Jedi Certificate
Jedit Certificate
A while back my wife organized a fantastic Star Wars themed party for Alexander’s 5th birthday. As part of the festivities there were a number of trails that the kids had to do to become “Jedi Knights”. I scoured the web for a certificate that I liked but couldn’t find one so I ended up creating one myself. It turned out pretty well, if I don’t say so myself! Feel free to use it if you’re doing something similar, you can download it here.
Filed under Design, family | Comments (2)Kung Fu Panda T-Shirt
I previously complained about the lack of a good image for my new favorite quote, so putting my money where my mouth is I took a cut at creating my own Kung Fu Panda homage. I think it turned out pretty nicely! I’ve also ordered it as a custom t-shirt from Zazzle, on the American Apparel black. It looks great, although the text came out a little small. I shall try again soon!
Filed under Design | Comments (2)The VirginEye visualizer
I’m currently attending the Fuel Conference in London. I just saw Alex Hunter from Virgin talk about the online marketing campaign they ran to launch Virgin America. The really interesting thing showed us was a fantastic new 3D visualizer called the Virgin Eye (click through to view) which captures articles from over 5000 news channels and displays them as a sort of star systems. Much like the Digg Labs visualizer, but still very cool!
Here’s a static view:
Technorati Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin America
Daniel Burka’s FOWD London presentation
I was recently at the FOWD London event, put on by the ever busy Carsonified team. There were a slew of good presentations, of which I haven’t really said much (yet), but one of the standouts was from Daniel Burka of Digg, Pownce and Mozilla fame.
What I liked about the presentation was that although Daniel was actually talking about design, the core principles are exactly the same as those I’ve been pushing in my software teams for a while. They also are extremely reminiscent of the key tenets of Agile development.
Less is More
One of my favorite tenets for software development. My preferred way of stating this is:
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This is always the first principle I try to establish with any of my software teams. In Daniel’s parlance, it comes out as “Iteration is subtraction too. Try to remove as much as you add”. For those of us practicing Agile, that might sound like “Refactor, refactor, refactor”!
Build extensible frameworks
The mantra:
Leverage, extensibility and re-use. Todd Papaioannou (yeah, I’m claiming it!)
will be extremely familiar to those who have worked on my projects. By this I mean that a key goal for all software that I build is to continually review whether it is stove piped, or whether it is either a) leveraging other software already out there, or b) someone else can leverage or extend it. Think plugin architectures. Nothing drives me more crazy than people with the NIH attitude wanting to reinvent the wheel. Do you know how many XML parsers/serializers I’ve seen??
In Daniel’s presentation he talks about the difference in Architecture, the High and Low road. His preference is the Low road, which gives you lots of reusable idioms to construct your final product. This is the same message I push in software development. Which leads nicely onto …
Continually Iterate
Again, one of the core tenets of Agile development, this is summed up in the KISS approach. Do the simplest thing first that works, get it out there, and then see if it works. If it doesn’t iterate quickly. Lots of software developers get mired in the mud of trying to build super edifices, when all they need to do is to do something much more simple.
In fact, Iterative design as a means of designing adaptable websites was the general theme of Daniel’s presentation, and I think it’s spot on. You never know exactly how the humans that use your interface, game or software product are going to react, and what they are going to do. That’s a lesson I learnt with running Terafirma. But you have to be prepared to iterate quickly if there is a problem, or a concerted need for improvement.
Here’s the video of the presentation:
From Future of Web Design on Vimeo.
You may also want to follow along with the slides:
[Updated - May 25]
Looks like Daniel has updated his slides for Mesh Conference. They now include a case study of the Digg Comments system.
Technorati Tags: fowd, webdesign, agile, daniel burka
Indigojoe Site updates
Quite a few updates to the site, but the main thing is this really cool player created by Johnny. Now we don’t have to use the one from MySpace, which is a relief. It’s pretty much done now, and all that remains is the arguing about Font styles and the like 
All in all, it was a pretty fun project, that came together very quickly and allowed me to hack some sizzle stuff for a change, instead of the usual enterprise framework crap. For such a small site, the list of technologies used is kinda long: AJAX, FAT, moo.fx, Flash, lightbox.js, Javascript and CSS to name a few. Oh, and PHP and mysql too. Fun!
Filed under Design, Javascript | Comment (0)
