Yancho

When one of the co-founders at Qualtrics, Stuart Orgill, was choosing his major at BYU he selected accounting. I asked him why and he said, “Because I’m not good at it.”  While others selected what they were good at and what they thought was a good fit, he selected an area where he was weakest and dominated it. That’s the way that we feel. See full article here .

Milton Glaser as quoted in "Imagine: How Creativity Works" by Jonah Lehrer I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It's about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that's always going to be a long and difficult process.  If you're doing it right, it's going to feel like work. (p. 69) The book isn't great, but I like the quote.

On Quora -- a really nice summary of color theory: http://www.quora.com/Design/Is-there-a-science-to-picking-the-colors-that-work-well-together-in-a-design-or-is-it-just-subjective/answer/Colm-Tuite

I posted some new thoughts on the Rain blog on the value of user experience testing: http://blog.mediarain.com/2011/09/usability-roi-and-the-art-of-communication/

I'm really glad I came across this tip. I didn't know it existed. It will be very helpful. It allows you to work with text in Photoshop as a paragraph, rather than a single line of text. http://methodandcraft.com/notes/switching-to-paragraph-text

Brewing the perfect brainstorm A little write-up I did for Rain based on a presentation I gave there and for the IxDA Utah group.

From an article in UX magazine : ... let’s take a quick look back to see how this new discipline fits into a simplified history of user experience: Human-computer interaction is about paying attention to people and their relationship with computing. Information architecture is about making things findable. Interaction design is about making things usable. Content strategy is about making things meaningful. Experience design is about making things seamless. Persuasive design is about making things influential. The trend goes towards deeper meanings and bigger impacts. As the design discipline gets better at the basics of understanding and enabling behavior, it moves towards creating meaningful impacts by influencing behavior. But this influence must be built on top of successes in the more basic elements of UX such as good research and seamless usability. This points to design as not merely being about aesthetics and veneer, but about designing with a purpose, an outco...