Category :: design + web
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri 06.26.09 - Jon Hicks and Andy Budd enjoying the sunshine outside of the Southbank Royal (something) Hall near Waterloo Station, London. About a half hour later, or as the cat herding organizers turn, a group of us walked over the bridge, through Leicester Sq, up into Soho to go have dinner to the same delicious Thai restaurant that Andy took my Mom and I to in Nov of 2007 and whose name I have forgotten now. The said Thai place was able to seat 14 of us with no reservation after a small wait on a Friday night. They Rock. If I could just remember the name...
A nice Google search has yielded the name - Busaba Eathai at 106 Wardour St. Delicious.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri 06.26.09 - Two of the bestest, dearest gentlemen on the planet: Steve Lawson and James Whatley.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri 06.26.09 - This morning I had the most delightful time at the Tuttle Club London, which due to a music conference at the ICA was held on the deck of a cafe in St. James Park just across the Mall from the ICA. Being in the park, on a deck, surrounded by grass and trees on such a lovely, sunny morning was the most delightful summery thing I can think of doing in London. Esp. when said activity includes great conversations with like minded geeks.
I think the Tuttle Club LA (LB) needs to meet outside sometime this summer.
If the folks at Starcut are going to proudly announce that they mobilize brands and media and charge a newspaper to mobilize the said newspaper's website, then they should educate themselves on the standards of the mobile user experience.
Major rule of the mobile web: Give the User a Choice. Don't assume that they want the full website or that they want a reduced site for mobile. Just because a script has detected that the browser coming to the site is a mobile browser, doesn't mean the reader/user wants to be forced into a locked sandbox with no exit. Don't assume that every user wants to reduce their data usage, some of us have unlimited plans. Give the user a choice.
Here are a few examples of Mobile Sites that do the User Experience right by giving the reader/user a choice to either view the mobile version or to switch over to the "classic", "full", "regular" version of the website:
Why does this matter? Well, not every Nokia or Sony Ericsson or Blackberry or insert name of mobile device is a smartphone with Opera Mini or a version of the Webkit or Gecko mobile browsers, but then again, not every Nokia or Sony or Blackberry or other mobile device is a simple device with a simple mobile web browser.
I think it is great that more and more websites offer mobile versions that are stripped down and load fast for mobile devices, but if you are going to strip out choice along with kilobytes, this is not good.
My Nokia N95 has a full featured web browser that renders most websites, except heavily AJAX sites, quite nicely. I have an unlimited data plan. Between my Nokia's browser and my data plan, I want to see the full version of most websites unless I need information quickly and then the mobile version is usually fine.
Not yesterday.
Yesterday, I left the house in a rush to meet up with Lauren Isaacson in Encino so that we could have lunch together before she departs for Vancouver. I was heading north on the 405 and passing the Long Beach Airport when I realized that I left my paper copy of the LA Times Food section. So, I did what I would normally do in this situation, I opened my Nokia's web browser and typed "latimes.com", instead of getting the usual, full web version of the LA Times website, I was forced into the mobile version of the site with no exit out.
No link to the full version. No links to the Food section. No ability to get out of the reduced web version. I then went to Google to search for the article and the Google search took me back to the front page of the mobile site with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com. Here is the mobile site that I saw with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com at either the top of the mobile page nor at the bottom:
I was very frustrated.
I was mad in the immediate situation of trying to locate information that was still live on the full version of the website but I was unable to get to the information because the mobile version of the site did not let me go there. I was mad as a web & mobile user experience designer to experience bad UX design first hand. I was frustrated that Starcut has probably charged the LA Times a lot of money to piss off loyal readers like me.
In the end, I had to use a desktop computer at Lauren's parent's house to search the LA Times' website for the article on the restaurant we were to go to. Itzik Hagadol is excellent, especially their 20 salads for $8.99.
But the lack of ability to exit the LA Times's mobile site from a mobile browser is not excellent. It would be excellent if Starcut would revisit the site and add a simple link at the top or the bottom of each mobile page, giving the reader/user the option to go to the full non-mobile version of the site from their mobile browser.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Thurs 05.14.09 - Now on to color research and comparison, I am trying out different shades of aubergine. To this end, I after I dropped Scruffy McDoglet off at the groomers, I walked into India Sweet & Spices to buy little cute baby eggplants in a range of shades to see what colors of aubergine I could capture for a design I am working on.
Yes, design research with vegetables. They will make a tasty saute or bake later.
Fri. 03.27.09 - Actually the Tuttle Club LA was not born yesterday, but a month ago today, though the super cheap bagels at the Library in Long Beach apparently were born yesterday.
When Steve and Lobelia Lawson were out in the LA area for the NAMM show, Steve told Geoff Hickman and myself that we should start a Tuttle Club for LA. Well, due to the busy-ness of January, February and March, I was out of the picture on any organization, but Geoff and Francine Kinzner did get on top of things and started LA/LB/OC's own social media club, modeled after London's Tuttle Club, four weeks ago on Feb. 27, 2009.
Today was the 3rd Tuttle LA, but it was my first due to my being in Arizona & Texas for the other two. I enjoyed myself. I knew 3 of the 6 folks (Jeb, Geoff, and Lauren) and got to make friends with the other 3 (Francine, Nguyen, and Mark). It was great to get out of the house and away from the computer to talk about computers, mobile, web, extra and et al, during a Friday mid-day in Long Beach.
Jeb Brilliant and I fleshed out an idea that I have had rolling around in my head for over a year now, Lauren Isaacson thought up a great domain name, and Jeb and I made a plan on how to execute the idea, all over tea and coffee at the Library on Broadway & Redondo in Long Beach. Yay!
The only downside was hanging out too long and returning to my car to find a ticket on it for parking longer than an hour. Next time - Tuttle LA #4 - I will ride my bike the 4 or so miles from Seal Beach to The Library.
Next Tuttle LA (really Tuttle LA/LB/OC):
Fri. April 10, 2009
10:30 am
@ The Library
3418 E Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90803
Here you go, the first day of Ms. Jen's panel transcripts:
Sat March 14, 2006 - SXSW Interactive
Austin, TX
11:30am - The Creative Path
Jim Coudal - Coudal Partners
Brendan Dawes - Magnetic North
Gary Hustwit - Filmmaker "Helvetica", "Objectified"
Objectified premier is at the Paramount at 5pm.
Jim Couldal:
Creative Path: show don't tell.
Speaking on Joseph Conrad, literary theory, "we are complicit in our own corruption" By the time you have finished the book or movie, the narrative leads you through your own corruption much more powerfully than if Conrad was to write an essay.
Montessori - Teaching kids to learn.
Layer Tennis - Live on Friday afternoons, two artists swap a file back and forth in real time. Continue to add to the file on top each other's work. Ultimate end is to probably to reduce productivity on Friday afternoon. Restraint and freedom, creativity comes out of the balance between the two. Keep in mind that the act and result of creation is a conversation, not a lecture.
Gary Hustwit - Seventy-five minutes and thrity-six seconds.
I make documentary films, which are linear fixed forms of media. There is no way for the viewer of the film to change the plot line, characters, destination, or duration of the film, unless they get up and leave.
How do you make a fixed documentary film to be interactive?
1. use ellipsis... Intentionally leave out information, that the viewer of the film needs to put in themselves, a moment of discovery is more compelling than if someone tells you what the story is.
What is not there, what is left out. It leave the piece open to interpretation.
Delayed gratification.
2. Make it a game. bring in puzzles.
Dialogue going on between the viewer and the film.
Timing, juxtaposition.
"If all else fails, put a dog in the film." - Gary Hustwit
Brendan Dawes -
Made a flash video editor in 1998 - Pyscho Studio - See if folks could make their own version of the pyscho shower scene.
The danger is that when you give folks things to play with, you get some weird shit. Then you realize that people are weird.
Human beings versus machines. Computer would plot an efficient line from a to be. Critical Mass by Philip Ball is where he had folks walk across a park, before they put in the paths, to see how humans used the park.
Good design is about taking things away. Gives example of traffic calming in Brighton, by having the sidewalk & street be the same space with no directions & signs -> it makes drivers slow down to 10mph and be much more aware.
Makes sketches, as sketchbooks don't run out of batteries.
doodlebuzz.com - We get complacent with interface, why can't we create new interface.
"People think these days that if you can't use an interface in 2 seconds that it is rubbish. That is rubbish." - Brendan advocates making new UIs and making the user work for it.
You can start with Britney Spears and end up with the Pope. Any interface that allows you to do that is good.
"If you don't go out in the woods, nothing will never happen & your life will never begin..." Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Yes, it is that time of year again, time for SXSW Interactive and the 2009 Weblog Awards!
The Bloggies are the web's longest-running non-profit, reader voted blog awards. The votes are in and the Weblog Awards ceremony will be held on Monday, March 16th at 12:30pm (Central Time, GMT-5) at the SXSW Trade Show Day Stage.
Come join us in celebrating blogs and bloggers at SXSW Monday at lunch. If you can't make in person to the Bloggies Award Ceremony, join us on IRC, #Bloggies on irc.freenode.net, for live coverage and chat. After the ceremony the winning blogs can be found at 2009.bloggies.com.
