« February 2004 | Main | April 2004 »
peter boersma & jacco nieuwland created J-Flow and presented it at the IA Summit:
a tool that allows designers to present designs for interactive applications. The result is a series of HTML files with pop-up images of application screens shown in a hierarchical set of flows.The tool is based on Microsoft Visio and consists of stencils, templates and
macros that link the flows and screens.
grading flags on various criteria such as good/bad colors, level of plagarism, similarity to a corporate logo, writing - slogans or country names, business, and presence of "colonial nonsense".
the us flag got a C+!
Faroe Islands A- 80 / 100
Nicest of the cross flags so popular in Scandinavia.
(via InfoD-Cafe)
Andrei Herasimchuk's latest essay: The complexity principle
In general, the simplest way to think of any interaction within an application is in binary terms. The choice may be yes or no. The choice may be chocolate or not chocolate.In essence, the user can or cannot perform a certain action, or interact a certain way with the interface.
The nature of this core interaction model gives us a base unit of 2. So, at the most basic level, we can think of complexity as a factor of this binary interaction raised to the number of items present in the interface.
C = 2i
Where "c" is complexity and "i" is equal to the number of items that require interaction.
adding 1 more of anything (item, field, widget, palette, etc.) increases the complexity not by 1 but exponentially. so the goal is not to make the interface as simple as possible but "as complex as it absolutely needs to be."
To emphasize this point he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
Andrei emphasizes that the complexity prionciple does not apply to the amount of data or content (users are adept at sorting through large sets of data, such as in search results) but to the visual presentation of that data or content.
This means knowing that every ornament, typographic change, or color added to the presentation of the data set increases its visual complexity exponentially. This is not to say design should be bare, uninspired or boring. It just means that one should be aware of complexity in their work and resist the urge to overly decorate when it is not somehow reinforcing a certain aspect of the design.
in the comments josh offered another supporting quote:
"The ability to simplify means to elminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak" -Hans Hofmann
there is some great discussion in the comments, expanding the point of this article into emotional/conceptual/qualittative complexity. Andrei continually emphasizes that his essay is specifically aimed at the number of "controls" and these other aspects of complexity would be separate areas of discussion.
10 new ways to speed up download time
the first 5 are all reasons to use CSS for just about everything you can.
(via sporter)
couple links from the AIGAExperienceDesign group on Bitmap to Vector conversion:
Illustrator Tracing tutorial
Hello, and welcome to this tutorial. Here you'll learn how to
do those nice looking traced images like the one to your right.
Now, I know there is a lot of software out there that will do this work
for you, such as Adobe Streamline or Flash with its bitmap tracing option,
but I'm sure you'll agree with me that there's nothing like the real
thing baby, so let's get on with it and get some skills.
Illustrator How-To: Turn Bitmap Images into Vector Art
Transforming the jagged edges of raster images into the smooth curves of
vector art isn't hard to do using Adobe Illustrator's Auto Trace feature.
But the end result can look simplistic. For more sophisticated images,
you'll need additional help from Illustrator's path-editing tools and from
your image editing application. Here's what you need to do.
