Tag: AIGA

The professional organization for design.

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Advocacy AIGA Design Web Design Zeldman zeldman.com

Understanding web design, live on video

Now available on streaming video, Jeffrey Zeldman: Understanding Web Design — is a good quality 42:40 capture of my October 25, 2008 presentation at Gain: AIGA Business and Design Conference.

Author and Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman answers the question: what does a web designer need most? Skills and knowledge of software, of course, but empathy—the ability to think about and empathize with your user—is by far the most important. Good useful education is hard to find, and within companies there is often no departmental standardization. Good graphic design is not the same as good user experience design, he explains. In fact, “good web design is invisible”—it feels simple and authentic because it’s about the character of the content, not the character of the designer.

In addition to the streaming video, a surprisingly accurate PDF transcription is available, along with a downloadable copy of my slides. (The typeface is Joshua Darden’s Jubilat.)

[tags]AIGA, GAIN, Gain:AIGA, Zeldman, design, presentation, video, webdesign[/tags]

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Advocacy AIGA events New York City NYC Web Design Zeldman

Come up and see me

So it turns out I’ll be speaking about web design this Saturday at the sold-out AIGA Gain Conference. Yes, that conference.

[tags]AIGA, GAIN, events, speaking, design, business, conference[/tags]

Categories
AIGA Community conferences Design events Web Design

Dear AIGA, where are the web designers?

Dear AIGA:

I am a member in good standing and was honored to be part of the AIGA site redesign.

I received your email about the AIGA Business and Design Conference and am impressed with the speakers at the main show, as well as the 20/20 presenters. You have chosen brilliant talents who have made major contributions; with such speakers, the conference will undoubtedly be an illuminating and brilliant success.

But in reading the mini-biographies of the presenters, I can’t help noticing that for all the brand directors, creative directors, Jungian analysts, and print designers, one rather significant specimen of the profession is missing. Where are the web (or if you insist, the interaction) designers?

I am probably missing someone, but I count two people with web experience, and neither gets more than 60 seconds of stage time.

In my years as a web designer, I’ve worked with dozens and met thousands of gifted, passionate design professionals who would surely love to spend three days soaking up graphic design brilliance at an event like Gain.

But if no one on the stage shares their experience—and if one of the two speakers with web experience thinks the web is a crude medium where second-rate designers create unmemorable and mediocre works—AIGA is unlikely to reach this audience.

I need hardly add that this audience makes up an ever increasing percentage of the design profession, and performs work that is global in impact.

If you exclude us from the conversation, the conversation may end up excluding you.

Comments are now closed, but you can read what other people had to say.

[tags]AIGA, webdesign, GAIN, conference[/tags]

Categories
Applications cities Community Design links Publishing Tools war, peace, and justice writing

Inspiration and perspiration

AIGA | Aquent Salary Survey Calculator
Are you getting paid what you should? Find out with this free online calculator, created by AIGA and Aquent after surveying nearly 6,500 design professionals.
Pantone’s Fall Fashion Color Report
The fashion forecast is for cool, calm colors from the earth. Wear them tomorrow, see them on your website the day after.
Magic 8_Ball on ‘Zune’
Daring Fireball has fun kicking Microsoft’s me-tooism.
CreativeIQ: Create Letterhead Templates in MS Word
Creating letterhead templates in Microsoft Word that don’t suck.
Most Inspired
Design inspiration aggregation.
Netdiver: Outstanding
Design inspiration, collected by Netdiver. Sharp concepts and fresh perspectives.
“People nearby started to panic”
A mobile phone rings on a London-to-New-York flight.
Time Capsules: Douglas Coupland: September 11
From the vantage point of a 52-day book tour that began on September 11, 2001, the author recalls the surreal first days of post-9/11 America.
Congress: Hall Pass Revoked

If Net Neutrality didn’t do enough to get you squirming HR5319 AKA Deleting Online Predators Act AKA DOPA should serve as proof that Congress should no longer be allowed to vote on any laws governing the internet. In case you missed the news, DOPA basically will require all public schools and libraries to block access to social networking sites and chat rooms.

The Agency Model is Dead – Blue Flavor
Brian Fling of new agency Blue Flavor lists “signs of the decline in the traditional agency” and discusses his agency’s nontraditional approach.
AppZapper – Making uninstalls easy
AppZapper for Mac OS X lets you confidently try new apps while knowing you can uninstall them easily. Drag one or more unwanted apps onto AppZapper and watch as it finds all the extra files and lets you delete them with a single click.
Bokardo: Why Netscape Will Succeed
Bokardo, a blog about social web design, says Netscape’s reinvention of itself as a mass-market version of Digg will succeed.
Zach Klein: Connected Ventures + IAC
The guys behind collegehumor.com sell to Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.

