king talk

After two and a half years of writing for WEAVE Magazine, we finally managed to smuggle a picture of us, a grill and lots of meat into the new issue!

For the better part of this year I worked on installation projects like Streamflow and Holodeck. But in the last couple of weeks I finally had a classic interface project on my desk again.

This also meant that I got the chance to do some interface sketches again; something I almost forgot could be fun. Here are a few things (re)discovered and found interesting.

The Purpose of Sketching

The only reason why I do sketches (and not start directly with, say, wireframes) is to organize my thoughts. When I think about an interface, I always see a few details very clearly in front of me while the big picture is still blurry. Sketching allows me to organize my thoughts, combine them and create new stuff based on older drawings.

Use a Pen you Like

Everyone has a different style when it comes to bringing thoughts to paper and the pen should support that style. I personally need a rather thick pen for drawing and settled with an Edding 1300 felt marker. It is thin enough to write annotations but also thick enough to force me to ignore details in the beginning.

(Paper) Size Matters

I sketch on A3 paper. It is still managable in its size, yet large enough to accomodate a whole group of sketches. I like to draw interesting details next to the basic layout so that I get a clearer idea of the whole composition.

Start Tiny

My sketches grow as my idea of the interface becomes clearer. While the first sketch might be just 5 by 5 centimeters, the last one might fill a whole A3 sheet.

The size of the initial sketches also depends on the pen I use.
The thinner the pen, the tinyer the first sketches should be. This keeps me from trying to figure out every detail in the first sketch and thereby also reduces the fear of doing things wrong.

How do you Sketch?

Do you use similar techniques for sketching or are they completely different? Let me know in the comments!

A prostitute won’t give you free sex just so that she can then charge you for the pillow talk. She won’t give the good stuff away for free.

For some reasons, designers are happy to do so. They create elaborate concepts and plans – sometimes even multiple proposals – pack it all into a high gloss presentation and then hope for the client to be gracious enough to pay them afterwards, when the whole thing needs to be put into practice.

This might work if you are a big agency and you have a lot of time to kill. But it can be lethal for smaller companies or freelancers. If you don’t have a lot of money and resources, you simply can’t afford to do unpaid pitches. Working for free is not going to change your financial situation for the better.

Why do people want pitches, and why is it bad?

1. They don’t know you and they want to make sure that you are worth your money. This means that there is no confidence (and probably limited interest) in your work – which is a bad basis for working together. A good portfolio and some recommendations can turn this ship sometimes.
2. They don’t know what they want and would like to collect ideas upfront. In this case, you’re giving away what you do best upfront. It is pretty common that the winning agency will be told to use some of the ideas of its competitors.
3. They don’t know IF they actually want to do something and they want you to figure out if it is worth it. This is probably the worst form, because more than often it doesn’t even lead to a job for anyone.

In our three years of existence, we never participated in an unpaid pitch. We did two paid pitches in two years – still too many for my taste. We like to charge for our sexy time.

For our latest article in WEAVE magazine, we took a closer look at Microsofts Kinect and how you can do some really interesting things with it. You will learn how to use OpenFrameworks to write an extremely robust and versatile tracker that works great for interactive installations.

Fitts law is one of the most important principles in interaction design. What is it and how does it apply to various types of interfaces?

In 1954 an Ohio State psychologist published a paper named »The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement«. It presented a model for measuring the time it takes someone to hit a certain control of a machine, based on the position of the hand, the distance to the control.

The author of this paper was Paul Fitts and his findings are a key ingredient to every measured user interface design process. It was – and still is – glorified by many designers and engineers, probably most notably by Bruce Tognazzini, the first application software engineer at Apple. He even developed a set of questions about it which he would ask every aspiring software engineer. So what’s so important about it? Let’s have a look. continue reading …