Yancho

I participated in the Children's Book Pro course from SVSLearn.com these last several weeks. The course pacing is really fast. It was definitely tough to stay up with the assignments in the timeframe given. But, the material was great and I'll have continued access to it, so I'm going to go back and revisit it as I build out my portfolio and write and illustrate my own stories.  The course has guidance for the practical side of developing illustrations for a children's book. The instructors provide three manuscripts based on familiar fairy tales as source material to allow students to practice the various stages of illustration. My choice was Jack and the Beanstalk . To make it interesting for me, I tried illustrating the story as though it was a metaphor for a young upstart from rural America coming and stealing the political thunder of a dustbowl-era politician. The politician is the giant. The various items Jack steals (the coins, the goose, the harp) represent vari...

 l have been working on a class on svslearn.com with Will Terry. His explanation and demo were great Can you see the additions I made on each image?

There's a class on svslearn.com by Will Terry where he demonstrates drawing 50 items in a single image. He recommended it as a way to create a compelling portfolio piece that helps illustrate how you can tackle complex drawings. This is my first attempt at a drawing with such a large scope. I feel like the demonstration by Mr. Terry really opened my capacity a great deal. Finished piece. Expanded thumbnail. Early stage line drawing

This column was published in The Times-News probably in 2002 Roads less traveled Christijan Draper Winter’s gift to men  I earned my first ice-covered beard over Christmas. I spent much of my youth pouring over climbing and outdoor magazines, seeing pictures of rugged men with full, ice-caked beards. My dad also kept old slides of his climbing excursions with his buddies. I loved looking at their misty breath frozen in the air. I loved the ice caves. The images stirred me: wool balaclavas, crampons, sunglasses, ice axes. But most intriguing and wonderful was the full crust of ice on hairy faces. That was the image of a perfect man. I love winter. I enjoy camping in the snow. I love the crispness you feel when you step out from a warm house into a sub-freezing day. One winter while camping in the White Mountains of northern Arizona, my dad and I hopped on some c ross-country skis and skated into the woods at midnight. The moon was full and glowed against the snow...

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...

This article on password security is a good one. Article on password security

I like Kristi Olsen's definition of UX: As UX researchers, our goal is to identify customer pain points and obstacles in a given workflow or process, then tell a compelling story about their risks and provide general recommendations for alleviating those risks. It's pretty succinct and clear. Methods vary, but the goal is the same. Mike Hughes on UX Matters  argues that we sometimes make a faulty assumption in our view of the "user". Users are  not  spherical. They are irregular, lumpy beings who introduce spin and resistance into your well-planned happy paths. Walk through a design, explicitly asking at each step:  What might a reasonable person do that could lead to failure?  Examine the consequences, then change your design to prevent, mitigate, or repair the damage that could result. If you need to convince others to implement your solution, either involve them directly in the walkthrough or document negative scenarios to the same level of detail tha...

A thought from Colleen Jones, the author of Clout, in an interview on UXMatters.com marketing and media tend to focus on influencing  attitude , while usability and technical communication focus on supporting  action.  There’s a time and a place for content that influences attitude—and for content that guides action. More and more, a  complete  user experience must plan content that influences  both  attitude  and  action. That’s easier said than done This is an area that probably needs more attention -- the idea of melding attitude and action, somehow making instruction or experiences attend to both, because internal to a person attitude and action are reciprocal and will often spiral with each other.

From  David Brooks Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories: Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer. Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings. Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations. Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups. Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people se...

I'm reading "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" right now. I really like Steve Krug 's authorial style. He suggests that: Even though terms like “user-centered design” and “user experience” are now in the vocabulary of most people working on Web sites, relatively few designers, developers, stakeholders, managers, and check-signers—who all have a hand in the design process—have actually spent any time watching how people use Web sites. As a result, we end up designing for our abstract idea of users, based for the most part on ourselves. It is interesting to note, though, that when you do spend some time and resources on exploring how users interact with your design you can have a tremendous amount of success. Jakob Nielson , who has been doing UX design and testing for many years, says that: According to our survey, spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by ...

I'm really glad I finally spent some time reading the articles Dr. Gibbons suggested we read in relation to the Thanksgiving Point project. I think the most compelling thought I read was this: We argue that the right strategy cannot be known a priori. Instead of trying to define a service from the top down, we start with exploratory or immersive research to lead to opportunities for innovation in strategy. This, in turn, provides context (or the fill) from which the service can be created. But there are many great thoughts that help give picture to the concept of experience design: Great experiences are leading to a demand for even better experiences. As expectations for service experiences rise—are the people participating or cocreating those experiences becoming more skilled at leveraging the resources for their experience and designing their service? If so, then what are the implications for designing-for-service experiences? In designing-for-service experiences we must pr...

I've been doing a bit of reading about experience design. One thing that strikes me as interesting is the idea that sometimes in UX design we begin focusing on such minute things that it almost seems ridiculous. Like writing an entire article about whether or not you should write "submit" on your button or some other verbiage. Not that I don't think that is important in its own way. (I certainly agree with the sentiment.) I just feel like the more important broad principles of human engagement get ignored by a myopic view of the user experience. In " 10 Faces of Innovation ," by Tom Kelley, he tells how he will ignore cracks, dust, and peeling wallpaper in a hotel that has an exceptional bed because that's what is important to him when he is travelling. He comes in late and gets up early. The most important part of the hotel is the bed since a good night's rest makes a difference to his traveling experience. A vision of how you can make the user f...