The 9th Annual Weblog Awards Ceremony will be brought to you this Monday by Ms. Jen and George Kelly, with big ideas & help from Glenda Sims, as well as all the fabulous presenters and bloggers. Extra big thanks to Nikolai Nolan for all his hard work on the Ninth Annual Weblog Awards web site and managing the whole voting process.
If you are going to SXSWi, please come join us on Monday 3/16 at 12:30pm at the Day Stage for the Bloggies!
If you are like me, you have found your web browsing managed by a feed reader that alerts you when web sites, blogs, and other subscription based web spaces make an update. But not every web site out there in the big wide world of the web has a subscription or a feed available... Shock! Horror! How 1999!
So, I have a few bookmarked that I like to visit but for various reasons they aren't on my feed reader or don't have a feed be it atom or rss or rdf or feedburner.
My favorite non-feed web site that I check every day is the Interactive Global Composite Weather Satellite Images page from NASA. This page allows me to see the most recent set of satellite images from the Pacific and see what weather is coming California's way. It also allows me to see the Pacific Ocean and the nations on its rim as a whole rather than a set of disjointed far away places. Truly fun and lovely.
Best of all, you can animate up to the last 30 satellite images to see how the storms are tracking across the Pacific. The only sad thing is that due to various weather satellite agreements, most of Europe, Asia, and Africa are blacked out. Grrr... Give me the whole globe!
What websites do you go to every day that are not in your feed reader, so you either have them bookmarked or actually type out the URL old school style?
Tonight at dinner, Erika and I had a long talk about my Facebook post from last night: how each of us use it, why I hate it, and why it is the first social network site that she has really gotten into. We talked at length about synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, public vs. private, the open web vs. the closed web (like MySpace or Facebook), preferred modes of communication, and which worked better when. It was a great conversation over excellent food at Fu Rai Bo in West LA.
All the while we were discussing Facebook and styles of communication an early 20s-something couple next to us was on a date and the whole time the girl kept taking phone calls and texting, all the while she was leaning across the table to smooch the fellow. When they left, I pointed out the extreme difference to Erika.
Not once during dinner did either Erika or I touch our mobile phones, I did not take photos or check my email, she did not take any phone calls. We talked. Then again, we weren't on a date, just having a fun debate over issues. Yet, the youngsters were completely ok with continuous partial attention and smooching in between communicative interruptions.
One of the things that Erika pointed out to me during our discussion, of which she should know as we have been friends for over 18 years now, is that if I strongly don't like something then it is a guarantee that 80% of the rest of the planet will strongly like it. I have a problem with intuitively not being mainstream. Thus, if I don't like Facebook, you should probably go buy stock in it. Well, if they were public that is.
I got home tonight and found this post over at The Spittoon and have concluded that I must not be "Miss Con-GENE-iality":
If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame.
While I am good at keeping up with a wide circle of networks, I don't enjoy nor have I gotten sucked into Facebook. As I stated to Erika tonight, it really comes down to the open web vs. the closed web and how services like Facebook & MySpace encourage folks to remain in the closed web and get dumbed down by the confined space. Erika argued that folks like the convenience of the closed web spaces like Facebook & MySpace that allows folks to do everything in one place.
I don't want the internet to become an slightly more interactive version of the brain dead Boob Tube (TV), but a place where folks can grow and become more creative and alive.
I have social networking fatigue and I have had it for years.
I jumped on my first alt.music board/list in 1994 and have been full bore ahead on mailing lists, alt.music, bulletin boards, message boards, groups, friendster, myspace, flickr, twitter, facebook, jaiku, ad finitum, ad nauseum ever since. Fifteen years later, I alternately love the online spaces that allow me to really connect and be fed by others, and I am overwhelmed by the ones that sap my attention and energy.
I hate chat/IM/AIM and text/sms is not far behind in my book, as they both demand that one reply immediately and in a shallow fashion. I really do prefer asynchronous communication in which I can take the time to reply in depth if necessary to instant now chat. I prefer to be able to check in on [insert name of service] when I have the time and post / reply at my leisure. It is for this same reason that I only pick up about half of the phone calls I receive. As a bouncy adult who is easily distracted, I have learned that I need to think before I respond.
As a creative who has had her own consultancy / freelance web design & development business since August of 2000, I have learned that if I want to be a good little citizen and pay my bills on time I really need to focus on the task(s) at hand when I am working.
While continuous partial attention may be a great catch phrase for the current cultural zeitgeist, if I practice it at any length it will toss me out of my house and I will be living in my car. My car, while wonderful, does not have a comfy bed & a hot shower. Thus, I need to focus and concentrate on work and the online leisure activities that feed my life and soul - like blogging, researching, creating, and communicating in a constructive manner.
Ok, so that is my explanation for preferring email & phone calls and avoiding chat & texting. Now let's talk about social networks....
I have read up and checked out the Google AppEngine in a cursory fashion a couple of times in the last few months, even to the point of signing up for an invite before it was publicly open and downloading the SDK. But life and work and play were too busy, so I didn't have time to really delve into GAE with any intent and real application.
Until today. Last Friday night, a much admired friend passed away in a car accident and on Sunday I was asked if I would develop a memorial web application for friends, family, and colleagues to post photos and stories up. I said yes and ran through my head quickly all the possible ways we could do it. Given the resources at hand it seemed that PHP, be it hand rolled or Cake PHP would be the only approach to take given the time & server constraints. Yikes.
I really struggle with PHP, I dislike all the verbage, punctuation, and braces. When I am able to make a whole app work in it, I am vastly relieved. But most of the time the butt kicking that PHP delivers is greater than my feelings of accomplishment.
One of the things that I do adore about Python and Ruby is that they both are lean and make sense. There is not butt kicking, only happy writing, testing and deploying. Except most host servers don't like one to run a good Python or Ruby framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails. So if a client or friend already has a server and a domain and wants to move forward fast, much of the time Django and Ruby on Rails gets ruled out. Thus, the evils of PHP reassert themselves.
After sending most of yesterday and this morning debating of how I should plan and construct the memorial site, a meteor of insight flashed through my head... Google App Engine.
GAE is free (for now), uses Python and Django (happy days!!!!), it has great tutorials on top of all the Google resources. No reinventing the wheels with PHP and/or Cake PHP.
So this afternoon I started experimenting with GAE and discovered very quickly that between its webapp extension and the images/Picasa API that I would be able to develop the whole memorial application with very little fuss and stress.
Here is a quote from an email that I sent to the folks organizing the memorial:
Google AppEngine is a dreamy love bug of a dev environment, I may have to marry it. PHP is formally now dead to me. Normally 6 hours into a dev project I am not happy but really really really really really frustrated and writing snarky twitters about how much I *hate* PHP. But no... Love love love love the Google.
Google, thank you for making my life easier today when I would rather be crying than developing.
Dear Yahoo Executives,
If you are wondering why your company is failing, it is because you don't get the internet.
What were you all thinking last week when you decided to layoff one of the founding employees who is now one of the two most public facing and world popular employees of your most important property?
After this bonehead move of exceedingly bad strategy and timing, everyone involved in the decision to layoff George Oates should be fired asap.
Sincerely, Jenifer Hanen
*******
Update from Tues 12.16.08:
Jeremy and Jeffrey both weigh in on George getting laid off.
Now that video is all the rage, Flash seems to have been sidelined to banner ads, games, and corporate websites.
I miss the days of silly, homemade, whimsical* Flash animations with very little purpose. While I am not a big fan of all Flash websites in which most of the time I immediately exit, I do like fun Flash.
Where have all the silly Flash animations gone? Are art students and high school students too broke to buy the education version Flash from Adobe and don't have a crack code? Are they too deep into WOW/Wii/XBox/etc and celebrating 4:20 to create their own Flash silliness? Are they too used to the Facebook & MySpace communities to put up their own websites?
Do you have a favorite fun Flash that has been created in the last 2 years?
************
* Let's not even talk about silly, off the wall animated gifs...
The video(s) from the Nokia Open Lab 2008 are now up on the Ovi channel.
For all the attendees who were baffled as to why we were invited and what the purpose of the Lab was, in the part 2 of Jari Pasanen's introduction to the Nokia Open Lab event, he states what, as VP of Strategy, he was hoping to get out of the event:
"How we can actually improve the communication dialogue between guys like your self, because you also are not only leaders but also censors. You have a lot of understanding where this business is going. Nokia is now moving fast into the internet business. We are not saying we are an internet company. We still have our legacy, we are a mobile phone company, even though we call some of our products 'multimedia computers'...."
As I have watched some of the video from the event that is up on the Nokia Open Lab Ovi Channel, it has helped me to more clearly remember was was said, but... and this is a big but, I am even more forcefully struck then I was at the time by the lack of women present. The four of us who were invited did talk about the lack of women during the event and were told when we asked that more women were invited but couldn't make it.
In the video(s) of the Lab, it appears that Nokia's interest in brainstorming and/ or the experts about mobile and the interwebs' is only a guy thing. Yes, Anne, Micki, and I are featured in the videos (sorry, I haven't seen Rebecca yet in the vidstream), but the greater majority of the event invitees are men (4 women, over 35 men).
