designer Link designer graphics design -- mmk4mkt

Orcas Designer for Avalon Totally Rocks!!
Now that I got the mess working, I must say that the Orcas Designer from Avalon totally utterly rocks!!
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Expression Lessons

A very nice set of Expression lessons via Jason

This morning I found these great lessons for learning Expresion Graphic Designer this morning. Looks like it was created by Annie Ford. Very useful for a non designer, like myself.

Holy CSS Zeldman!
An exaustive list of CSS links, and other Web designer/developer resources.
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Become An Expert Web Designer!
Video tutorials and stunning templates show you how to create your own websites and graphics from scratch in the next hour!
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Top 10 Ways Websites Makes Me Suffer
Learn what makes one Web designer scream.
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Think-Then-Do
The single most difficult and important skill for a web designer is: Remembering what you're doing. It is incredibly easy to get bogged down. Hunt, Ben
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The Design Spectrum
When designing a product, the techniques and priorities a designer should use change according to its purpose. Hunt, Ben
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Automatic Magazine Layout
You can't always count on having a professional designer around to resize and position your images for you, but you'd rather your page layout didn't look like it was created by orangutans. Harvey Kane builds a script that makes your life easier.
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Client and Designer Roles in Web Design
Clients and web designers must understand their individual roles in making sure that a website will succeed. For a website to be effective, the business...
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Simplicity
Simple web design delivers huge benefits to designer, client and user. When a design doesn't seem to work, ask what should be taken away before asking what's missing. Hunt, Ben
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Why Code By Hand
If you're serious about reaching your full potential as a web page designer / producer, I believe you need to learn to code your sites by hand. Hunt, Ben
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RIP FrontPage

After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. We will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of two brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies: Office SharePoint Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers and Expression Web for the professional Web designer. Link >>

Yeah, I know. Most web-heads will read this announcement from Microsoft, let out a snort, and say 'It's about time!'.For me though, it's not without just a bit of sadness and sense of loss that FrontPage goes quietly into the night.You see, I was working as a software developer at a Microsoft Solution Provider when Microsoft first purchased the FrontPage product from Vermeer. As part of our partnership we received beta copies of all the new MS software, including FrontPage. FrontPage was my introduction into the entire world of web development. I mostly learned HTML by creating pages in it, then switching over to see the source code it had created.And yes, I realize it created a lot of junk code, and was the basis for many nasty looking websites - but no more, in my opinion, than Geocities did 6-7 years ago or even MySpace is responsible for today. I still think the way FrontPage would build navigation bars from a flowchart view of a site is pretty nice - although it could have been nicer but MS hadn't updated it for probably 7 of those nine years of production.At any rate, I haven't actively used FrontPage for years now, and the world of web authoring and content management has taken great leaps in terms of functionality and price.But I wouldn't be where - or who - I am today without Microsoft Frontpage, so I truly mean it when I say 'Rest In Peace'.
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Buying Babies of the Preferred Gender and Purchasing Babies' Destinies
Buying designer babies with supportive destinies -- Kwai Lan Chan, A Master of Imperial Feng Shui and Chinese Astrology designing babies’ destinies for Asian parents to produce outstanding children. (PRWEB Jun 28, 2006) Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/chachingpr.php/U3F1YS1TdW1tLVpldGEtQ291cC1JbnNlLVplcm8=
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Tips for Design Reviews
To follow-up on one of the recurring discussions at this year’s Art of Yahoo! conference, I’ve compiled several of my thoughts on effective design reviews with product stakeholders (clients, business units, etc.).

Chris Conley (professor at the Institute of Design) recently pointed out that the design critique training designers get in school better prepares them for the open discussions and feedback they will encounter in the business world. He rightly notes that the key is to “learn to listen to make your ideas better, not learn to defend your ideas.” But there’s still a need to “sell” stakeholders on the thinking behind a specific design solution. How does this design address business goals and user needs they care about?

In my experience, the following three tips have helped me make the pitch.

Frame the solution within an appropriate context.
What problem are you trying to solve; what goals you are trying to achieve; what are the limitations you needed to accommodate? Outlining these items up front helps establish criteria for evaluating the design.

“Taking the time up front to really research and understand end users and business needs enables you to speak directly to consumer expectations and stakeholder objectives. You need to know what your design is trying to accomplish: who is it for? What does it do? And why does it matter?” - Visual Communication Questions

“Because they research and dissect user needs, designers are in a unique position to define a problem through the eyes of customers. Because they think and act holistically, designers are able to articulate relationships within a market, across product ecosystems, and between customer needs and business goals. Because they can communicate visually and with narrative, designers are able to effectively articulate these definitions to product teams and stakeholders.” - Defining the Problem

“By framing the presentation of a design with problem definition, designers can focus stakeholder feedback on how well the design addresses their goals. If the proper high-level definition is not present to provide context, feedback can quickly turn into a critique of the mockup not the solution. After all, it’s much easier to have an opinion on font sizes and color choices than on the right strategic positioning of an important product.” - Live by the Mockup, Die by the Mockup

Have confidence in the solution you are presenting.
Too many options or uncertainties creates doubt about the effectiveness of a design.

“Good design is problem solving and should always be presented as such. Whenever a designer (be it an interaction designer, an information designer, or a visual designer) presents a client with too many options they risk undermining their value and opening themselves up to “design by committee”. The message is “I don’t know enough about your users or goals so you pick what works best.” Now the design is in a non-designer’s hands (who may very well be wondering why he hired a designer in the first place).” - Presenting Design

Without realizing it, consumers “transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of a product to the product itself.” - Blink & Interface Design

Explain what you’ve done.
Use the language of design to explain how your solution effectively (with confidence) addresses the context you established earlier.

“You can use visual design to communicate key concepts to your users. By addressing the question “What is this?” we communicate usefulness. By addressing “How do I use it?” we communicate usability. By addressing “Why should I care?” we communicate desirability. When properly applied, visual design is all about communication. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our users to use and appreciate the web sites we design.” - Where Visual Design Meets Usability: Part 1

“For example “Our research has shown that this information is what most users are looking for on this page. As a result, it has the most visual weight (achieved through a strong contrast with the background) on this screen.” Outlining how visual design decisions enforce the relationships between content and guide user actions tends to remove the subjectivity inherent in many design reviews. This can help designers explain and sell their concepts.” - Visual Communication Questions

Tags: collaboration, communication
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Behind the Scenes with Apache's .htaccess
Although I'm a designer and not a programmer or server-side specialist, for a few years I've used Apache's .htaccess to a limited degree for clients' websites, primarily for simple URL redirects and setting up custom error pages. Now that I can use Apache's .htaccess for my own websites, I've been immersed in learning more about how to use this powerful tool conservatively but effectively to redirect URLs and to combat spammers and bad bots. