Today was spent in two ways: the Dog ways and the Interaction Design ways.

Belle was a hair ball beyond Polar Bear status and desperately needed to visit a groomer to get shaved. Given that all the pet salons that I knew of were booked up due to predicted weekend hot weather, it involved me driving up PCH in this morning a bit looking for dog salons and walking into Purr-cision Grooming in Sunset Beach and begging for Belle to get a slot at the grooming table.

I have in the past noted that Sunset Beach has a high percentage of Psychics (2 or 3 in 2 miles), 3 Happy Ending Style Message Parlors (of the Rub & Tug variety), and 3 Tattoo parlours, and one just one dog groomers. Many thanks for Mark Anthony and the crew at Purr-cision for making Belle a dog again rather than a mini-polar bear.

The second part of my day was doing my least favorite activity: wireframing. Wireframing in my book is right up there with doing one's taxes and cleaning the toilet. Just say no.

Now I know that some folks consider wireframes to be the be all and end all of web design.

In my 12 years of designing and developing for the web, I prefer to first think about the task extensively, sketch & makes notes, and then just do it. This is much the same process I use when making art, esp. painting. I think, mull, turn things over in my mind - sometimes for weeks, make sketches, and then start the task.

In today's case, I already had fully envisioned the finished web interaction in my head and worked out the steps, but I needed to explain it to a programmer who would help me with the perl code. First I tried to explain it in an email, but that was not full enough. So I made two diagrams in photoshop with arrows to show how the behavior/actions would happen. But that was not enough either, so I started to make a html/javascript plain version of the interaction, when I realized... gasp! shock! horror! I was wireframing. blech.

Silly me.