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Igloo Feed Sponsorship

2013-05-21T23:00:00-05:00

Igloo has some funny new Sandwich videos to lighten your day (and maybe convince your boss and/or IT to upgrade your intranet to something more human). Check them out:

(You can also get a free 30-day trial and bring back Cake Fridays here.)

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

When Designers Interview Engineers

2013-05-16T11:42:39-05:00

The reality for most designers is that we are very likely to work at companies whose principal line of business is not design, but something else — media, services, widgets, what have you. This is slightly less true if you’re in the studio or agency world, but certainly if you do interaction or product design, you’re probably working in an environment that’s engineering-focused first, and design-focused second (or third). There’s a tech sector, but there’s no ‘design sector.’

Thankfully, as the design profession has matured designers have learned to assert themselves effectively in these situations. That includes having a say in the process of hiring new team members. Just as engineers and product managers (who more often than not come from engineering backgrounds) will often interview potential design hires, it’s becoming increasingly common for designers to interview engineering candidates too. I’ve done it a lot over the past several years, and it’s not uncommon at Etsy.

For designers though, interviewing an engineer does not always come naturally. In part this is because the language of engineering is so concrete and therefore more widely assimilated, and the language of design is comparatively soft and resigned to niches.

What to Ask

If you’re a designer interviewing an engineering candidate, I think what you want to know is basically “will I be able to work with this person?” I’ve found that the easiest place to start is to inquire about the candidate’s past experiences working with other designers. What was the arrangement like? Who did what? What bumps in the road did they hit? What were the easiest and hardest things about working with those designers? What did they learn about how design intersects with their job?

I also find that the simplest questions will often yield the most effective answers: did the engineering candidate enjoy working with designers? Was it a good time, a necessary evil, or a burdensome chore? There can be a world of insight in the answers that come back.

There’s also the more neutral ground of asking the candidate to talk about any products, services, features, user interface details etc. that they’re fond of. The way they describe that product or feature, the details they call out, and the reasons they give for being sympathetic to it — all these things talk directly to what they value in their own work.

Design Topics Are Fair Game

None of what I’m suggesting here is particularly innovative, of course. Most designers would come up with them on their own, given enough exposure to engineering interviews. A slightly more interesting idea is to have designers asking engineers about design topics.

It’s much more common for designers to be expected to master the engineering vernacular than vice versa, but that shouldn’t stop designers from asking engineers what they know about design. Designers might hesitate to ask if the engineer understands anything about typography, color, images, branding systems and logos, but I say why not? It’s perfectly fair game to ask if an engineer understands why a given design solution works, why some typography looks better than others, or what makes a good design good, and a bad design bad. An engineer who understands these things is a tremendous asset in shipping great products, and designers are best equipped to assess that.

It might be true that most engineering candidates will likely answer in the negative to these queries, and the interviewer should to set his or her own expectations accordingly. But even if the engineer displays some scant, perhaps intuited knowledge about design, or even a genuine if uninformed interest in design, that’s valuable.

More to the point, it’s one small step in establishing a certain baseline in the relationship between designers and engineers, one in which the dynamic of understanding one another is less of a one-way street. Designers working in the technology sector have spent about two decades now learning to speak in the engineers’ tongue. We should see what we can do about making the inverse true as well.

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Mad Mimi Email Marketing Feed Sponsorship

2013-05-14T23:00:00-05:00

Mad Mimi is a design-oriented email newsletter service founded in 2008. Developed to provide a mobile-app-like feel, and with a drag-and-drop email composer, Mad Mimi offers a simple, elegant user experience that helps customers create, send, and track beautiful html email campaigns.

Mad Mimi also offers robust APIs, integrations, and add-on features. This makes it a perfect fit for today’s visionaries, artists, and entrepreneurs, including great digital brands like Fancy and StumbleUpon, who use Mad Mimi to communicate with their customers.

Best yet, Mad Mimi is free for up to 2,500 contacts. We hope you’ll give us a try or support@madmimi.com with questions.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Tail Wagging in Interface Design

2013-05-14T05:30:03-05:00

A wonderfully argued indictment of skeuomorphism and its inherent falsity, by designer and developer Matt Gemell. It’s well worth a read, though I actually don’t fully agree with it. I’m working up to writing down my thoughts on the widespread distaste for skeuomorphism and the accompanying mania for ‘flat design.’ And when I say ‘working up to it’ I mean ‘trying to find the time.’ Anyway, Read Matt’s piece here.