Where was Darla? Where was Cat? Where was Rita? There are a lot of women in mobile and internet who have expertise that should be shared with Nokia at an event like Open Lab.
If we are to take Jari's introduction seriously and statement that the Open Lab was a way for internet folk to share their expertise with Nokia, then there were many women with expertise in social media, blogging, media, creation, and the internet who could have been invited, such as: Danah Boyd. Lynne D. Johnson. Sharanya Manivannan. Jen Beckman. Anne Galloway. Megan McMillan. Molly Wright Steenson.
Just sayin'. For next time.
Also, next time, 2 or 3 days of workshopping / discussions / brainstorming would be better than 1.5 days. We were just getting comfortable to really get down to the issues when it was time to go home.
Go watch the videos on the Nokia Open Lab Ovi Channel, there is some good stuff there. And some funny stuff as well. ;o)
All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.
All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.
The synopsis of the very first ever Nokia Open Lab 2008 is below the "fold" (aka click on the continue reading bit)...
Continue reading Nokia Open Lab 2008 - Day 2 - The Big Day.
All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.
Wed. 09.10.08 and Thurs. 09.11.08 - Thus the Nokia Open Lab 2008 starts off with travel from Seal Beach, California at an ungodly hour of the morning on Wednesday (ie before 5am) to get to LAX in time for a 7am (!!!!) flight to New York's JFK airport before transferring on to Helsinki via Finnair.
My neighbor Earl was so kind as to give me a ride to LAX before the crack of dawn even thought of getting up. The flight from LAX -> JFK was wonderful due to the lovely inflight GoGo wifi, as previously documented. At JFK, Micki and I stopped for lunch at an amusing "bistro" that was themed as a New York cop bar with the servers in fake police uniforms.
The plane ride from New York to Helsinki was uneventful, in that there was no wifi, and my poor rowmate, Rahul Nair, got a chatty Ms. Jen (sorry, Rahul...). But hey! Rahul was a part of the team that was responsible for Zonetag and Zurfer. Oh how I would have liked to have met him 2 years ago when I was working on the Around Ireland project. In my defense, it was an 8 hour flight to Helsinki and Rahul has been working in geo-location for a couple of years... ;o)
Continue reading Nokia Open Lab 2008 - Day 0 -> Day 1 - Traveling from LAX to Helsinki.
Is blogging a writing / posting activity that one does with a specific web based content software that allows one to publish to a website chronologically or is it a writing / posting activity that is about keeping a web log of one's life / thoughts irregardless of software running the web site?
If the second, then I have been keeping a weblog (self-publishing) in one form or another since 1996, when I put up my first internet homepage on my exciting 6 megs of space on the Boston University web servers (ACS3, if you must know). From 1997-1998, I had a home page over on the earthlink.net servers. From 1999 - 2003, I hand coded pages of writing and photos at the Barflies.net. And from 2003 to present, I have used Movable Type software at Blackphoebe.com and barflies.net to publish my thoughts and photos.
All this being said, if blogging is a software than my biggest influences were Ben & Mena Trott at SXSWi 2003. If blogging is a community, then Jish is my biggest influence, as he was the first person to be nice to me and invite me into the group at SXSWi 2003 (previous to that, I was an outsider from the Music world).
Previous to attending the first BlogHer in 2005, I had no idea who Dooce was, other than folks I know liked her blog. My first inkling into the web celebrity that is Heather Armstrong is when I was getting out of the car at the parking lot of the Westin Hotel pre-BlogHer 2005, and one of my friends got out of our car and shrieked, "DOOOOOOOOCE!" as loud as humanly possible.
The tall, blonde female person getting out of the car next to us looked horrified. I was mortified and busied myself with unloading the car. While I had not read Dooce's blog up to this point, but I understood in that instant the full power of internet celebrity. One would think it was 1964 and the Beatles had just landed.
During that first one day BlogHer conference in the summer of 2005, I was both excited by being at an event that was for and by women bloggers and more than a bit alienated by the whole thing. All my web related conference attendance up to this point was SXSW Interactive, which does have many bloggers but the focus is quite different. What I did like about the first BlogHer was how homegrown it was and friendly.
The same group of us, plus a few more, traveled up to San Jose late July 2006 for the second BlogHer. This one I spoke at and once again met folks that I would not have otherwise crossed paths with. Yet again, there were aspects to BlogHer that were just plain weird, mostly some of the interpersonal communication and overt familiarity, as well as judgments that folks made about others just based on their blogs genre (mommy bloggers vs. the business bloggers) or by the content on the blog. Odd but true.
The last two BlogHers (2007 & 2008), I did not attend due to other commitments. I did seriously consider going this year, as this would be the only place to meet up with a whole set of great bloggers who don't attend SXSW or other tech events. But in the end, the price of staying in San Francisco, project deadlines in July, and the general weirdness at the other 2 BlogHers I attended kept me away.
Why bring this all up now?
Continue reading Blogging, BlogHer, and Dooce.
Can someone please give me three good reasons why I should renew my AIGA Membership?
My first year of $295 - really only good for email spam for events that are completely irrelevant to web design and you have to pay more money to attend the event that the email spam was promoting - AIGA membership has seemed quite useless. At least once as week, I become beyond irritated by either the AIGA mothership or AIGA Los Angeles for sending yet *another* email for the same event that they have already emailed me about four times in the last month.
I have a hard time defending a $295 fee to join a professional organization that is so web clueless. The mothership in New York recently sent me a very designed professional packet on why I should renew, of which I looked at and thought, "Oh, that is where the membership fee is going to... High end printing. Huh."
Where is the web related events? Where are the free events for folks who have already spent their $295 for the year? Where are the just plain networking get togethers?
I am not interested in driving up to LA to see some ultra special human speak on (fill in black here) design and pay $25-40 for the privilege on top of my $295 yearly fee. I would spend $5-10 for a happy hour cocktail party to meet other SoCal designers of all stripes, but those types of events are never organized.
Web professionals who are also AIGA members who don't live in NYC or SF, please tell me why you are a member or remain one after the first rip off year?
If you can't give me a good reason, should we maybe form a professional organization for web based designers?
This week Sandra and I are working on an iteration or somewhat-redesign of her Debutante Clothing blog. The other night I went over to her house and used a photo of Justin's sister to make a big bold splash of a banner header.
But by the time I got home and all through yesterday day, I felt it was too bold for the rest of Sandra's blog and overwhelmed the content. This afternoon, I plugged my Wacom tablet in, turned on Fireworks, opened up the photo of the roses outside of Sandra's front door that I took on Tuesday evening and started to draw over the photo with colors from her blog.
I wasn't sure if Sandra would like the drawing for her masthead or if she liked our big bold statement, or if I should take the the drawn over roses and weave them into the new masthead I created on Tuesday evening.
Tuesday Evening's Masthead:
This Afternoon's Rose additions to the Bold Banner:
Now looking at the two ideas above, I thought of a subtler iteration:
What do you think?
About two weeks ago, I received an invitation to join a Flickr beta test. I was intrigued, so I said yes. I had to sign an NDA stating that for the love of a tasty chicken I would not breath a blog, twitter, or in person word that I was beta testing Flickr Video. Yes, Flickr can have my silence in return for uploading 60 seconds of various tasty chickens from India, SXSW 2008, and Scruffy & Belle.
Oh, what a delight. I have had quite a bit of fun over the last 2 weeks uploading videos, really participating in a Flickr group in a way that I have not been interested in or invested enough in before, and watching with baited breath what folks would post as their videos. And then there was the Fridget meme that Derek started...
In all truthfulness, while I appreciate YouTube, Google Video, and Vimeo, I am not drawn into these services. I don't wait to see what will be posted, I only go when someone else sends me a link. If the video is longer than 5 minutes, I don't watch, be it too much work or just plain not interested.
It has been very different with Flickr Video. I am drawn in. I love the short format of 60 to 90 seconds. As the Flickr folk said - think of it as a long photograph. I also love the fact that I can use the same uploader and same Flickr tagging and interface that I use for photos. The user interface is simple and easy to use and not just because I am used to it.
Most of all, I am having fun with video on Flickr in a way that has never been fun before. Thanks, Flickr! Y'all rock.
Sun 03.09.08 - Today is the Big Day. George Kelly and I will be conducting our Web Standards Confession Booth "Core Conversation" in the Ballroom E of the Austin Convention Center at 3:30pm.
Come on down, drop by, etc. to participate in the conversation and/or to give your confession. ;o)
While web usability experts and designers decry the horizontal scroll, I believe that it has its a rightful place on the web. I actually love it when an art or experimental site shakes up the convention of vertical scroll by defying our expectations of usage. Design Melt Down also believes that there is a place for the horizontal scroll.
Banksy's use of the horizontal scroll with big huge images of his outdoor work rocks. Then again, Banksy rocks. The page is even named horizontal_1.htm.
Keep rockin' the guerilla art & web, Banksy...
At SXSW Interactive 2006, an acquaintance of mine asked, "What do you do?"
This was not an intro question trying to find out who I was and what I did for a living upon first meeting, but a derisory question meant to belittle by someone who had known me for over a year or two by that time and knew my profession.
I was a bit stunned, "You know what I do. I am a web designer and mobile blogger."
