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This website required a thoughtful dialogue with the craftsman to determine why people purchase handcrafted furniture. It finally dawned on us: people like the story and the process as much as the piece itself. Armed with this goal, we set out to highlight these facets while displaying the work in the most complementary light. Here's the full story...
Clean and subdued were the guiding elements for this artist's site design. It makes sense too. Her work is so confrontational that we let it take the lead. Patrons of her work appreciate this treatment, since it lets them see more of the work and less of the site. Read more...
Reaching your 60th birthday is quite a milestone. When my mother turned 60, our family decided to throw her a bash. To get the word out, I designed these cards with a pull-out surprise, held snugly in place by a birthday candle. Think interactive work in an analog environment. Here's how it went down...
In certain cases, the web is no substitute for the immediacy and permanence of traditional print material. To strengthen brand recognition for Mobile Ad Group, I developed this media kit which packages the most useful information into a concise, physical document. The proprietary data within is enough for media buyers to keep it handy. How it turned out...
Located in Phoenix, AZ, Paulina Miller showcases outstanding work by emerging and established fine artists. The gallery is also a cornerstone of the First Friday Art Walk, a monthly event that routinely attracts thousands of gallery patrons. It made sense to re-establish her online presence, which included a total site redesign. Here's what I did...
Wordle.net has been around for a while, and I finally decided to post what my personal Del.icio.us cloud would look like.
It’s beautiful outside and I’m reading and writing from a patio café in Raleigh. I’ve always preferred working outside, but squinting to read my Macbook’s screen in the sun always deterred me. I looked into those photographer’s shades, but those are bulky and weird for café culture. I found the winning strategy in OS X’s Universal Access.
I was trying to figure out the differences in dimensions among embedded video players. It struck me that others might be looking for the same thing. So, I created an html file with embeds of popular video players, along with their pixel dimensions.
A few weeks ago and prior to my core conversation at SXSW, Evan Carroll interviewed me about Love in the Cloud: Online-only marriages.
The progress bar is a bit cold. It unemotionally calculates the height of a bar based on elementary math. So I started thinking. People tend to have a unique attraction to faces. You see this in eye tracking studies. What if the progress bar was humanized a bit?
Just for fun, I thought I’d see what Twitter might look like if it exposed some of the more commonly used features directly in the interface.
What I’m about to say might be be considered treason. But I’m throwing it out there to open discussion. What would happen if companies simply took their marketing dollars and reinvested them in their business?
Making sites accessible for disabled users has always been an afterthought. Right now, making sites usable for low-vision and blind users is a cobbled together assortment of best practices and hacks. Image alt tags, semantic markup, and “skip to content” links are a few of the techniques we use to address the problem. The problem is that these were added after the fact–and that they were designed for the static Web. It comes with it a number of problems.
Meetup.com was facing issues about two years ago. Their service, which enables people to discover other like-minded folks, was gaining traction. They started growing in response. Meetup went from a startup with a handful of employees to one that totaled around 60. In the process, they implemented procedures and structure that contributed to tanking morale and quality. What did they do?
At the Funologists panel at SXSW, the speakers lightly touched on digital ethnography. One of the points they that came up was the “lying user” phenomenon. While they didn’t go into it too far, it sparked an idea I’ve been meaning to write about.
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I‘m Todd, a UX Designer and presumably a stand up guy. Oombrella is my online ghost and the place where I share my thoughts and work. It now broadcasts from Raleigh, NC.