I'm pleased to announce the first of a series of products that I'm producing for creatives involved in design for the screen. The first 2 products are graph paper notepads formatted for user interface design and design of time-related sequences.
The Wireframe Graph Paper Notepad is made for visual designers, interaction designers, and information architects designing for the screen. The notepad has 50 sheets at 8 1/2 x 11 inches on white 70# paper, glued on the left side. The ink is a non-photo blue (cyan) so that the grid lines and any sketch lines made in non-photo blue pencil can be knocked out when scanned and processed in graphics software.
The Storyboard Notepad is made for creatives who think about interactions over time, whether doing user interface or interaction design or planning video, film, and animation sequences. The notepad has 50 sheets at 8 1/2×11 inches on white 70# paper, glued on the left side. The ink is a non-photo blue (cyan).
You can find out more about these products at http://konigi.com/store. Due to several large advanced orders supplies are limited.
I welcome your feedback!
Wired interactive map of the people, companies, and technologies spawned by the Force.
I've updated the OmniGraffle Web Design Template for OmniGraffle 5 and the document is now being maintained at Konigi. Check it out, Grafflers.
I spend a lot of time sketching interface ideas on paper. Typically I sketch wireframes and storyboards on graph paper, then redo the final documents in OmniGraffle. But lately, I've been using paper for more than just sketching. Now, after spending time sketching ideas and working out design issues, I start to do higher fidelity drawings on paper, scan them, post them to our system. We discuss and iterate, and the process repeats until we're happy, and I spend less time pushing pixels around.
As a result of this method of working, I've been wanting my graph paper to be more suitable to the way I work and the kinds of drawings I do. So I've come up with the different types of graph paper. You see here. You'll find styles for wireframing user interfaces, story boarding interaction, and plotting values based on simple criteria using a two by two grid. We throw in a basic grid got anything else that might come up.
These pages are great for sketching, but also work well when producing high fidelity drawings. The title bar and grid lines are photo-safe, so they won't show up when you scan them into your computer. The thick black lines for boxes will show in scans and are 2px wide to match the weight of Pentel Sign Pens.
So if you're interested, find out more about Konigi Graph Paper or download these for your self.
Well, it finally happened. I got too lazy to comb through the relationships in the taxonomy I've been using on this site over the years and I've decided to stop creating parent/child relationships. So now I only have the tag clouds. I still separate the facets for subject and people.
I believe taxonomy and thesauri to be useful when describing content for the purposes of browsing, especially to first time users of a system. It makes sense when classifying content in business information systems, reference or documentation content, newspaper and magazine sites, etc. It's useful for CMS with granular levels description. But the level of effort to maintain it over time is significant, and I never really know what the right methods are in Drupal to do things like show links to related tags when browsing taxonomy, or show related links on nodes in this site.
As I see it, I've got 2 problems:
- Creation Issue: I want to continue to organically tag as I create nodes. But I also want to create the relationships for each tag I create while I'm creating the tag in Node>Add mode, rather than having to go find it afterward in my non-searchable taxonomy controls.
- Relationship Display Issues: I want to better show relationships on both taxonomy pages (see also: synonyms, navigate to: parents) and in nodes (more entries like this, i.e. an algorithmically generated list of nodes weighted to show those containing most of the terms used in this entry).
The relationship creation is painful, though, because by freetagging, I put off the task until some later time--which seems to never come. I don't yet know how I'm going to deal with this growing problem. I've just decided to stop caring for this blog. I'm sure others could care less, but I used to use the hierarchical list of my taxonomies occasionally to survey what I've been writing about. I just haven't found the proper way to what I want in Drupal yet.
For now, all I know is that I have this big-ass tag cloud that becomes more and more difficult to maintain and explore in a meaningful way. I'm not sure how to make better of use of it, without knowing what Drupal modules work best for my needs. It's been a while since I've looked at the contributed taxonomy modules. This might be the kick in the pants I need to go see what good stuff people have come up with for problems like mine.
Minutes is a sweet little dashboard timer. Move an arrow around the dial to set the number of minutes. Keep spinning around for more than 60 minutes. The app displays the clock time for when the alarm will go off. Set the alarm to use one of the included tones or to play an iTunes playlist. Click on it to toggle on/off. Nice.
My del.icio.us tag cloud in Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle:
About Wordle:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.
InformationWeek reports on Wachovia's push to introduce social software into the enterprise.
Beyond connecting employees around the world, Wachovia's collaborative environment is designed to attract younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. "Business in general has a real challenge engaging Generation Y," said Fields. "They're coming to us with high enthusiasm but encountering arcane tools and bureaucracies," he said, adding that many young workers' engagement levels "fall off the table" after about a year on the job. "They are leaving Fortune 100 companies," he said.
The company started by piloting wikis that represented "non-threatening use cases," and are expanding out from there. They will be building their set of tools based on Sharepoint services.
As younger knowledge workers enter the workplace and see the cumbersome legacy tools, or lack of tools, provided by some enterprises, they will clamor for the services they already use on the Internet and bitch about the inadequacy of what they have. I know I did when I worked in a large corporation.
Starting around 2000, with IM and then moving on the wikis, and social bookmarking, I got our group to bypass IT to install AIM and Usemod, and built our own social bookmarking tools. We learned to get things done better, faster, and smarter. I never asked for permission. I just did my job the best way I could.
There's no reason young information workers should need to ask for these tools now. You'd better just have them or we'll look outside to get them. But if you want to address issues such as security, it's better to heed the rumble from the grassroots.
The realization within the really large corporations like Wachovia to accept the new paradigm of doing business openly within the enterprise is a sign that the idea has taken root, and we shouldn't need to describe or document the need any longer. The tools are mature enough for IT consider in terms of security and journaling functionalities. Enterprise social software is slowly following in the wake of acceptance of the Cluetrain, and the paradigm of open markets and transparent communications with businesses. The timing is right and the tools are tested.
If I have any say in the matter, I won't ever work for another large company again. It took a lot of effort in evangelizing, socializing, and implementing tools for more efficient communications and documentation processes. But should I ever find myself back in a large corporation some day in the future, I'd wager that some form of the social software I use today will be present in those companies.
This week I'll be starting another new stage in my career, as I take on the role of Director of User Experience at Traction Software, Inc, marking my return to the subjects you've read me blogging about in the past: design of information retrieval and content management systems, knowledge management, and social networking and social software for the enterprise.
It's with great pleasure that I return to work on the application I used as a client, and to the team that I contributed some interface design work to over a year ago as a consultant. You'll be reading me return to blogging about the topics I mentioned above, but this time from the design and product development end of the conversation. Previously I wrote mainly about grassroots needs for social software and km and how blog/wiki tools meet these needs. In addition, I expect to show details of the application and its use for various forms of personal and enterprise knowledge management. I've used this tool in the past on a range of needs, including serving as a tracking system for usability testing issues, documenting project information (wiki style), and simply for logging my own projects and todo lists (personal km style wiki).
There will be more to come. I look forward to sharing with you.