STUDIO NOTES

Musings on design matters, technology and culture

 

Archive for the 'Design' Category

Why Not Just Try Designing? – Trusting the Ability and Conviction of Experienced Designers

We need to recognize that good design is often lead by individuals who have mastered their craft and because of this, are able to present their design with confidence and conviction.

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Design Thinking 101

Design thinking is an innovation process that uses the designer’s sensibility to find unmet needs and opportunities in order to create new solutions that matter to people.

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Help! My Designer Wants a “Discovery Phase”

The “discovery phase” is one of the most misconstrued areas of product development and of the designer-client relationship.

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When The Client Wants a Re-Skin

A request from a client for a re-skin of their web site or application should send up a red flag telling the designer to dig deeper and examine other hidden issues.

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Why Some Startups Fail

I recently finished reading a book by Marty Cagan titled Inspired – How to Create Products Customer’s Love. For all of you who don’t like to read, this is only 225 pages with pithy chapters of only 3-4 pages in length. In short, the book is a gem and has loads of advice from an [...]

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Waiting for App Store 2.0

For those of us who make a living partly by selling mobile applications in Apple’s App Store, there’s been a lot of concern expressed on blogs and amongst developers about whether or not the App Store is a dependable resource. With over 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers, the general consensus is that Apple [...]

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31 Flavors – Designing for iPhone, Android and Blackberry Platforms

A client of mine who wants to make aggressive headway into the mobile space has asked me to make three versions of their current iPhone 2.0 app that includes an upgrade to iPhone 3.0, a never-launched version for Google Android and another one for Blackberry devices (Palm Pre version to come later). It’s my job [...]

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Everybody’s an Interaction Designer

A provocative blog post by Cooper’s Tim McCoy titled, “Is Interaction Design a dead-end job?” got me thinking—is everybody now an interaction designer? Just read a few reviews for any iPhone app in the iTunes app store and you’ll begin to think so. One reviewer of the Facebook app for the iPhone wrote:
“In the next [...]

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Web Designing the Conversation

When designing a Web site, there are industry standards available to create a site map, labeling and navigation. These are as common as street signs: “Solutions”, “Company”, “FAQ”, “About”, “Gallery”, “Checkout”, etc. As users, we have come to expect these standards in the same way we expect to find a produce section and a bread [...]

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What Wall Street Could Learn from Good Design

As the US teeters on the brink of a financial meltdown, I can’t help but to think how often man gets himself in trouble by designing something that doesn’t serve his own interests. Examples of man in conflict with his technological prowess include the creation of nuclear warheads, fossil fuel-run machines, fishing nets that “sweep” [...]

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