king talk

Es ist wieder soweit. Die neue Januar/Februar-Ausgabe des WEAVE Magazin ist erhältlich. Dabei widme ich mich auf Seite 94 einem wichtigen Bestandteil eines jeden User Interfaces. Dem Text.

Was muss ich bei der Beschriftung von UI Elementen beachten? Welche Arten von Meldungen gibt es und wie formuliere ich diese so benutzerfreundlich wie möglich? Dazu habe ich zu Beginn ein kleines Experiment aufgestellt und alle textuellen Inhalte des WordPress-Backend entfernt. Stellt sich nun die Frage, wer kann das noch bedienen? Wie kann ich z.B. den Blogpost an einem gewissen Datum veröffentlichen? Fast unmöglich, ohne die Hilfe des Textes. Nur Umrisse der UI-Elemente und Icons können noch einen groben Anhaltspunkt liefern, sofern der Benutzer mit WordPress bereits vertraut ist.

Mehr zum Thema gibt es wie bereits erwähnt in der neuen WEAVE. Zum Artikel gibt es noch eine Linkliste mit relevanten Seiten zum Thema Text im UI sowie eine kompakte Checkliste, die jeder bei der Umsetzung eines User Interface Textes einmal durchgehen sollte.

Today I stumbled upon an entry at UX-Blog which reported about a review of the upcoming book of Steve Johnson. It‘s about the process of innovation and how people and companies can create a process for innovation. He says, that innovation isn‘t one mysterious thing popping out of nowhere. Every innovation is a sequence of small novel steps with many people involved. There isn‘t a lonely creator having the genious idea. Real innovation happens when different visions come to life, collide and result in a bigger breakthrough. The medium internet has tons of information and offers you a big network of innovative thinkers and makers (though, it also can be very distractive). If you are able to connect the advantages of various media (like books, web, movies, etc.)  you provide a basis for innovation.

One last note: Besides the fact that Steve Johnson is a great thinker, the sketching style of his videos is really enjoyable.

The OFFF 2010 review for those of you who missed out on this years events that took place at the digital creation conference at ‘La Grande Halle de la Villette’ in Paris between the 24th – 26th June. Both myself and the Envis team were in attendance and here are a selection of the key highlighted speakers from the event.

—– Craig Ward —–

Processing particles motion test from Craig Ward on Vimeo.

Craig Ward is a British born typographer / designer currently living and working in New York City, USA.

—– Julien Vallée —–

OFFF Paris 2010 Sponsors titles from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Julien Vallée is a Canadian born creative currently residing in Montreal, Canada.

—– Dvein —–

Dvein @ OFFF 2010 from Ruben Gonçalves on Vimeo.

Dvein are a group of Motion / Animation geniuses based in Barcelona, Spain.

—– NON-FORMAT —–

Non-Format from Etapes on Vimeo.

Non-Format are design house based in London, recognised since they formed in 2000 by their directors Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British).

—– SOSOlimited —–

We’re Sorry from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

SOSOlimited are a collective of talented audio visual designers focusing mainly on interactive installations and fun weird stuff. Currently based in Cambridge, MA, USA.

—– The Mill —–

The Mill are a large scale visual FX team coming out of London, New York and Los Angeles. They were responsible for closing the festival this year and they did so with a nice group presentation focusing primarily on their post production work they did for Nike on ‘Write the Future’. An advertisement spot that notably took the Internet by storm at the beginning of the this years World Cup.

Nike Write The Future from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

They went on discussing the ‘making of’ and did a nice job of showing alot of the thought and design process. Storyboards, to the use of the massive tool used for realising large scale crowd environments alongside the VFX they covered throughout such an enormous project. They called it the biggest VFX advertisement ever made. Funny enough i believe them.

OFFF Paris 2010 Titles from OFFF on Vimeo.

To end our review; above we showcase the OFFF titles designed and produced by ‘The Mill’ for this years festival.

Gestures are common place in multi touch application development. Interaction Designers need icons for wireframing or just for documentation of the work. Ryan Lee released a vector based icon set for gesture under Creative Commons Licence. You don´t need to reinvent the wheel again. This so called Gesturecons include 42 icons for the most popular gesture like panning, flickering etc. You can download it the zip with .ai, .pdf and .eps files here…

via UX Strategie

»AstroTable« is a prototypal interactive installation designed for an exhibition context. Astronomic principles of planetary movement can be explored and understood very easily. By placing one of the eight discs, representing the »Laws of Planetary Motion« of J. Kepler as well as the »Laws of Gravitation« of I. Newton, on the sun one can select a specific topic.

Smoothly animated, the solar system fades out, an abstract layer for visualization appears. The selected disc represents the sun’s mass. By spinning it, one »manipulates time«.

The disc remains consistantly spinning at that rate by itself (and a bit of electronics…). One can accelerate and decelerate it and thus manipulate the visualization. An audio comment completes the explanation. By removing the disc, one goes back to the solar system view.

This project was done by Andreas Brendle, Fabian Gronbach, Eduard Warkentin at the course »Interaction Design« from HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd under supervision of Prof. Beck & Prof. Krämer.