The Acquaintance stated, "No, I am asking what do you do? Have you written a book? What conferences have you spoken at? etc."
What the acquaintance was really getting at was who was I and where did I rank in web hierarchy. I am here to tell you that I did not add up in the acquaintance's book. I did not matter in this person's world because I had not aggressively carved out a territory to have, to hold, and to defend in the new internet bubble known as "Web 2.0".
I was a bit bewildered by the whole conversation and later it offended my flat hierarchy punk rock ethos. I may have forgotten about it, except it happened a couple of more times over the course of the year with several other professional acquaintances.
Since I have finished my Master's program nearly a year ago, I have felt a great deal of pressure, both internally and externally, to carve out a territory, be it web design for developers or mobile design or mobile practices or ... or ... I have spoken to / met with 3 tech publishing house acquisition editors about the possibility of writing a book. I have spoken at two conferences and a few university speaking engagements on web design and mobile practices. While I love speaking and teaching, the very idea of writing tech book leaves me cold.
But most of all, I have been examining my motives and desires. During the third editor meeting last week, I stated out loud, "I love creating web sites and art, I am not sure I want to write a book."
My non-existent business manager would have given me a good talking to and possibly a swift kick in the rear, but I don't care. It is true. I most desire to create.
Be the creations art, photography, ideas, web design, a web app, a great meal, a blog post, or a coptic bound handmade book, I want to make things. I want to share ideas. I want be a blessing to others.
All the carving of territories that is currently happening in web design & development makes me nervous. No, not really nervous, it makes me shy away. Watching the internet that I have loved so dearly the last 13 years go from a wild place with lots of crazy ideas - a place of innovation and sharing - to a place that is slowing hardening into a place of hierarchy and territories, I want to pull out of it and go paint.
Seriously. I have an pdf application on my desktop to apply for a grant for a local studio space for LA area emerging artists. This is not a good response, as in 1994 - 1996 I purposely left the art world and all of its competition for the love of creating web sites.
A better response for me now is that while I don't care about competing for a specific slice of a web territory, I will create regardless. I don't care if the topics I could write a book on or in an article or speak on are currently or concurrently have 3-4 other higher profile web professionals jockeying for the slot as "The Expert ™". I will create. And I will share.
To this end, I will be blogging more of my ideas about the web design / dev and mobile worlds, not to carve out a territory but instead to celebrate a range of ideas. Sharing them with the internet. Hold me to this, I have been posting lots of photos but more ideas need to be flowing from this space.
Next time someone asks me, "What do you do?"
I create.
The design-o-sphere is in a twitter about the Photoshop CS3 Beta icons, but I am here to tell you that icons be darned, the real problems of the beta version is in the interface with one's Wacom tablet.
The tracking between my Wacom's pen tool and the actual mark made on the Photoshop CS3 beta image is faulty at best. I have spent two nights drawing on my Wacom tablet with Photoshop CS3 Beta and making a lot of messes, as 1/4 of the time the mark is made at least 30 pixels from where the pen was previously. A big jump with no lifting of my hand.. I have cross tested on Fireworks 8 and Photoshop CS2 with no troubles. Hopefully, Adobe will have this ironed out before CS3 goes to market.
On the good side of CS3: the glory and heavy lifter of the Photoshop CS3 Beta is the "Quick Selection Tool". Drool. Knock out whole sections of unwanted bits and then use the "Magic Wand Tool" for the fine tuning of your selection. Happy days.
Jessica Helfand at DesignObserver has written on The Ovalization of The American Mind.
One can imagine buttons being scaled to the oval circumference of an average adult fingertip, but recently it seems that the propensity for ovals has resulted in a morphologically compromised landscape of soft shapes and rounded edges. And nowhere is this more noticeable than in cars, which (with a few exceptions) have enthusiastically embraced everything rounded: fenders, dashboards, you name it. While I'm not advocating a market for squared-off odometers, it is difficult to find a car these days that doesn't look like a cartoon.
Ms. Jen echos: it is difficult to find a website these days that doesn't look like a cartoon.
While Ms. Helfand uses contemporary car and thornamental design to illustrate her points, my mind kept wandering to thoughts of the ovalization of web design. While most of the current crop of Web 2.0 web design is keeping within the ideals of geometric modernism and avoiding thornamental-ism, the oval has landed and many sites have the stylized appearance of a darkly lit neon cartoon.
I do like that designers are breaking out of the box, even ovalizing their box model, but when a web design trend takes off it really takes off and the oval, rounded cornered, neon bevel is in full flight.
The Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen Re-Design is proceeding as a for loop... in iterative steps.
The first step, after months of thinking and planning, was to work on the banner, sidebar, and type over the months of March and April.
The second step has been over the last two days, in which I have ported all my templates from Movable Type 3.0 or 3.1 (can't remember which, maybe it was 2.6 something) to MT 3.2 templates, and then refined the first steps design changes to work with the MT 3.2 template system.
Now you ask, why did I not do this last August when Movable Type 3.2 was released? Well, because the new stylesheets were designed to be a big bitch and the first few times I looked at them I shouted and cursed anyone who created a 1543 line css file (WTF!!!!). Then I spent months researching and testing other blogging systems (Word Press, et al) on private spaces to see if I should give up my three year relationship with Movable Type. But really, Word Press is not that much better in its own frustrating ways and since I am not going to home brew my own CMS ala KuraFire, I decided to go with the devil I know and love and just bite the template bullet to get the new features I want to use.
Last night I whittled the MT 3.2 CSS file down to under 350 lines and made snarky/cranky comments along the way. Tonight I worked on refining the details of the design (image placement, text, headlines, type spacing, etc) in the css and then ported all the new templates over from the test blog to Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen. Rebuild. Check on the PowerBook. Check on the Dell Inspiron. Tinker. Rebuild. Again. Again. And again...
Here is where you all come in... Please let me know how it looks in your browser. I have opened the comments up to TypeKey authentification and to moderated comments. Please tell me how the type size looks on your browser and screen resolution? Is the headline & body type readable & harmonious? Is the layout jacked up? Etc.
If there are serious errors, please send me an email (blackphoebe at gmail dot com) with a screen shot and what computer you have and what browser you are viewing the site on.
Thanks!
For the next ten minutes, I will be porting all my templates from Movable Type 3.something templates to the 3.2 templates. If this site is all jacked up, please wait until I hit the "rebuild" button.
Thank you. The Management.
Back in December I started thinking about re-designing Black Phoebe, in February I had a long flirtation with the idea, and since March I have been sketching and researching.
Well, rather than a Big CSS Reboot with the rest of the gang back on May 1st, I am going to be web 2.0 trendy and implement incremental or iterative design.
1 step + 1 step, looped over time will get me a new design. And so it has started. Watch the i++.
Around Christmas time, I started to think about the visual and conceptual design of this site, as it has gotten too cluttered from my personal tastes, besides the redesign itch had hit.
I have been thinking about moving towards a layout where there would be one big photo, a set of thumbnails of the last 5 photos, and exerpts of text. But I realized that not only has that been done and I don't really like it on other sites, but that I like the long blog-form of one column of chronological posts. I like seeing the last two plus weeks of posts all willy nilly next to each other, from my cameraphone photos, to text posts, to others. But the cameraphone posts had gotten out of control and very little text, and thus ideas, are seen.
I am the woman who loves Ab Ex and Color Field paintings ( esp. Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, & Helen Frankenthaler), as well as Minimalism.
After much thought, as well as discussing with others, I have decided to only post a photo or two a day from my cameraphone here and the rest of the output will go to my flickr account. I also promised myself that I would write more often, as I am interested in the intersection of text and image, not just image all the time. Rather than a redesign, less cluttered content, and more integration of image and text.
My next step is to de-clutter the right hand links sidebar. I have been trying to find a standards compliant DOM script link toggle so that the site visitor would see the headlines and when you rollover the headline, the links would come down.
After months of telling myself I would do it, I did.
I have worked out a tweak or small re-design of the blackphoebe.com front page and have given this blog a new banner, as well as made all the sub-pages of the blog consistent with the site design, and I added the Category names to each post.
Check it out. What thinkest thou?
A few notes about the current process of design around these parts:
1) I hope that I have fixed the Safari bug in terms on the creeping nav/links section. I found a free-range div tag with the help of the WC3 Validator. Safari users, please let me know if this has fixed the problem.
2) I realize that if the viewer/reader is coming in on a 800 x 600 resolution then the photos will be squeezing into the nav/links section. My logs tell me that most of you, over 70 some odd percent, are using 1024 x 768 or higher resolution. My apologies but I do want to use bigger photos or photos in sets of three.
That is it for now. Happy Saturday.
Construction Update:
Two days ago, Jay kindly emailed me to let me know that my right navigation bar / links section was not floating to the right as it should, but was instead down at the very bottom of the page. Jay uses Safari for Mac. I waited for my roommate Lauren to return home, asked her to power up her Mac and I went to look at this site via Safari... lo and behold... no navigation bar on the right, it was down at the bottom.
I have now tinkered with the CSS, so that the right nav/links bar is working in Mozilla for PC, IE 6.0 for PC, and IE 5.5 for PC. Can you please check on the various Mac browsers and other PC browsers for me and let me know if the page is working properly? Just give a heads up on what is working and what is not in the comments to this post. Thanks!
