Flash Player 10 hit labs

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Check out some of what Adobe’s got planned for the next Flash Player release. Will we be able to compete with “Microsoft Sparkle” (aka Silverlight) ?

For those that like Video

Minnebar was fun.

I managed to FINALLY be talked into dragging myself out on a spring Saturday to Minnebar this past week thanks to Ben who asked me to be on a panel to discuss the age old Designers vs. Coders issue that still seems to plague way too many web projects. Seems as if we’re still talking about the same issues we were frustrated with 10 years ago.

But, hey, it was fun. And I got to meet some very nice, smart folks including those that were on the panel with me: Norm Orstad from Slantwise, Mike Bollinger from Livefront and Margeret Andrews from Vita.mn.

Alas, given that it *was* a Spring Saturday–albeit a wet one–prior commitments prevented me from sticking around past the noon hour. However, I did manage to sneak into the ‘Why Drupal?’ session presented by the very articulate and knowledgeable Allie Micka. (I came away with the opinion of “wow, that is cool, but, of course, really complex”). I also managed to get to the Refresh TwinCities session hosted by Thomas Knoll. I’ll need to ponder that latter session a bit before presenting a full opinion of it, but, on the surface, it seems like a great idea for a broader web organization that is going to struggle against the competition from all of the existing niche web community/orgs around town.

In the end, I remembered that the web still is a lot of fun. I had lost a bit of that excitement these past few years sitting in my admittedly cushy, yet rather bland gig. I’ll definitely be going to the next Minnebar…no matter how nice that weekend might be weather-wise. ;0)

Personas are Taxidermy

It’s been nearly a decade since Alan Cooper first published The Inmates Are Running the Asylum - a great book stating the obvious: software developers are rarely the people software is developed for.

In it Cooper promotes the use of archetypical descriptions of people, Personas, to keep the software development team focused on the customer.

That was 10 years ago.

This was before Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Amazon reviews, Wordpress.com. Before so many people began publishing their experiences, wants, desires, and honest feelings online publicly.

Today, we don’t need to make up people (even if they’re a composite of real), real ones are easy to find. For example, H&R Block is on Twitter currently with 346 followers.

Not frozen urban beasts - living, breathing, complex people with continually updating timelines.

People. That use software.

Here’s an example:

“On Sun registration form: “Company/Organization (Please, no abbreviations)” - but it allows only 30 chars, too short for my employer name.” - afongen

Can’t make this up.

Calling all designers

minnebar
For any designer looking to find the web standards and design pulse here in the Twin Cities, sign yourselves up for Minnebar (or Barcamp Minnesota). Last year around 400+ people attended this free design and technology event. It will be Saturday, May 10th, 8am-whenever at the Coffman Union(U of M)! With free food and drink this should be something you don’t want to miss out!

Currently we have a few topics regarding design/web standards. In fact, we have five and counting! I will be discussing the “Pros and Cons of CSS frameworks“. I would like to see more presentations or topics about design. Below I have a wish list of topics that someone could present or lead a discussion;

  • Web typography
  • How designers and developer see things
  • To blog about design or not?
  • Wire-framing techniques
  • Design process
  • Web-app design vs E-commerce design
  • Newbies guide to web design standards community
  • Your ideas??

The pulse is strong here in the Twin Cities and you can help make it stronger. Bring what you have learned from your own web standards research or find out what you should know. Everyone has something to give and share. If you have any thoughts or questions leave a comment below or please contact me, Norm Orstad at norman@orstad.com.

Another Font Company Killing Typography

In the continuing saga of how near-sighted font companies are destroying their market and the practice of online typography, I present you:

“[Letterhead Fonts] may think it’s going to shame one of its customers into paying, but all it’s really doing is convincing a lot of folks never to buy anything from Letterhead fonts in the future. ” - Michael Masnick

Best Buy Looking for Front End Web Development Lead

Best Buy Corporation is seeking a highly skilled “Front End Web Developer” with excellent front end programming skills and consultative abilities. This position will leverage a variety of programming and markup languages combined with web standards and usability guided design principles to develop and deploy websites/web applications for the Best Buy enterprise.

