http://www.getfinch.com/ en francisco@getfinch.com Copyright 2009 2009-10-23T15:25:00+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/the_design_sickness/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/the_design_sickness/ It’s that time of year. I start feeling a bit of the shakes and sort of feeling ill. It all begins when I go back and look at my site. It honestly makes me crazy to look at it. I can pick out about five new things I see wrong with it every time I look at it. Being a designer is sort of a curse in a way, you can never stop looking at the world around in you in terms of color, typography, etc. It gets worse when it’s something that is supposed to be designed like an advertisement or a restaurant menu. It becomes unbearable when you have control over it, like your website. There are little things I do daily to sort of curb this “design sickness”. There are no shortage of places to find inspiration online. I have grown a bit bored of the millions of galleries and lists of what people deem to be a great site though. Sometimes those are nice, but really diving into design and UX theory does the trick and calms the creative monster inside me. For my own creative sanity I’ve decided to make a conscious effort to get ahead of things. It’s been about six months since the last redesign for my site. I went ahead and redesigned the blog portion this week. It’s been good to give it some time. I now know how much I am able to post (hopefully more frequent side) so I’ve set up the blog for that. The key is knowing yourself and what you can commit to. I think that having a creative checkup for personal projects a few times a year is a good thing for designers. Anyone else get the design sickness? Feature 2009-10-23T15:25:00+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/the_art_that_influenced_modern_design/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/the_art_that_influenced_modern_design/ Styles in design are described and classified in many ways. Sometimes they are given a moniker, like “Web 2.0,” other times they are referred to by their appearance: grungy, minimalist, retro, big type. The people (and brands) to which modern design styles are attributed are as numerous as the styles themselves. Many designers look to a brand such as Apple as an example of great modern design because a designer’s sensibility is infused into everything it does. Even though many current styles and trends can be connected to recent design pieces, they do not originate there. So much modern design originated before computers and the Web were even a glimmer in the eye of their creators. You can read the rest on Smashing Magazine Feature 2009-08-25T04:44:25+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/designing_a_film_festival/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/designing_a_film_festival/ I am art directing the Traverse City Film Festival for its fifth anniversary year. It’s a really cool event to have here in Michigan and I’m thankful we have something like this to look forward to in such a down time in the economy. Last year was the first time I ever volunteered and attended the festival. If you don’t know much about the festival here’s a short history: The Traverse City Film Festival was founded by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. The festival is held annually in Traverse City, Michigan. It is now one of the largest film festivals in the Midwest. There are close to 100 films screened and many are US or world premieres. In addition, it is a non-profit educational and charitable organization. The poster design was the first piece I created to help set the tone of the festival. Since this year was an anniversary year I felt it was important to tie back into the real soul of the festival and have a sort of nostalgia in the artwork for it. One of the great things about the festival is the Open Space venue. They inflate a movie screen, float it out on the lake and show free movies like The Goonies. There is nothing better on a summer night than watching a classic movie under the night sky with friends and family. The current Traverse City Film Festival logo depicts this scene and I thought it might be fun to take the illustration and make it “real”. After working on the idea the scene became more stylized and surreal. I liked the look and then added some type that would fit that old Hollywood movie poster look. There are many different elements that need to tie into the main look to create a successful campaign for something like this. I worked on everything from credentials to schedule posters to ballots for film voting. This also included creating merchandise art for T-shirts and even labels for wine bottles. It’s a lot of fun to pull it all together, and it means also staying very organized. It’s been ages since I opened InDesign to do print work, so that was another challenge. There are so many fantastic choices this year. I have a good amount of foreign, documentary and indie films in my schedule to check out. A few of my top must-see-movies are Dead Snow, The Cove, and Big Fan. All in all it’s been a great honor to be a part of such a great organization and helping create the “face” of the festival this year. I can’t wait to check out the great films and hear what some of the directors and actors have to say about them. Tickets go on sale to the public this week. For more information and to check out the films they will be showing go to Traverse City Film Festival. Feature 2009-07-15T04:34:59+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/its_alive_flashcatalyst_beta/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/its_alive_flashcatalyst_beta/ I had a lot of fun working on a demo for FlashCatalyst with Darron Schall and Joe Johnston of Universal Mind along with the great folks at Adobe. At a basic level FlashCatalyst is a new tool from Adobe that allows the designer to create the design and interactions of the interface and then pass over the file to the developer to wire it up. The designer can refine pieces of the UI while the developer continues to work without interrupting the workflow of the application. When I have some more time I will try to do more of a walkthrough and discussion on FlashCatalyst. For now, Ryan Stewart has put together a nice screencast showing off the demo we worked on and some of the features of FlashCatalyst. Take a look. Fresh Bytes 2009-06-01T15:58:40+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/how_to_design_for_your_worst_client_you/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/how_to_design_for_your_worst_client_you/ I was invited a while back by Jacob Gube over at Six Revisions to write for his design and developer online magazine. This is my first article of hopefully many. I had a good time and really enjoyed working with Jacob who does a great job putting it all together. Check it out. Fresh Bytes 