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri 06.26.09 - Jon Hicks and Andy Budd enjoying the sunshine outside of the Southbank Royal (something) Hall near Waterloo Station, London. About a half hour later, or as the cat herding organizers turn, a group of us walked over the bridge, through Leicester Sq, up into Soho to go have dinner to the same delicious Thai restaurant that Andy took my Mom and I to in Nov of 2007 and whose name I have forgotten now. The said Thai place was able to seat 14 of us with no reservation after a small wait on a Friday night. They Rock. If I could just remember the name...
A nice Google search has yielded the name - Busaba Eathai at 106 Wardour St. Delicious.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri 06.26.09 - Two of the bestest, dearest gentlemen on the planet: Steve Lawson and James Whatley.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Fri 06.26.09 - This morning I had the most delightful time at the Tuttle Club London, which due to a music conference at the ICA was held on the deck of a cafe in St. James Park just across the Mall from the ICA. Being in the park, on a deck, surrounded by grass and trees on such a lovely, sunny morning was the most delightful summery thing I can think of doing in London. Esp. when said activity includes great conversations with like minded geeks.
I think the Tuttle Club LA (LB) needs to meet outside sometime this summer.
If the folks at Starcut are going to proudly announce that they mobilize brands and media and charge a newspaper to mobilize the said newspaper's website, then they should educate themselves on the standards of the mobile user experience.
Major rule of the mobile web: Give the User a Choice. Don't assume that they want the full website or that they want a reduced site for mobile. Just because a script has detected that the browser coming to the site is a mobile browser, doesn't mean the reader/user wants to be forced into a locked sandbox with no exit. Don't assume that every user wants to reduce their data usage, some of us have unlimited plans. Give the user a choice.
Here are a few examples of Mobile Sites that do the User Experience right by giving the reader/user a choice to either view the mobile version or to switch over to the "classic", "full", "regular" version of the website:
Why does this matter? Well, not every Nokia or Sony Ericsson or Blackberry or insert name of mobile device is a smartphone with Opera Mini or a version of the Webkit or Gecko mobile browsers, but then again, not every Nokia or Sony or Blackberry or other mobile device is a simple device with a simple mobile web browser.
I think it is great that more and more websites offer mobile versions that are stripped down and load fast for mobile devices, but if you are going to strip out choice along with kilobytes, this is not good.
My Nokia N95 has a full featured web browser that renders most websites, except heavily AJAX sites, quite nicely. I have an unlimited data plan. Between my Nokia's browser and my data plan, I want to see the full version of most websites unless I need information quickly and then the mobile version is usually fine.
Not yesterday.
Yesterday, I left the house in a rush to meet up with Lauren Isaacson in Encino so that we could have lunch together before she departs for Vancouver. I was heading north on the 405 and passing the Long Beach Airport when I realized that I left my paper copy of the LA Times Food section. So, I did what I would normally do in this situation, I opened my Nokia's web browser and typed "latimes.com", instead of getting the usual, full web version of the LA Times website, I was forced into the mobile version of the site with no exit out.
No link to the full version. No links to the Food section. No ability to get out of the reduced web version. I then went to Google to search for the article and the Google search took me back to the front page of the mobile site with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com. Here is the mobile site that I saw with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com at either the top of the mobile page nor at the bottom:
I was very frustrated.
I was mad in the immediate situation of trying to locate information that was still live on the full version of the website but I was unable to get to the information because the mobile version of the site did not let me go there. I was mad as a web & mobile user experience designer to experience bad UX design first hand. I was frustrated that Starcut has probably charged the LA Times a lot of money to piss off loyal readers like me.
In the end, I had to use a desktop computer at Lauren's parent's house to search the LA Times' website for the article on the restaurant we were to go to. Itzik Hagadol is excellent, especially their 20 salads for $8.99.
But the lack of ability to exit the LA Times's mobile site from a mobile browser is not excellent. It would be excellent if Starcut would revisit the site and add a simple link at the top or the bottom of each mobile page, giving the reader/user the option to go to the full non-mobile version of the site from their mobile browser.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.
Thurs 05.14.09 - Now on to color research and comparison, I am trying out different shades of aubergine. To this end, I after I dropped Scruffy McDoglet off at the groomers, I walked into India Sweet & Spices to buy little cute baby eggplants in a range of shades to see what colors of aubergine I could capture for a design I am working on.
Yes, design research with vegetables. They will make a tasty saute or bake later.
Fri. 03.27.09 - Actually the Tuttle Club LA was not born yesterday, but a month ago today, though the super cheap bagels at the Library in Long Beach apparently were born yesterday.
When Steve and Lobelia Lawson were out in the LA area for the NAMM show, Steve told Geoff Hickman and myself that we should start a Tuttle Club for LA. Well, due to the busy-ness of January, February and March, I was out of the picture on any organization, but Geoff and Francine Kinzner did get on top of things and started LA/LB/OC's own social media club, modeled after London's Tuttle Club, four weeks ago on Feb. 27, 2009.
Today was the 3rd Tuttle LA, but it was my first due to my being in Arizona & Texas for the other two. I enjoyed myself. I knew 3 of the 6 folks (Jeb, Geoff, and Lauren) and got to make friends with the other 3 (Francine, Nguyen, and Mark). It was great to get out of the house and away from the computer to talk about computers, mobile, web, extra and et al, during a Friday mid-day in Long Beach.
Jeb Brilliant and I fleshed out an idea that I have had rolling around in my head for over a year now, Lauren Isaacson thought up a great domain name, and Jeb and I made a plan on how to execute the idea, all over tea and coffee at the Library on Broadway & Redondo in Long Beach. Yay!
The only downside was hanging out too long and returning to my car to find a ticket on it for parking longer than an hour. Next time - Tuttle LA #4 - I will ride my bike the 4 or so miles from Seal Beach to The Library.
Next Tuttle LA (really Tuttle LA/LB/OC):
Fri. April 10, 2009
10:30 am
@ The Library
3418 E Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90803
Here you go, the first day of Ms. Jen's panel transcripts:
Sat March 14, 2006 - SXSW Interactive
Austin, TX
11:30am - The Creative Path
Jim Coudal - Coudal Partners
Brendan Dawes - Magnetic North
Gary Hustwit - Filmmaker "Helvetica", "Objectified"
Objectified premier is at the Paramount at 5pm.
Jim Couldal:
Creative Path: show don't tell.
Speaking on Joseph Conrad, literary theory, "we are complicit in our own corruption" By the time you have finished the book or movie, the narrative leads you through your own corruption much more powerfully than if Conrad was to write an essay.
Montessori - Teaching kids to learn.
Layer Tennis - Live on Friday afternoons, two artists swap a file back and forth in real time. Continue to add to the file on top each other's work. Ultimate end is to probably to reduce productivity on Friday afternoon. Restraint and freedom, creativity comes out of the balance between the two. Keep in mind that the act and result of creation is a conversation, not a lecture.
Gary Hustwit - Seventy-five minutes and thrity-six seconds.
I make documentary films, which are linear fixed forms of media. There is no way for the viewer of the film to change the plot line, characters, destination, or duration of the film, unless they get up and leave.
How do you make a fixed documentary film to be interactive?
1. use ellipsis... Intentionally leave out information, that the viewer of the film needs to put in themselves, a moment of discovery is more compelling than if someone tells you what the story is.
What is not there, what is left out. It leave the piece open to interpretation.
Delayed gratification.
2. Make it a game. bring in puzzles.
Dialogue going on between the viewer and the film.
Timing, juxtaposition.
"If all else fails, put a dog in the film." - Gary Hustwit
Brendan Dawes -
Made a flash video editor in 1998 - Pyscho Studio - See if folks could make their own version of the pyscho shower scene.
The danger is that when you give folks things to play with, you get some weird shit. Then you realize that people are weird.
Human beings versus machines. Computer would plot an efficient line from a to be. Critical Mass by Philip Ball is where he had folks walk across a park, before they put in the paths, to see how humans used the park.
Good design is about taking things away. Gives example of traffic calming in Brighton, by having the sidewalk & street be the same space with no directions & signs -> it makes drivers slow down to 10mph and be much more aware.
Makes sketches, as sketchbooks don't run out of batteries.
doodlebuzz.com - We get complacent with interface, why can't we create new interface.
"People think these days that if you can't use an interface in 2 seconds that it is rubbish. That is rubbish." - Brendan advocates making new UIs and making the user work for it.
You can start with Britney Spears and end up with the Pope. Any interface that allows you to do that is good.
"If you don't go out in the woods, nothing will never happen & your life will never begin..." Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Yes, it is that time of year again, time for SXSW Interactive and the 2009 Weblog Awards!
The Bloggies are the web's longest-running non-profit, reader voted blog awards. The votes are in and the Weblog Awards ceremony will be held on Monday, March 16th at 12:30pm (Central Time, GMT-5) at the SXSW Trade Show Day Stage.
Come join us in celebrating blogs and bloggers at SXSW Monday at lunch. If you can't make in person to the Bloggies Award Ceremony, join us on IRC, #Bloggies on irc.freenode.net, for live coverage and chat. After the ceremony the winning blogs can be found at 2009.bloggies.com.