Ideal Candidates Have:

  • Expert knowledge of hand-coded HTML (XHTML and DHTML inclusive), CSS and JavaScript based on web standards and best practices for code optimization, accessibility and SEO.
  • Strong experience developing, testing, implementing, production ready sites in multiple markup languages.
  • Proven problem solving / solution architecture experience: Displays the ability to determine the best approach to solve a problem, not necessarily always the quickest, easiest or the cheapest, but the solution that best positions Best Buy for success for the future in any project.
  • Proven ability to determine the best approach/coding language/methods based on project needs as well as budgetary efficiency.
  • Proven ability to speak to groups and evangelize solutions or concepts and explain them in business terms including the ability to review existing or 3rd party code and deliver feedback.
  • Willingness to diversify knowledge in a small team of web developers by a continuous teaching and learning cycle between the members.

Basic Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree with 5 years of experience or an Associate degree with 8 years of experience
  • 5 years of advanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript hand-coding and troubleshooting skills
  • 4 years of web development experience on large, complex websites
  • 3 years of one or a combination of ASP/JSP/PHP or similar web coding experience and troubleshooting skills
  • Previous experience working across business lines presenting and creating web solutions

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Demonstrated consultative experience

To apply
Click here: http://tinyurl.com/2g66vz

Independent Information Architect Starter Kit

I’ve been “working for myself”1 for 5 years now. In all honesty, the past five years haven’t been that much different than the 5 before that where I was an employee. My professional employee experience was with tech start ups or small professional services firms. Frequently both.

I do the same work, the difference is I’m biz dev, finance, project manager, marketing, as well as lead IA.

    Business

  • Get an Accountant.
    They’ll help you understand the tax implications of different business entity types, set up payroll, and make tax season a pleasure. That’s what accountants are supposed to do, be sure to find one you like. I like Lottsa.
  • Define Your Rates
    What do you charge? I’ve found this to be a pretty easy answer. If you have no idea, there are 2 easy ways to get a ballpark on the market: if you’re in-house; find out what your vendors are charging you, if you’re not; ask around and don’t take ‘it depends’ for an answer - by unpacking ‘it depends’ you’ll get a better idea of actual vendor/client relationships.
  • Define Your Services
    What do you do?2. You’ve got to decide up front what kind of projects you want and more importantly the ones you don’t. Even more importantly - what it would take to work on a project you don’t really want. In any case, you have some idea of what you enjoy doing.
  • Define Your Space
    Where in your house will you work? Make your space comfortable, adjust and arrange everything just the way you like it - make it the perfect office for you. If you’re just starting to work independently and you have a family - you need to declare office hours and set boundaries, for you and them.
    Marketing

  • Domain/Email Address
    Buy the [YourBusinessName].com, set up email there. Stop giving out Gmail, Yahoo, or GeoCities addresses. That’s pure silliness.
  • Website
    Yes, you’ll need one of these - specifically a blog, to help people understand your approach and personality. Your resume, portfolio (images from past projects), bio, and current photo should go here. Being able to say “It’s on my website” when someone asks for any of those things relieves a great deal of stress.If you’re an IA in MN, feel free to make MNteractive.com that blog.
  • Comment Elsewhere
    You need to be involved in the conversation online and off. Online, find blogs that you enjoy reading and leave an intelligent comment with a link to your website.
  • Events Around Town
    Find all the local marketing, usability, product design organizations’ websites and put their monthly events and meetups on your calendar. Meet these people. Then, do the same for tangentially related groups like programming language user groups, and anything else that sounds interesting.
  • Do I Need Business Cards?
    That’s your call. I don’t have any. Maybe I’ll get some later, I dunno. Lately, I’ve found blank index cards more effective for jotting down information about the people I meet and what we talked about. Are they an effective replacement for business cards? You’ll have to ask someone I gave them to.
  • Follow Up with People You Talk To.
    It’s easy. Email or phone, pick the one you’re most comfortable with, but do it. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard an independent lament about not getting a project and they admit to not following up.
    Hardware

  • Apple MacBook Pro 17″.
    No question. It gets noticed by clients and I like the big screen for working comfortably while on the road, and it will do whatever you ask it to. You’ll also need AppleCare, and a spare charger.
  • A backup plan.
    At minimum, you’ll want an external drive that stays in your home office. My external drive backs up to the cloud. This is great for providing fairly easy access to archived projects without having them on your work-a-day machine.
  • Noise-canceling headphones.
    I find them great in helping attain and maintain focus - especially on airplanes and if you have small children in your household.
  • A mobile phone that you like
    At minimum, it should have an easily accessible un/mute and speakerphone toggle. So many don’t. The rest of the stuff (email, web browsing, camera, Bluetooth, etc) all optional.
    Software

  • Apple’s iWork Suite & NeoOffice
    Used effectively together, you’ve got near-100% compatibility with MS Office for a small fraction of the price. Personally, I use spreadsheets and presentations far more than word processors (that’s what email is for).
  • Mail, Calendar
    Whatever works for you bestest.
  • What ever your clients want your work in.
    I’ve created wireframes in almost every application out there and I wouldn’t purchase any of them if not for that being the preferred application for a specific client.