[tags]design, business, inspiration, fashion, color, AIGA, salaries, links, digg, netscape, blue flavor, bbc, douglas coupland, 9/11, 911, writers, book tour, publishing, memoirs, mac os x, macosx, software, net neutrality, online predator, london, new york, nyc[/tags]

Categories
Design Happy Cog™ links Tools work

She Blinded Me With Christian Science

Lovely links for a fab Friday.

Ma.gnolia API 1.0
It’s what Willis was talkin’ ’bout.
“Design Matters” with Debbie Millman (audio)
Intelligent audio interviews with leading graphic designers and type designers.
creativebits
“Macintosh design community” blogazine.
“Dear Secretary Small…”
Carl Malamud on the privatization of the commons.
Monkey Do
The attractive, minimalist site of Mike Pick and Tim Murtaugh’s web design and development shop.
Rosenfeld Media’s first book
Rosenfeld Media has signed Donna Maurer to write a book on card sorting. Take a survey to help shape the book. (Note: All Rosenfeld Media books will be created with reader input. Disclosure: I serve on Rosenfeld Media’s advisory board.)
“The Feed Validator is Dead to Me.”
Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, on the politics of RSS.
Sacramento Bee redesign critique in pictures
“The page has a popover welcome message, tabbed features and a little JavaScript problem.” A critique by Aaron Gustafson, using Flickr.com as a teaching tool. (Interesting on both levels: the critique itself, and this usage of Flickr.)
King Kong reviewed, March 3, 1933
“Miss Wray goes through her ordeal with great courage.”
Daily Show smart. Comedy Central website, not so much.
“We’re sorry, but MotherLoad will only play on PCs with Windows XP or 2000/SP4+.”
The New Yorker reviews “An Inconvenient Truth”
“‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.”
AIGA: Graphic No More
Christopher Fahey of Behavior Design has mixed feelings about AIGA’s repositioning.
Avalonstar
The blog of Bryan Veloso.
The Pains
Novelist John Sundman, author of Acts of the Apostles (recommended for those who take their sci-fi black) and Cheap Complex Devices, has released this new, Creative-Commons-licensed, illustrated novella.
Converting Flickr content to valid markup
Like it says. Mini-tutorial on Veerle’s blog.
Butt Head!
Nick Fruhling observes that a certain magazine’s masthead requires special care. Via Veer.
Font Finagler for Mac OS X
Clears font caches, thereby often fixing problems in Photoshop, the Finder, etc. The free and possibly best font management tool, Linotype Font Explorer X, also does this, as does Cocktail. Both Font Explorer X and Cocktail are a part of life at Happy Cog — and a fine part of life at that. But if all you need to do is empty your font caches, Font Finagler gets the job done, and how.
Categories
An Event Apart Design events people Standards

AIGA/AEA Podcast II: a Man called Meyer

AIGA, the professional association for design, presents “Talking With Eric Meyer: An Event Apart Podcast #02.”

Each week leading up to An Event Apart in December 2005, AIGA talks with the founders about what attendees can expect from the conference. (Subscribe to AIGA’s Podcast Directory RSS feed.)

This week, AIGA’s Liz Danzico and An Event Apart’s Eric Meyer discuss the comparison between code and chisels, and why designers need to care about what’s under the hood.

It’s eight minutes and 16 seconds of pure design geek joy. Happy listening!

Categories
Design industry people Zeldman

Talk is free, fonts are cheap

Talk is free, fonts are cheap, and it’s time to refresh your stock (icon) portfolio in today’s Report.

On beyond podcast

AIGA, the professional association for design, kicks off a weekly series of Event Apart-themed interviews with podcast the first, in which AIGA’s Liz Danzico drills your humble narrator on the whos, what, whens, and whys of our upcoming conference. Tune in next week for podcast the second, featuring a man called Meyer.

For the type nerd on your Kwanza list

Indie Fonts, a fantastic showing of 2000 faces from the likes of Chank, Garage Fonts, Test Pilot Collective, and 15 other hot indie foundries (plus 33 fonts on CD) is normally a steal at US $39.95. But if you buy by 14 November it’s available at the ridiculously cheap price of US $19.95.

But wait, there’s more. For $40 you can get Indie Fonts 1 and Indie Fonts 2, featuring work by Mark Simonson Studio, Jukebox, Atomic Media, and many more. Ho, ho, ho!

Pretty business

The corporate world can be ugly. But it just got prettier with 52 finance and commerce icons covering capitalist concepts like transactions, credit, and interest. Newly available from Stockicons at a CFO-friendly US $179 are two add-on sets: Harmony and Contour.

Stockicon sets are designed to be used in commercial works, software projects, and websites, and are brought to you by The Iconfactory.