The 9th Annual Weblog Awards Ceremony will be brought to you this Monday by Ms. Jen and George Kelly, with big ideas & help from Glenda Sims, as well as all the fabulous presenters and bloggers. Extra big thanks to Nikolai Nolan for all his hard work on the Ninth Annual Weblog Awards web site and managing the whole voting process.
If you are going to SXSWi, please come join us on Monday 3/16 at 12:30pm at the Day Stage for the Bloggies!
If you are like me, you have found your web browsing managed by a feed reader that alerts you when web sites, blogs, and other subscription based web spaces make an update. But not every web site out there in the big wide world of the web has a subscription or a feed available... Shock! Horror! How 1999!
So, I have a few bookmarked that I like to visit but for various reasons they aren't on my feed reader or don't have a feed be it atom or rss or rdf or feedburner.
My favorite non-feed web site that I check every day is the Interactive Global Composite Weather Satellite Images page from NASA. This page allows me to see the most recent set of satellite images from the Pacific and see what weather is coming California's way. It also allows me to see the Pacific Ocean and the nations on its rim as a whole rather than a set of disjointed far away places. Truly fun and lovely.
Best of all, you can animate up to the last 30 satellite images to see how the storms are tracking across the Pacific. The only sad thing is that due to various weather satellite agreements, most of Europe, Asia, and Africa are blacked out. Grrr... Give me the whole globe!
What websites do you go to every day that are not in your feed reader, so you either have them bookmarked or actually type out the URL old school style?
Tonight at dinner, Erika and I had a long talk about my Facebook post from last night: how each of us use it, why I hate it, and why it is the first social network site that she has really gotten into. We talked at length about synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, public vs. private, the open web vs. the closed web (like MySpace or Facebook), preferred modes of communication, and which worked better when. It was a great conversation over excellent food at Fu Rai Bo in West LA.
All the while we were discussing Facebook and styles of communication an early 20s-something couple next to us was on a date and the whole time the girl kept taking phone calls and texting, all the while she was leaning across the table to smooch the fellow. When they left, I pointed out the extreme difference to Erika.
Not once during dinner did either Erika or I touch our mobile phones, I did not take photos or check my email, she did not take any phone calls. We talked. Then again, we weren't on a date, just having a fun debate over issues. Yet, the youngsters were completely ok with continuous partial attention and smooching in between communicative interruptions.
One of the things that Erika pointed out to me during our discussion, of which she should know as we have been friends for over 18 years now, is that if I strongly don't like something then it is a guarantee that 80% of the rest of the planet will strongly like it. I have a problem with intuitively not being mainstream. Thus, if I don't like Facebook, you should probably go buy stock in it. Well, if they were public that is.
I got home tonight and found this post over at The Spittoon and have concluded that I must not be "Miss Con-GENE-iality":
If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame.
While I am good at keeping up with a wide circle of networks, I don't enjoy nor have I gotten sucked into Facebook. As I stated to Erika tonight, it really comes down to the open web vs. the closed web and how services like Facebook & MySpace encourage folks to remain in the closed web and get dumbed down by the confined space. Erika argued that folks like the convenience of the closed web spaces like Facebook & MySpace that allows folks to do everything in one place.
I don't want the internet to become an slightly more interactive version of the brain dead Boob Tube (TV), but a place where folks can grow and become more creative and alive.
I have social networking fatigue and I have had it for years.
I jumped on my first alt.music board/list in 1994 and have been full bore ahead on mailing lists, alt.music, bulletin boards, message boards, groups, friendster, myspace, flickr, twitter, facebook, jaiku, ad finitum, ad nauseum ever since. Fifteen years later, I alternately love the online spaces that allow me to really connect and be fed by others, and I am overwhelmed by the ones that sap my attention and energy.
I hate chat/IM/AIM and text/sms is not far behind in my book, as they both demand that one reply immediately and in a shallow fashion. I really do prefer asynchronous communication in which I can take the time to reply in depth if necessary to instant now chat. I prefer to be able to check in on [insert name of service] when I have the time and post / reply at my leisure. It is for this same reason that I only pick up about half of the phone calls I receive. As a bouncy adult who is easily distracted, I have learned that I need to think before I respond.
As a creative who has had her own consultancy / freelance web design & development business since August of 2000, I have learned that if I want to be a good little citizen and pay my bills on time I really need to focus on the task(s) at hand when I am working.
While continuous partial attention may be a great catch phrase for the current cultural zeitgeist, if I practice it at any length it will toss me out of my house and I will be living in my car. My car, while wonderful, does not have a comfy bed & a hot shower. Thus, I need to focus and concentrate on work and the online leisure activities that feed my life and soul - like blogging, researching, creating, and communicating in a constructive manner.
Ok, so that is my explanation for preferring email & phone calls and avoiding chat & texting. Now let's talk about social networks....
I have read up and checked out the Google AppEngine in a cursory fashion a couple of times in the last few months, even to the point of signing up for an invite before it was publicly open and downloading the SDK. But life and work and play were too busy, so I didn't have time to really delve into GAE with any intent and real application.
Until today. Last Friday night, a much admired friend passed away in a car accident and on Sunday I was asked if I would develop a memorial web application for friends, family, and colleagues to post photos and stories up. I said yes and ran through my head quickly all the possible ways we could do it. Given the resources at hand it seemed that PHP, be it hand rolled or Cake PHP would be the only approach to take given the time & server constraints. Yikes.
I really struggle with PHP, I dislike all the verbage, punctuation, and braces. When I am able to make a whole app work in it, I am vastly relieved. But most of the time the butt kicking that PHP delivers is greater than my feelings of accomplishment.
One of the things that I do adore about Python and Ruby is that they both are lean and make sense. There is not butt kicking, only happy writing, testing and deploying. Except most host servers don't like one to run a good Python or Ruby framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails. So if a client or friend already has a server and a domain and wants to move forward fast, much of the time Django and Ruby on Rails gets ruled out. Thus, the evils of PHP reassert themselves.
After sending most of yesterday and this morning debating of how I should plan and construct the memorial site, a meteor of insight flashed through my head... Google App Engine.
GAE is free (for now), uses Python and Django (happy days!!!!), it has great tutorials on top of all the Google resources. No reinventing the wheels with PHP and/or Cake PHP.
So this afternoon I started experimenting with GAE and discovered very quickly that between its webapp extension and the images/Picasa API that I would be able to develop the whole memorial application with very little fuss and stress.
Here is a quote from an email that I sent to the folks organizing the memorial:
Google AppEngine is a dreamy love bug of a dev environment, I may have to marry it. PHP is formally now dead to me. Normally 6 hours into a dev project I am not happy but really really really really really frustrated and writing snarky twitters about how much I *hate* PHP. But no... Love love love love the Google.
Google, thank you for making my life easier today when I would rather be crying than developing.
Dear Yahoo Executives,
If you are wondering why your company is failing, it is because you don't get the internet.
What were you all thinking last week when you decided to layoff one of the founding employees who is now one of the two most public facing and world popular employees of your most important property?
After this bonehead move of exceedingly bad strategy and timing, everyone involved in the decision to layoff George Oates should be fired asap.
Sincerely, Jenifer Hanen
*******
Update from Tues 12.16.08:
Jeremy and Jeffrey both weigh in on George getting laid off.
Now that video is all the rage, Flash seems to have been sidelined to banner ads, games, and corporate websites.
I miss the days of silly, homemade, whimsical* Flash animations with very little purpose. While I am not a big fan of all Flash websites in which most of the time I immediately exit, I do like fun Flash.
Where have all the silly Flash animations gone? Are art students and high school students too broke to buy the education version Flash from Adobe and don't have a crack code? Are they too deep into WOW/Wii/XBox/etc and celebrating 4:20 to create their own Flash silliness? Are they too used to the Facebook & MySpace communities to put up their own websites?
Do you have a favorite fun Flash that has been created in the last 2 years?
************
* Let's not even talk about silly, off the wall animated gifs...
The video(s) from the Nokia Open Lab 2008 are now up on the Ovi channel.
For all the attendees who were baffled as to why we were invited and what the purpose of the Lab was, in the part 2 of Jari Pasanen's introduction to the Nokia Open Lab event, he states what, as VP of Strategy, he was hoping to get out of the event:
"How we can actually improve the communication dialogue between guys like your self, because you also are not only leaders but also censors. You have a lot of understanding where this business is going. Nokia is now moving fast into the internet business. We are not saying we are an internet company. We still have our legacy, we are a mobile phone company, even though we call some of our products 'multimedia computers'...."
As I have watched some of the video from the event that is up on the Nokia Open Lab Ovi Channel, it has helped me to more clearly remember was was said, but... and this is a big but, I am even more forcefully struck then I was at the time by the lack of women present. The four of us who were invited did talk about the lack of women during the event and were told when we asked that more women were invited but couldn't make it.
In the video(s) of the Lab, it appears that Nokia's interest in brainstorming and/ or the experts about mobile and the interwebs' is only a guy thing. Yes, Anne, Micki, and I are featured in the videos (sorry, I haven't seen Rebecca yet in the vidstream), but the greater majority of the event invitees are men (4 women, over 35 men).