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PDFpenPro 6 from Smile Feed Sponsorship

2013-05-07T23:00:00-05:00

PDFpenPro is the advanced version of PDFpen. PDFpenPro does everything that PDFpen does, such as add signatures, edit text and images, perform OCR on scanned documents and export Microsoft Word documents. It also has the ability to create a PDF form, build a table of contents, and convert HTML files to PDF.

The new PDFpenPro 6 adds document permission settings. When you share a PDF, you can restrict printing, copying, and editing of your PDFs. You can also use the new automatic form field creation tool to convert a non-interactive form into an interactive PDF form with text fields and checkboxes automatically added.

PDFpenPro 6 is available on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store for $100. A free demo can be downloaded on the Smile site. Find out why Macworld calls PDFpenPro “the crème de la crème of PDF editing and annotating applications.”

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Creative Cloud Is Not Suite

2013-05-07T12:47:45-05:00

Late in December of 2010, I paid US$750 (including taxes and shipping) for an upgrade copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5. I’m still using that software on my Mac at home, and find that it covers most all of my needs. If you amortize that cost out over the roughly thirty months that I’ve owned CS5, it comes to about US$25 per month.

When I first did this math, I expected that figure to be significantly lower than the cost for Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, which offers the same applications as the Creative Suite but via monthly subscription. Existing CS customers can subscribe to Creative Cloud for US$30 a month. Over the course of thirty months, that comes to about US$150 more than what I paid in December 2010. That’s not nothing, but it’s a fair price to pay considering that CC always provides the latest versions of Adobe’s software.

Of course, thirty months is an arbitrary number. I could probably use CS5 for another twelve months, at least, before I would really need to upgrade it. In so doing I’d effectively drive the price down to around US$18 a month, saving me US$510 over the cost of subscribing to Creative Cloud during that extended period of time.

However, as Adobe announced yesterday, going forward the only way to get access to the new versions of Adobe’s key software will be through a Creative Cloud subscription. If you want to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. now you must pay a monthly subscription fee. Which is to say, you can no longer buy a single, standalone version and let it amortize out over as long as you like.

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on each customer’s needs, of course. Some people will appreciate the ability to pay only for the months that they need. For businesses and startups, in particular, the ability to put a legal copy of Adobe’s apps in an employee’s hands for US$50 a month (the cost for new customers) instead of several hundred dollars is sure to be a boon.

But for folks like myself, who find that only every second or third of Adobe’s major releases truly warrants the financial and technological hassle of an upgrade, losing that option is not so appealing. It feels less like innovation and more like manipulation.

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UC.Quarterly

2013-05-01T14:24:59-05:00

My general skepticism about print-based graphic design products continues, but I have to respect those who keep at it, and manage to turn them into worthwhile objects — and products, even. My friends at Under Consideration, for instance, have just launched UC.Quarterly, a periodical “summary of the most interesting, relevant, and simply fun-to-see projects published each quarter.” The projects are selected from UC’s network of sites about graphic design and branding.

I’ve got the first issue in my hands and it’s a super-fun read. There’s very little additional content beyond the project images themselves, but to me this is the print equivalent of browsing at your leisure through Dribbble or the design-related content on Pinterest. It’s inspiration fodder, basically.

Each issue is published via Newspaper Club, which offers custom, short-run printing on wonderfully casual, unpretentious newsprint. You can buy them for US$15 a pop or subscribe to a year’s worth for US$45. Get yours here.

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Fresh music from Steven Jengo Feed Sponsorship

2013-04-30T23:00:00-05:00

Arrive in the office, make a cup of coffee, open up your email, and turn up your favorite song. We know how it goes.

Check out Steven Jengo’s new single, Summer of 2042.

Fresh tunes with a softly different touch; with that kind of familiar sound, simple and melodic, deep and lazy, freshly brewed for your listening pleasure.

Take care when driving at high volume. Find more at jengo.com.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Ghost

2013-04-29T15:38:41-05:00

Ghost is a Kickstarter project to build a new blogging platform. As the incumbent applications like WordPress have become much broader in scope and therefore more complex than just a tool for publishing content, the Ghost team hopes to create something much more focused on writing, blogging and journalism. Their prototype and their marketing materials look preternaturally professional; if nothing else, I want this project to happen so I can see if it’s as slick as the screen grabs and demo video suggest. On the issue of whether creating the next major blogging platform is an anachronistic ambition or not, I leave it to the market to decide. See the demo and link off to the Kickstarter page at TryGhost.org.

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Common Misconceptions about Touch Interfaces

2013-04-26T16:09:43-05:00

Really superb article on how touch screens really work, and how to design interactions for them. Read here.

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