQA’s Global Creative Director, delivering solutions for clients such as Nike and Xbox. This guy is really slick - click here and watch his interview right now.

We'd also like to say thanks to John Allwright and the Microsoft Expression team, I think that everybody will agree that the 'lounge' was really quite cool - nice to see Microsoft getting it right! John also gave us a great interview - you can see it here.

Over the next few days we'll upload further interviews and features from the event so that you can get your daily dose! Watch this space for: Mike Downey, Joshua Hirsch, Andy Clarke, Andy Budd, Steve Burnard, Jason Arber, Jeff Croft & more reaction from the event.

Future of Web Design

Yesterday, we were fortunate enough to attend The Future of Web Design event in central London. We just wanted to say thank you to Ryan Carson and his team for organising the event and allowing us to shoot some fantastic interviews with speakers, designers and developers throughout the day.

Watch this space, we'll announce the videos on our blog as we release them!

A bit of silliness...

...but something that desingers should relate to!

http://www.underconsideration.com/MaketheLogoBigger.mp3

This was hunted down and forwarded by http://www.eviljeanius.com

Hillman Curtis in the UK (Manchester)

Not to be missed: http://www.dandad.co.uk/buy/presidents-lectures/curtis.html

CS3

Oh, and just in case you didn't realise, Adobe have launched Creative Suite 3, more to follow...

http://www.adobe.com/creativelicense/

Silverlight...

...is the new name for wpf/e:
Visit http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ for more info.

Getting started with the wpf/e samples using expression blend

If you have downloaded the wpf/e samples from Microsoft, but you're struggling to get them working in Expression Blend, because you're NOT a developer - then this video fix might be useful - simple but effective, and gets you started.

A designer's overview of Expression and the Windows Presentation Foundation

 

There doesn't seem to be a simple, non-technical explanation for this yet, so
I'll stick my neck out and try to explain what I think it is. Hopefully somebody
'more cleverer' than me will add some comments and 'fine-tune' this description.

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)

This is Microsoft's new presentation format. From an audio-visual perspective
it can do most things that Flash can do but is based on a mark-up language,
whilst Flash is a binary file. It is very much in it's infancy however, and
working with the mark-up, (XAML), can be a crude experience as the tools,
(Expression Blend & Design), are very much 'unreleased'. Programmers are excited
about the fact that WPF gives them access to .NET features, which enables you to
harness the full power of the desktop on Vista developments.

XAML

This is a mark-up language based on XML. Don't be afraid, it really isn't
much more sophisticated than HTML, and like hyper text it relies on 'proper'
code like javascript, (Online apps), and .NET, (Desktop apps), to actually do
anything clever.

WPF/e

This is a browser plug-in, the name will change to something more user
friendly, and the install process will become 'smart'. The plug-in means that
anything created in XAML can be run through any browser, regardless of operating
system, hence the 'e' for 'everywhere'.

 

interaction design in the natural world...

creative review - interaction design special

Inside the cover of this month's Creative Review,I found this photgraph, on the subject of designers and developers working together, and the role of the interaction designer, I think that this picture really is worth a thousand words…



Photograph by Nicolas Zurcher, IDEO

version 1 or version 2?

Just in case you are struggling to get your head around the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 technologies, O’Reilly Media have conveniently put together this simple but effective table:

Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0

DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
cms --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

You can read more about O’Reilly Media’s opinions of Web 2.0 here.

web 2.0 glossary

It is easy to dismiss a term such as ‘Web 2.0’ as hype, Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media coined the phrase back in October 2004, when he was describing how the dot.com world had crashed so spectacular three years earlier. The phrase took hold and the developer community are ‘into it’ so why aren’t interaction designers?

The name itself is reason enough for designers to steer clear of anything ‘Web 2.0’, it is a spectacularly techy choice of name, and is clearly reminiscent of the early days of ‘Web 1.0’ when designers were scared away from switching to interaction design with words like ‘JavaScript’ ‘html’ ‘gifs’ and ‘jpgs’, we remember the web before designers were invited to the party, the most exciting pages consisted of tiled brick backgrounds with lots of text (Times New Roman) and big grey buttons.