Where was Darla? Where was Cat? Where was Rita? There are a lot of women in mobile and internet who have expertise that should be shared with Nokia at an event like Open Lab.
If we are to take Jari's introduction seriously and statement that the Open Lab was a way for internet folk to share their expertise with Nokia, then there were many women with expertise in social media, blogging, media, creation, and the internet who could have been invited, such as: Danah Boyd. Lynne D. Johnson. Sharanya Manivannan. Jen Beckman. Anne Galloway. Megan McMillan. Molly Wright Steenson.
Just sayin'. For next time.
Also, next time, 2 or 3 days of workshopping / discussions / brainstorming would be better than 1.5 days. We were just getting comfortable to really get down to the issues when it was time to go home.
Go watch the videos on the Nokia Open Lab Ovi Channel, there is some good stuff there. And some funny stuff as well. ;o)
All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.
All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.
The synopsis of the very first ever Nokia Open Lab 2008 is below the "fold" (aka click on the continue reading bit)...
All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.
Wed. 09.10.08 and Thurs. 09.11.08 - Thus the Nokia Open Lab 2008 starts off with travel from Seal Beach, California at an ungodly hour of the morning on Wednesday (ie before 5am) to get to LAX in time for a 7am (!!!!) flight to New York's JFK airport before transferring on to Helsinki via Finnair.
My neighbor Earl was so kind as to give me a ride to LAX before the crack of dawn even thought of getting up. The flight from LAX -> JFK was wonderful due to the lovely inflight GoGo wifi, as previously documented. At JFK, Micki and I stopped for lunch at an amusing "bistro" that was themed as a New York cop bar with the servers in fake police uniforms.
The plane ride from New York to Helsinki was uneventful, in that there was no wifi, and my poor rowmate, Rahul Nair, got a chatty Ms. Jen (sorry, Rahul...). But hey! Rahul was a part of the team that was responsible for Zonetag and Zurfer. Oh how I would have liked to have met him 2 years ago when I was working on the Around Ireland project. In my defense, it was an 8 hour flight to Helsinki and Rahul has been working in geo-location for a couple of years... ;o)
Is blogging a writing / posting activity that one does with a specific web based content software that allows one to publish to a website chronologically or is it a writing / posting activity that is about keeping a web log of one's life / thoughts irregardless of software running the web site?
If the second, then I have been keeping a weblog (self-publishing) in one form or another since 1996, when I put up my first internet homepage on my exciting 6 megs of space on the Boston University web servers (ACS3, if you must know). From 1997-1998, I had a home page over on the earthlink.net servers. From 1999 - 2003, I hand coded pages of writing and photos at the Barflies.net. And from 2003 to present, I have used Movable Type software at Blackphoebe.com and barflies.net to publish my thoughts and photos.
All this being said, if blogging is a software than my biggest influences were Ben & Mena Trott at SXSWi 2003. If blogging is a community, then Jish is my biggest influence, as he was the first person to be nice to me and invite me into the group at SXSWi 2003 (previous to that, I was an outsider from the Music world).
Previous to attending the first BlogHer in 2005, I had no idea who Dooce was, other than folks I know liked her blog. My first inkling into the web celebrity that is Heather Armstrong is when I was getting out of the car at the parking lot of the Westin Hotel pre-BlogHer 2005, and one of my friends got out of our car and shrieked, "DOOOOOOOOCE!" as loud as humanly possible.
The tall, blonde female person getting out of the car next to us looked horrified. I was mortified and busied myself with unloading the car. While I had not read Dooce's blog up to this point, but I understood in that instant the full power of internet celebrity. One would think it was 1964 and the Beatles had just landed.
During that first one day BlogHer conference in the summer of 2005, I was both excited by being at an event that was for and by women bloggers and more than a bit alienated by the whole thing. All my web related conference attendance up to this point was SXSW Interactive, which does have many bloggers but the focus is quite different. What I did like about the first BlogHer was how homegrown it was and friendly.
The same group of us, plus a few more, traveled up to San Jose late July 2006 for the second BlogHer. This one I spoke at and once again met folks that I would not have otherwise crossed paths with. Yet again, there were aspects to BlogHer that were just plain weird, mostly some of the interpersonal communication and overt familiarity, as well as judgments that folks made about others just based on their blogs genre (mommy bloggers vs. the business bloggers) or by the content on the blog. Odd but true.
The last two BlogHers (2007 & 2008), I did not attend due to other commitments. I did seriously consider going this year, as this would be the only place to meet up with a whole set of great bloggers who don't attend SXSW or other tech events. But in the end, the price of staying in San Francisco, project deadlines in July, and the general weirdness at the other 2 BlogHers I attended kept me away.
Why bring this all up now?
Can someone please give me three good reasons why I should renew my AIGA Membership?
My first year of $295 - really only good for email spam for events that are completely irrelevant to web design and you have to pay more money to attend the event that the email spam was promoting - AIGA membership has seemed quite useless. At least once as week, I become beyond irritated by either the AIGA mothership or AIGA Los Angeles for sending yet *another* email for the same event that they have already emailed me about four times in the last month.
I have a hard time defending a $295 fee to join a professional organization that is so web clueless. The mothership in New York recently sent me a very designed professional packet on why I should renew, of which I looked at and thought, "Oh, that is where the membership fee is going to... High end printing. Huh."
Where is the web related events? Where are the free events for folks who have already spent their $295 for the year? Where are the just plain networking get togethers?
I am not interested in driving up to LA to see some ultra special human speak on (fill in black here) design and pay $25-40 for the privilege on top of my $295 yearly fee. I would spend $5-10 for a happy hour cocktail party to meet other SoCal designers of all stripes, but those types of events are never organized.
Web professionals who are also AIGA members who don't live in NYC or SF, please tell me why you are a member or remain one after the first rip off year?
If you can't give me a good reason, should we maybe form a professional organization for web based designers?
This week Sandra and I are working on an iteration or somewhat-redesign of her Debutante Clothing blog. The other night I went over to her house and used a photo of Justin's sister to make a big bold splash of a banner header.
But by the time I got home and all through yesterday day, I felt it was too bold for the rest of Sandra's blog and overwhelmed the content. This afternoon, I plugged my Wacom tablet in, turned on Fireworks, opened up the photo of the roses outside of Sandra's front door that I took on Tuesday evening and started to draw over the photo with colors from her blog.
I wasn't sure if Sandra would like the drawing for her masthead or if she liked our big bold statement, or if I should take the the drawn over roses and weave them into the new masthead I created on Tuesday evening.
Tuesday Evening's Masthead:
This Afternoon's Rose additions to the Bold Banner:
Now looking at the two ideas above, I thought of a subtler iteration:
What do you think?
About two weeks ago, I received an invitation to join a Flickr beta test. I was intrigued, so I said yes. I had to sign an NDA stating that for the love of a tasty chicken I would not breath a blog, twitter, or in person word that I was beta testing Flickr Video. Yes, Flickr can have my silence in return for uploading 60 seconds of various tasty chickens from India, SXSW 2008, and Scruffy & Belle.
Oh, what a delight. I have had quite a bit of fun over the last 2 weeks uploading videos, really participating in a Flickr group in a way that I have not been interested in or invested enough in before, and watching with baited breath what folks would post as their videos. And then there was the Fridget meme that Derek started...
In all truthfulness, while I appreciate YouTube, Google Video, and Vimeo, I am not drawn into these services. I don't wait to see what will be posted, I only go when someone else sends me a link. If the video is longer than 5 minutes, I don't watch, be it too much work or just plain not interested.
It has been very different with Flickr Video. I am drawn in. I love the short format of 60 to 90 seconds. As the Flickr folk said - think of it as a long photograph. I also love the fact that I can use the same uploader and same Flickr tagging and interface that I use for photos. The user interface is simple and easy to use and not just because I am used to it.
Most of all, I am having fun with video on Flickr in a way that has never been fun before. Thanks, Flickr! Y'all rock.
Sun 03.09.08 - Today is the Big Day. George Kelly and I will be conducting our Web Standards Confession Booth "Core Conversation" in the Ballroom E of the Austin Convention Center at 3:30pm.
Come on down, drop by, etc. to participate in the conversation and/or to give your confession. ;o)
While web usability experts and designers decry the horizontal scroll, I believe that it has its a rightful place on the web. I actually love it when an art or experimental site shakes up the convention of vertical scroll by defying our expectations of usage. Design Melt Down also believes that there is a place for the horizontal scroll.
Banksy's use of the horizontal scroll with big huge images of his outdoor work rocks. Then again, Banksy rocks. The page is even named horizontal_1.htm.
Keep rockin' the guerilla art & web, Banksy...
At SXSW Interactive 2006, an acquaintance of mine asked, "What do you do?"
This was not an intro question trying to find out who I was and what I did for a living upon first meeting, but a derisory question meant to belittle by someone who had known me for over a year or two by that time and knew my profession.
I was a bit stunned, "You know what I do. I am a web designer and mobile blogger."
The Acquaintance stated, "No, I am asking what do you do? Have you written a book? What conferences have you spoken at? etc."