After this, it comes down to your own organization, sales, and resource management skills.

Good luck.

1. Anyone that works for themselves knows this is a misnomer.
2. This is one of my least favorite questions. It assumes a singular perspective about work that doesn’t represent my reality. Currently, when I someone asks me this question, I pretend they asked, “Tell me about a cool project you’re working on?”

MN-based Parenting Startup, Tumblon.com, Looking for Designer & Marketing/PR Mgr

Tumblon a new Minneapols-based parenting startup is looking for a Visual Designer and a Marketing/PR manager
Their blog: http://blog.tumblon.com/

Contact Jonathan Dahl for more information.

April UX Meetup recap

Hey all –

Tonight’s UX Meetup was about usability, but was oh-so-much-more. We probably had a good 3 handfuls or so of local folks, many familiar faces (Garrick, Lori, Fred, Jon), many new faces (Karen, Kevin, Stephanie, Tommy, Scott and many others I didn’t get the chance to chat with!) Brit’s was a bit on the noisy side tonight, so we naturally grouped into smaller chat groups, which I liked because it allowed us all to have personal conversations with a number of folks. Anecdotal feedback indicated that tonight’s informal setup allowed for some powerful networking — cool!

Some highlights for me are:
1. being convinced to try Twitter (at least sometime)
2. being convinced to try Facebook and actually try and find some old friends out there

And, I was able to find a number of people eager to listen and comment on my acculturation to the consulting world…very helpful!

For next month, I may continue my quest to find yet a quieter spot…stay tuned, and I hope you can join us!

KO

P.S. I intended to pose a question to all regarding blended quant-qual usability methods (aka “unmoderated testing”), but didn’t even get around to it because of all the other great things we talked about tonight. If anybody cares to chime in with experience or opinion, I’m all ears!

A Proposal to Create the YouTube of Typefaces

Typography was my first design love.

A well chosen typeface, used effectively, is like a the score of a movie. Adding richness and tone to the underlying story.

Unfortunately, here in web browser land we’ve only got a few good notes; Helvetica (1957), Verdana (1996), Georgia (1993),

Online typography doesn’t exist today. Full stop.

If we assume browser-based publishing will be the primary form of graphic design moving forward and the easiest form to-be-typographers will cut their teeth on, we have effectively reduced their piano to 3 keys. All of which are older than modern browsers.

Today, WebKit supports downloadable custom fonts. Netscape 4.0, IE 4.0 also did a decade ago.

Yet for 10 years, we’ve had the same browser typeface choices.

The same 3 notes over and over and over and over.

No wonder when Stefan Hartwig asked me what my favorite typefaces were, I was stumped for a minute. For my entire professional career, I’ve had the same choices.

Yes, this is an extension of a post I wrote 18 months ago:
Typeface Licensing, For Those Who Think Music Licensing is Easy.

My proposal is the opposite of Andrei Michael Herasimchuk’s plea to Adobe.

I want a YouTube of typefaces. Easily created, open to everyone to easily embed-able.

We already have the CSS code to use the custom typefaces:


@font-face {
font-family: “Kimberley”;
src: url(http://www.princexml.com/fonts/larabie/kimberle.ttf) format(”truetype”);

John Gruber retorts:

“The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren’t worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren’t embeddable.”

Visit MySpace lately? Quality is mostly irrelevant.

Things we need for this to happen:
1. Free and easy to use typeface creation tools
2. Typefaces with licensed for this use (CC, public domain, lots of choices here)
3. Typefaces to be embedded in webpages

Without it, typography might as well be added to obsoleteskills.com, and type foundaries will only have themselves to blame for their lack of a market.

Thanks to @stefanhartwig and @arikjones for inspiring this post.

UPDATE April 03, 2008.
German type foundary FDI fonts.info releases Graublau Sans Web free for web embedding. Progress.