No wonder the design community were happy to stay at home and play with Quark, an old buddy that they were completely familiar with. However, with risk came reward, and the designers who made the leap to interaction design were more than rewarded! They also had a lot of fun along the way. So the real question is: Can you afford not to believe the hype?

It is my intention to fully investigate everything about the web mk II, and I will be publishing a series of articles that are related to the new ‘WebTop’ experience, beginning with a glossary of Web 2.0 terms so that designers have no excuse to stay away.

Ajax:
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. A group of technologies that shift the burden for processing information from the server to the local PC. This allows a browser to download all of the information it needs to render the page, including database variables, and lets the visitor use and manipulate that information on their PC without having to refer back to the server. This is clearly closer to running an application, reducing site-traffic.

API:
Application Programming Interface. A frame of reference that allows third-party developers to produce sites or applications that draw on data presented by the other site. An example of this is the Microsoft local.live.com API lets you embed the maps on your own site and overlay your own data, almost as if the maps were stored on your own local server. To see a number of examples of this visit the gallery at ViaVirtualEarth.com.

Blogroll:
A collection of links, often stored in a database, so that it can be manipulated in an intelligent manner.

RSS:
Really Simple Syndication / Rich Site Summary. An XML-based document structure that presents the content, but not the formatting of a website. Tags within the file define the purpose of each piece of information in the structure, allowing it to be re-used in other pages.

Ruby on Rails:
Application framework developed by 37Signals that allows for the rapid development of MySQL –based applications. Could be the most important language in the development of Web 2.0 applications, a logical progression from PHP and a good first step for programmers.

Tag:
A descriptive term applied to any kind of data to make it easier to find. The most famous example are the tags applied to images in Flickr that allow you to search for and categorise images stored in the site.

Tag cloud:
A visual representation of the number of times a particular tag had been applied to objects in a given database.

Trackback:
A special kind of link that joins an original piece of content with derivative works, or new pieces of content that refer to, or were inspired by, the original. This is most commonly found on blogs.

Wiki:
A special kind of site to which users can add their own information, or change the information that is already stored there. Most famous example: Wikipedia. Wikis were the initial idea for how the web should run but technology limited this.

an online time and place for everything

I noticed an interesting article in The Guardian newspaper this morning, written by Jack Schofield, it talks about last weeks launch of Google's new calendar. This is an interesting follow-on from my Web 2.0 articles:

'Google Calendar is faster and easier to use. Like Gmail, Google's email service, Google Calendar downloads and runs JavaScript code in the browser (Internet Explorer and Firefox only), which makes the user interface much more responsive. Google has also exploited the iCalendar internet standard, which has superseded the old vCal, and XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. The first makes it much easier to share calendar data; XML makes it easy to add a button to a web page, which users can click to add an event to their Google Calendar.'

View the full article here.

Ways to get creative with software development

Listen to this morning's Podcast with Dr. Neil Roodyn: Click Here

Show notes:

'Ways to get creative with software development'

Fantastic brands have a unique point of view, if you can establish your brand-alignment your product will become a circle that people want to join AND tell others about.

If you make branding a part of your product development you will: Increase the perceived value of your product, make your software easier to learn/use and broaden your market, increasing sales.

3 Goals:

1) Don’t set out to create a software tool – ‘Make a Place’
This creates an emotional tie between your product and your customer, great brands have practised this historically, an obvious example is the Apple iPod experience.

2) Keep usability at the forefront – pay special attention to buttons and navigation, Keep It Simple Stupid. Model techniques that the big software developers have used for navigation, they have invested millions of pounds getting it right. Where possible test your product on non-techies.

3) Stay focussed on your brand alignment and what your product is trying to achieve, take every opportunity to get your message across, this could include the packaging –even if it is a downloadable product it can have packaging – an installer screen for example.

Most importantly stay passionate about your products, all brand leaders have this in common!

Have a fantastic day!

Tricky