What the acquaintance was really getting at was who was I and where did I rank in web hierarchy. I am here to tell you that I did not add up in the acquaintance's book. I did not matter in this person's world because I had not aggressively carved out a territory to have, to hold, and to defend in the new internet bubble known as "Web 2.0".
I was a bit bewildered by the whole conversation and later it offended my flat hierarchy punk rock ethos. I may have forgotten about it, except it happened a couple of more times over the course of the year with several other professional acquaintances.
Since I have finished my Master's program nearly a year ago, I have felt a great deal of pressure, both internally and externally, to carve out a territory, be it web design for developers or mobile design or mobile practices or ... or ... I have spoken to / met with 3 tech publishing house acquisition editors about the possibility of writing a book. I have spoken at two conferences and a few university speaking engagements on web design and mobile practices. While I love speaking and teaching, the very idea of writing tech book leaves me cold.
But most of all, I have been examining my motives and desires. During the third editor meeting last week, I stated out loud, "I love creating web sites and art, I am not sure I want to write a book."
My non-existent business manager would have given me a good talking to and possibly a swift kick in the rear, but I don't care. It is true. I most desire to create.
Be the creations art, photography, ideas, web design, a web app, a great meal, a blog post, or a coptic bound handmade book, I want to make things. I want to share ideas. I want be a blessing to others.
All the carving of territories that is currently happening in web design & development makes me nervous. No, not really nervous, it makes me shy away. Watching the internet that I have loved so dearly the last 13 years go from a wild place with lots of crazy ideas - a place of innovation and sharing - to a place that is slowing hardening into a place of hierarchy and territories, I want to pull out of it and go paint.
Seriously. I have an pdf application on my desktop to apply for a grant for a local studio space for LA area emerging artists. This is not a good response, as in 1994 - 1996 I purposely left the art world and all of its competition for the love of creating web sites.
A better response for me now is that while I don't care about competing for a specific slice of a web territory, I will create regardless. I don't care if the topics I could write a book on or in an article or speak on are currently or concurrently have 3-4 other higher profile web professionals jockeying for the slot as "The Expert ™". I will create. And I will share.
To this end, I will be blogging more of my ideas about the web design / dev and mobile worlds, not to carve out a territory but instead to celebrate a range of ideas. Sharing them with the internet. Hold me to this, I have been posting lots of photos but more ideas need to be flowing from this space.
Next time someone asks me, "What do you do?"
I create.
The design-o-sphere is in a twitter about the Photoshop CS3 Beta icons, but I am here to tell you that icons be darned, the real problems of the beta version is in the interface with one's Wacom tablet.
The tracking between my Wacom's pen tool and the actual mark made on the Photoshop CS3 beta image is faulty at best. I have spent two nights drawing on my Wacom tablet with Photoshop CS3 Beta and making a lot of messes, as 1/4 of the time the mark is made at least 30 pixels from where the pen was previously. A big jump with no lifting of my hand.. I have cross tested on Fireworks 8 and Photoshop CS2 with no troubles. Hopefully, Adobe will have this ironed out before CS3 goes to market.
On the good side of CS3: the glory and heavy lifter of the Photoshop CS3 Beta is the "Quick Selection Tool". Drool. Knock out whole sections of unwanted bits and then use the "Magic Wand Tool" for the fine tuning of your selection. Happy days.
Jessica Helfand at DesignObserver has written on The Ovalization of The American Mind.
One can imagine buttons being scaled to the oval circumference of an average adult fingertip, but recently it seems that the propensity for ovals has resulted in a morphologically compromised landscape of soft shapes and rounded edges. And nowhere is this more noticeable than in cars, which (with a few exceptions) have enthusiastically embraced everything rounded: fenders, dashboards, you name it. While I'm not advocating a market for squared-off odometers, it is difficult to find a car these days that doesn't look like a cartoon.
Ms. Jen echos: it is difficult to find a website these days that doesn't look like a cartoon.
While Ms. Helfand uses contemporary car and thornamental design to illustrate her points, my mind kept wandering to thoughts of the ovalization of web design. While most of the current crop of Web 2.0 web design is keeping within the ideals of geometric modernism and avoiding thornamental-ism, the oval has landed and many sites have the stylized appearance of a darkly lit neon cartoon.
I do like that designers are breaking out of the box, even ovalizing their box model, but when a web design trend takes off it really takes off and the oval, rounded cornered, neon bevel is in full flight.
The Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen Re-Design is proceeding as a for loop... in iterative steps.
The first step, after months of thinking and planning, was to work on the banner, sidebar, and type over the months of March and April.
The second step has been over the last two days, in which I have ported all my templates from Movable Type 3.0 or 3.1 (can't remember which, maybe it was 2.6 something) to MT 3.2 templates, and then refined the first steps design changes to work with the MT 3.2 template system.
Now you ask, why did I not do this last August when Movable Type 3.2 was released? Well, because the new stylesheets were designed to be a big bitch and the first few times I looked at them I shouted and cursed anyone who created a 1543 line css file (WTF!!!!). Then I spent months researching and testing other blogging systems (Word Press, et al) on private spaces to see if I should give up my three year relationship with Movable Type. But really, Word Press is not that much better in its own frustrating ways and since I am not going to home brew my own CMS ala KuraFire, I decided to go with the devil I know and love and just bite the template bullet to get the new features I want to use.
Last night I whittled the MT 3.2 CSS file down to under 350 lines and made snarky/cranky comments along the way. Tonight I worked on refining the details of the design (image placement, text, headlines, type spacing, etc) in the css and then ported all the new templates over from the test blog to Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen. Rebuild. Check on the PowerBook. Check on the Dell Inspiron. Tinker. Rebuild. Again. Again. And again...
Here is where you all come in... Please let me know how it looks in your browser. I have opened the comments up to TypeKey authentification and to moderated comments. Please tell me how the type size looks on your browser and screen resolution? Is the headline & body type readable & harmonious? Is the layout jacked up? Etc.
If there are serious errors, please send me an email (blackphoebe at gmail dot com) with a screen shot and what computer you have and what browser you are viewing the site on.
Thanks!
For the next ten minutes, I will be porting all my templates from Movable Type 3.something templates to the 3.2 templates. If this site is all jacked up, please wait until I hit the "rebuild" button.
Thank you. The Management.
Back in December I started thinking about re-designing Black Phoebe, in February I had a long flirtation with the idea, and since March I have been sketching and researching.
Well, rather than a Big CSS Reboot with the rest of the gang back on May 1st, I am going to be web 2.0 trendy and implement incremental or iterative design.
1 step + 1 step, looped over time will get me a new design. And so it has started. Watch the i++.
Around Christmas time, I started to think about the visual and conceptual design of this site, as it has gotten too cluttered from my personal tastes, besides the redesign itch had hit.
I have been thinking about moving towards a layout where there would be one big photo, a set of thumbnails of the last 5 photos, and exerpts of text. But I realized that not only has that been done and I don't really like it on other sites, but that I like the long blog-form of one column of chronological posts. I like seeing the last two plus weeks of posts all willy nilly next to each other, from my cameraphone photos, to text posts, to others. But the cameraphone posts had gotten out of control and very little text, and thus ideas, are seen.
I am the woman who loves Ab Ex and Color Field paintings ( esp. Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, & Helen Frankenthaler), as well as Minimalism.
After much thought, as well as discussing with others, I have decided to only post a photo or two a day from my cameraphone here and the rest of the output will go to my flickr account. I also promised myself that I would write more often, as I am interested in the intersection of text and image, not just image all the time. Rather than a redesign, less cluttered content, and more integration of image and text.
My next step is to de-clutter the right hand links sidebar. I have been trying to find a standards compliant DOM script link toggle so that the site visitor would see the headlines and when you rollover the headline, the links would come down.
After months of telling myself I would do it, I did.
I have worked out a tweak or small re-design of the blackphoebe.com front page and have given this blog a new banner, as well as made all the sub-pages of the blog consistent with the site design, and I added the Category names to each post.
Check it out. What thinkest thou?
A few notes about the current process of design around these parts:
1) I hope that I have fixed the Safari bug in terms on the creeping nav/links section. I found a free-range div tag with the help of the WC3 Validator. Safari users, please let me know if this has fixed the problem.
2) I realize that if the viewer/reader is coming in on a 800 x 600 resolution then the photos will be squeezing into the nav/links section. My logs tell me that most of you, over 70 some odd percent, are using 1024 x 768 or higher resolution. My apologies but I do want to use bigger photos or photos in sets of three.
That is it for now. Happy Saturday.
Construction Update:
Two days ago, Jay kindly emailed me to let me know that my right navigation bar / links section was not floating to the right as it should, but was instead down at the very bottom of the page. Jay uses Safari for Mac. I waited for my roommate Lauren to return home, asked her to power up her Mac and I went to look at this site via Safari... lo and behold... no navigation bar on the right, it was down at the bottom.
I have now tinkered with the CSS, so that the right nav/links bar is working in Mozilla for PC, IE 6.0 for PC, and IE 5.5 for PC. Can you please check on the various Mac browsers and other PC browsers for me and let me know if the page is working properly? Just give a heads up on what is working and what is not in the comments to this post. Thanks!
