tyHATCH / Notebook

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Adaptive Path’s most excellent UX Week in San Francisco. In an effort to make sure I got the most out of the conference, I went analog with my notes. Truth be said, I’m horrible taking notes on a computer and as I’ve been needing to do more sketching, this proved an opportune time to do that. I’ve put together a Flickr set of my notes, but if you’d like to get the all together I’ve made a couple of PDFs (hi-res and lo-res) to download. Feel free to download them, read and learn from them.

I noticed a slight bump in traffic this morning, looking at my Mint stats it appears that the cat is now out of the bag officially about my joining the NorthTemple crew. It’s an understatement to say I’m very excited to be joining such a great team of designers working on something I deeply believe in. I’ll be there in mid-May.

I’m also leaving behind another talented and fun group of designers at Mayo Clinic who I will miss. It’s been great working with the creative team lead by Dan Brevick. He’s been one of the best Creative Directors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. He’s looking for my replacement right now. It’s a great place to work and has some incredible benefits that are hard to find in today’s job market and you’d join a stellar team that is a lot of fun to be a part of. Not only that, you get to work on a wide range of projects that help people live better, healthier lives.

Very cool online tool for creating your own fonts from FontShop. (Via Hicks.)

Adam Darowski looks at how using your URL as part of your UI can be helpful for power users. I’ve long used this as a best practice personally. It may take some additional effort to set it up on a larger service, but the long-term benefits of human-readable URLs are definitely are worth the effort.

Congrats to the WebKit team.

Dave Shea asks a great question and gets some great answers. Personally, I have way too many things going on outside of work right now to even think about this, but Dave raised a great question that is nearly always in the back of my mind. I’d possibly rephrase it to say: “Is there something I can create that has me as the client and still have an income?”

The answer is as variable as the number of designers out there. I think the folks over at Coudal have tapped a magical vein for themselves. Carlos Segura of t-26 and 5-inch and the gang at 37signals have also figured out what works for them. (Wait a minute, they’re all in Chicago… What’s in the water there?)

What works for me will be different that what works for the next person, but we all see the wild success of others and long to quit doing client work at some point. In the end, I believe it’s all about having the courage to follow one’s passion to see where it leads.

Thought provoking article in the new issue of Gain from AIGA about research’s impact on design. Favorite quote from the article:

“Never ask consumers how they would improve a design. They’re not design experts and you want their reactions, not their solutions.”

Whilst some may strongly agree or disagree on this point, I think the principle a valid one in that great design never comes out of a committee. (Yes, it is extremely helpful to get as much feedback as possible, but the decision shouldn’t hinge on a consensus from some nebulous research group.)

Indeed. A wickedly clever execution. (Via SimpleBits)

SitePoint has launched a rather handy reference section on their site full of CSS Reference goodness.

Lovely book on how to design for the chemical industry over at grain edit.