DC Design Talks, Viget Labs

I’m attending DC Design talks, from the people who brought you RefreshDC.

9:15 – Web Typography / Samantha Warren

Companion Visuals

Samantha starts off by talking about her love of type, Mrs. Eaves, and DIN.
She says: “Good web typography is a balance of expression and communication under constraints.”
Posts a list of safe fonts for the screen
recommends typetester to test your foint choices and copy.
Matthew Carter…rules.
66 characters for line width is ideal
Lots of tips and tricks.

Mentions the crystal goblet, declares it out of date.

Repeated mention of Information Architects Japan.

I would like to see some examples of typography in non-design, non web people atmosphere. All the examples are form web design, IA, code workshops, and others within the world of web type. When highliting Khoi Vinh’s grid prowess, why not show NYTimes.com?

Q&A Afterwards brings up a big, gaping issue missing form the presentation: what about flash: embedded, searchable, with accurate presentation. What’s not to love?

10:00 – Creating a Component Library / Nathan Curtis

So this Nathan Curtis guy is the other half of the team that created Eight Shapes here in DC. Uses legos and star wars (and Star wars legos) as metaphors to describe the process.

The component library is essentially equivalent to having all the legos of a kit laid out, easy to understand, from the beginning.

Look at a website, or ‘view’, break it into pieces. These are components.

Gives an example with National Geographic.com, overlays component pieces. Now shows he uses the Adobe bridge to manage a library of wireframe components and drops the into InDesign to create wireframes.

The key is to have a wireframing, visual design, and code working in harmony.

Not taking many notes….listening. This guy is a pro. Totally comprehensive perspective and presentation.

How to build? Discover > Organiza > Build > Document > promote > Distribute > maintain > Teach

They actually print out websites and cut them up, pasting them on paper in the way you want to maintain the library. then, translate that into a sreadsheet, and begin to structure and maintain the library. Document the system in an internal or web-based system. Distribute and promote.

Globe, nav, spotlight, content, sidebar, footer

10:45 – Speaking in Styles / Jason Cranford Teague

Starts with an exercise, we all draw a shape, one volunteer tries to communicate to jason how to make the shape, and it’s a disaster.

Focus on these:
HTML – structure
javascript – funtionality
CSS – presentation

DOM – Document object model: a way of describin the things on your page.

HTML defines the DOM, CSS< designs it, js transforms it, adds the interactivity.

CSS is a stylesheet language.
CSS is for developers and designers.
CSS is easy to learn as long as you understand syntax, semantics, and structure.
CSS can handle your layouts.
CSS has a fari amount of browser inconsistencies.

CSS gives you the precise visual control, visual possibilities, increased interactivity, visual consistency, and ability to make global changes.

Understand the limitations.
Take ownership of the design.

Syntax: how CSS is put together.
Semantics: how it works (?) how it gets applied to a browser
Vocabulary: what are the different terms

11:30 – Finding Design Inspiration / Alex Giron

Intro by Arthur from Freewebs

So this is the requisite inspiration presentation at every design conference. And like all inspiration presentations, it reveals how personal inpiration is. Alex Giron is giving us a guided tour of his life and studio. No offense, Alex, but when the perspective on inspiration is so intimate, it’s hard to translate into applicable terms for everyone.

A couple great questions: How do you make a business case for playing video games and fostering creativity, and how do you bill your video game time? Giron basically says having a fun environment is worth it to him, so they spend a lot of time and money out of pocket.

12:15 – Lunch

Cosi brought to you by AIM.

1:15 – Research-Driven Design / Jackson Fox

WHY IS THIS GUY’S PRESENTATION IN COMIC SANS??!?!?!?

Research means observing the user. Building a foundation of user behavior gives the design ammunition.

Approaching design vs research.
Design began with the intuition, but began to mature to include the research heritage of cognitive psychology, and gives way to sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists.

E-Z design research:
Usability: usability.gov, NNg, UIE
Papers: SURL
Books: Prioritizing Web usability, Designing Interfaces, Head First design patterns

2:00 – Coming to terms with Sociality / Thomas Vander Wal

Hey, this guy invented the word folksonomy!

US Premiere of this content: Deconstructing the design and concepts of social media and software.

What is social softward: software where we connect with different people, anything that allows you to engage with people.

It’s services + people.

meeting the requirements to find interests, wants, desires needs.

Sharing… sharing is important. ut it’s really all about me. And then me spirals out to my friends, interests, following. That is what it means to be social.

Business calls it knowledge sharing, but we cal it communicating.

Facebook fails on doing things with information, but it’s great at being social. But being social produces a byproduct of information.

So we need tools for understanding. Cure technology pain.

PResents a cool chart of services graphed on the axes of derived value and efort to contribute. Tagging has a high value for little work contributing.

people rarely rate things they don’t like

Folksonomy:
Tells the story of Bitsy, a program that lets you tag anything. people tagged music but couldn’t agree on the terms for music. delicious tied identity to

folksonomy is the result of personal freetagging for refind
tagging is usually done in social
tagging is done by the person consuming the information

Spheres of sociality:
personal
selective – coworkers?
collective
mob
–not all content is created equal. Flickr does this: privat v. public content.

He keeps talking about mixx?

Jaiku does granular listening:

Object-mediated sociality. identity overlaps with objects. Identity has presence (account on a site). actions, being able to share). sharing (act of sharing). reputation (tied to identity and points out your characteristics). relationships (point to you and others). conversation (exchanging thoughts). groups (building on conversations). collaboration (bringing together groups and actions).

Perception:
All the different perspectives contribute to the whole:
The individual–personal perspective.
Collective–individuals who have their own view and are aggregated. not collaborative!
Collaborative–lots of people work on a single object
Newbie–new to system, features, concepts, not a contributor
Service owner–looking at keeping the servers up, bandwidth costs, conversion rates
External developer–using api

depth o perception:
non-user: example is a form,
non-contributing user
non-contributing selective user
light contributing user
heavy contributing user (people expect instant heavy contributing users)

Understanding this user matrix helps you build your feature set for your entire service and architecture.

2:45 – Sane User Experience in your Flash Designs – Erik Olson

Flash – for better or worse.

General outline of poor UI, no underlines, unnecessary animation, etc.
Use the right Affordance to indicate a feature, understand that users will perceive affordance.
Outlines a lot of usability problems that affect all projects, but are often promplematic in flash environments. Personally, I would attribute this to the fact that most of the flash designers I know are trying to push the envelope ALL the time, and break away from standard patterns.

And give users control over the animation.

3:30 – The Laws pf Design: From Principle to Practice / Patrick Haney

Design principles are universal.
Like all man-made ‘laws’ they do not exist in the absolute sends – to break them is no sin –John Maeda

• Fitts Law

• Hicks Law
  If you have a lot of options, it will take you longer to make the right decision.
• Design for Error
  (Donald Norman – Design for error)
• Affordance
  Make buttons look like buttons, make checkboxes look like checkboxes, make text fields look like text fields.
• Chunking
  Navigational chunking
• Closure
  Your brain finishes what it starts. Suggest the box.
• Signal to noise ratio
  “there is no such thing as information overload, only bad design.” -Edward Tufte.
  Try blurring the page (i look with my glasses off) to see the forest for the trees.
• Color
  Use repetition of color wisely
  Kuler
• Legibility
  virb blog
• Accessiblity
  Allowing the most amount of people to use whatever you’re building.
  Highlights a zeldman article.
  Think about screen readers and other devices, including color blindness–test with color oracle
• Iteraction
  Ipod example.
  Good Designers Redesign. Great Designers Realign.
  Use analytics to test against. Google analytics, mint, crazy egg.

Is it wrong to say that many have been doing all of these without knowing it?

I have to wonder, if we were at Harvard, would this lecture be a little more advanced, or is this just how this guy rolls?

4:15 – Justifying Design / Rob Goodlatte

This guy is a senior at Duke, has already worked at newsvine and is headed to join the Facebook team.

Rob immediately begins to call into question traditional, intuitive design roles. I actually think this guy represents a new trend in design: putting your money where your mouse is.

Act with Purpose.
Remember, Design is not Art. You have to e able to explain what you’re doing beyond “creative license”.

Demonstrates aesthetic justifications with a red dot.

Effective design is not decoration.

“Solutioneering” is building solutions without actually solving the problems.

Ask the right questions.
Define goals.
Understand the client/user’s culture.
Communicate. – copy is crucial
flow.
paul rand aesthetic design vocabulary

talked a lot about Ladislav Sutnar

5:30 – Afterparty?

can’t make it… feeling tired.

–

Overall, this was a great conference. I love that it is short, cheap, and local. It’s like formalizing bar camp in a great, approachable way. And the people you meet are local, so you are more likely to see them again, work with them, and have another opportunity to share ideas.