2009-06-01T15:26:33+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/ria_mojo_welcome_to_the_ux_recession/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/ria_mojo_welcome_to_the_ux_recession/ Buzzword Bingo Let’s face it, User Experience (UX) is the *new* Web 2.0. It’s a buzzword that people really don’t get the true meaning of. UX first came in the form of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies and has evolved into an interaction design role. An experience can be defined in many ways. I define a true experience as the sum of many interactions with people, an environment, or a product. In this case I am talking specifically about Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Beauty is only skin deep When I am called on a project I am normally just asked to “skin the app”. I understand the term, but I think it leaves a bad impression in what an Experience Designer really does. It is like the saying “beauty is only skin deep.” This gives off the impression that the design piece is nothing more than a sprinkle of decoration to make things look pretty and that there is nothing deeper in creating this. XD is much more than just “eye candy”. There are many theories, laws, and best practices behind it. Welcome to the UX Recession Technology is causing the products and interfaces of the world to become very complex. The simple behaviors of products from the manufacturing age are being replaced by very robust and extremely complex behaviors of digital products. So we are essentially asking the user to make their life easier by using something much more complex. So that is where the need for UX has grown. There’s something standing in the way of this. I believe that beyond our current world recession, there is a UX Recession. The tight purse strings of businesses and the rush to market without spending the time to make the application right have caused many bad experiences to be created. Companies have a hard time being the “best to market” when they want to be “first to market.” They have very little understanding of the value of UX. If you look at history of products you can see that things like the iPod and the iPhone were not first to market, yet they made a huge impact on the market through creating a great experience. Emotion and UX For a long time we have had usability in UX touted as the most important. The design outside of that isn’t as important. Same with the way we make decisions on products we use. The rational side of our minds was thought to overcome the raw emotion. Our minds are wired to enjoy and dislike many things though. So we are setup to automatically enjoy and react good to “attractive things” before we begin to interact with them. So how do attractive things work better? Studies have shown that when you are in a relaxed and happy state your mind is at ease and tends to be more open to creative problem solving. So if you come across a problem in an interface you tend to be able to overcome this and move on. If you are tense and unhappy your mind begins to narrow it’s focus and if you have a problem it becomes more difficult to find your way around it. And that compounds into frustration and a bad experience. There is a danger though of using just pure “attraction” in design to create a product. One example is with Tropicana and the redesign of their orange juice package. Although the new design isn’t bad to me, if you look at it in the mind of a customer, it is a disaster. Just take a look at it on the shelf where the customer sees it. “Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice? Because I do and the new cartons stink” – Tropicana Customer Lead by example By taking a look at some of the best experiences out there we can learn a lot. So many markets seem to be “locked down” where a few big players own the share of the customers mind and dollar. And we as users are force fed crap experiences because these are the only choices, or blame ourselves for being stupid and not knowing how to use these websites or products. We can look at the Flip as a great example of this. The product is very limited in features in comparison to the big name video camera makers like Sony. Even the zoom is nearly worthless. By creating a very focused set of features that it does very well, and making it a very easy and fun experience the Flip has taken 20% of the market share. I like to think that great UX took 20% of the market share. Survival of the fittest Over time people will begin to find value in UX by understanding what it is. This will happen as the industry grows and other fields begin to see it as a vital part of the product. By educating clients and bringing up issues while building the experience they (the client) will begin to see that they can put out a “best to market” product. I hope to see UX move towards the planning stages of application creation, rather than an afterthought. I think that in the end, the best experiences will win, and the companies that disregard this will simply die off. It’s a harsh reality, but in this economy people don’t have the time or money to waste on things that are not quality experiences in their life. They will just move on to the products and services that are better. Feature 2009-05-27T15:56:28+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/digging_big_spaceship/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/digging_big_spaceship/ A nice new site launched by Big Spaceship. I really like the clean layout and the fact that they didn’t use all Flash for the site like the last version. I especially love the red they use. Awesome work. Fresh Bytes 2009-04-23T19:17:13+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/artprize_is_on/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/artprize_is_on/ Unveiled today in Grand Rapids, Michigan is the world’s largest art prize and competition with people voting using the social web: ArtPrize. Not sure if I love the name but this sounds like a great thing for my hometown of Grand Rapids. More info is on the site: http://www.ArtPrize.org/. Fresh Bytes 2009-04-23T14:11:15+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/adios_internet_exploder_6/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/adios_internet_exploder_6/ For some reason the 2001 Space Odyssey scene with the apes seeing this strange “monolith” and the creepy music resonated with me. I think in some ways that many people that use IE6 must feel this way about the internet in general. Very confused and afraid to evolve with the rest of us. So I thought that imagery fit perfectly with how I chose to say Adios to Internet Explorer 6. Feature 2009-04-15T16:19:03+00:00 http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/james_day/ http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/james_day/ Lovely photo site for James day showing some fantastic work. The site is very clean with some great transitions to add flair. The portraits are quirky and some of still photos are very graphic and bold. Fresh Bytes 2009-04-10T18:44:08+00:00