SXSW 2012 Submission

By garthdb | Published: 16 Aug 2011

Since Tony Holguin tweeted Mickey’s 10 Commandments last year I’ve been itching to present on how they relate to User Experience and Interaction Design.  So I’ve finally submitted the topic to SXSW 2012 with Tony’s permission.  Check out the session page on SXSW for the full details.

If you’re not familiar with the SXSW process, the topic submissions are closed, but now the community is invited to vote for their favorite sessions.  It’s not required that you be registered for the event to vote, but you do have to sign in/create and account.  The community votes count for 30% of the decision-making process, 40% is by the SXSW Advisory Board, and 30% by the SXSW staff. (full faq)

So in summary, and in the words of the great Mayor Robert “Bob” White, “Vote for me”

While you’re at it, why don’t you vote for Andy Branch and Leonard Souza‘s sessions.

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Clean Illustrator FXG Files

By garthdb | Published: 15 Aug 2011

When saving Illustrator Files as FXG there is an option to “Save Illustrator Private Data”. Even with this option unchecked I find the resulting FXG file has more data in it I need for use in a Flex project.

I have a quick regular expression to remove most of the unnecessary namespaces and data from the file; I figured someone else might find it useful.

(ai:|ATE:|flm:|d:)(\w*)(=")([^"]*)(")( )?

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Clean Code Course Notes

By garthdb | Published: 27 Jul 2011

AdobeXD brought in Robert Martin to teach a Clean Code Course over the next few days. Decided to post my notes as we are going along. I’ll keep posting my notes as we go along. Updated: day 2, Refactoring; day 3, Unit Tests.

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12 Heuristics of UX

By garthdb | Published: 25 Jul 2011

I’ve been meaning to post these awhile ago, but I did a session back at 360|Flex 2010 DC and I included a list of 12 Heuristics for UX. To be completely honest, they are influenced by Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics, but I don’t really like his angle or implementation and they are definitely lacking as far as user experience is concerned.

Here is the list:

  1. Response
  2. Metaphor
  3. Navigation
  4. Consistency
  5. Training
  6. Efficiency
  7. Design
  8. Prevention
  9. Recovery
  10. Help
  11. Emotion
  12. Anthropomorphism

I’m working up a more in-depth exploration and will post it soon.

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James T. Edmondson: Typography Hero (updated)

By garthdb | Published: 14 Jul 2011

Yesterday I again found myself enjoying the Lost Type Co-op site. It is a wonderful site that hosts some beautiful fonts. It is a name-your-price system that gives the designers 100% of the proceeds.

I decided I should support the wonderful program and buy a couple of fonts. I don’t have any specific project in mind to use them, they are just pretty. Feeling cheap by not paying anything (which is totally allowed by the site) I decided to pay at least $1 for Wisdom Script created by James T. Edmondson.

This morning I received a thank you email from James. I thought it was quite decent to get a system generated thank you email even for my $1 purchase, but scrolling down I realized that James had personally written it (handmade even) when I saw this drawn message.

James T. Edmondson's handwritten thanks

For this – James T. Edmondson is my Typography Hero; follow him on twitter and send him bags of money on Lost Type Co-op.

Update – James has released a new font called Duke. After purchasing it he sent me another thank you.

Thanks Again Garth

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Why Does UX Rock So Hard

By garthdb | Published: 14 Jun 2011

I spoke at Flash and the City last week in NYC. My session was titled Why Does UX Rock So Hard.

I’ve included my slides, but, to be honest, they are fairly minimal and don’t make as much sense without context of the presentation.

I was also asked to participate in the keynote on why it is a good time to be a UX Designer.

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Designing for Mobile

By garthdb | Published: 2 May 2011

Just finished up my session at Flash Camp on Designing for Mobile.

For the fun of trying something new I built the deck with Showoff, taking the recommendation from Sim.  It’s not as feature rich as Powerpoint/Keynote, but it is fun to play with.

I also posted the deck to github.

Designing for Mobile Deck (pdf)

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Flash Camp SF 2011

By garthdb | Published: 20 Apr 2011

I’ve been invited to speak at Flash Camp SF 2011 on April 29.

I’ll be presenting on Designing for Mobile Applications and I’ll make sure to post my slides when I am done.

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Rhymes with Sucks

By garthdb | Published: 12 Apr 2011

Just finished up my presentation at 360|Flex and I thought I would share my slides.  I’m so on the ball.

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Networking Sucks

By garthdb | Published: 2 Mar 2011

I’ve been asked to speak at Rain on How to Network.  I took it in a slightly different direction.

Here’s the short description:

Networking Sucks
Networking has a lot of benefits, sadly it usually requires that you are self serving, false, and act, generally, like a tool. In this session we’ll be looking at alternatives and how you can feel more comfortable as a part of the interaction community.

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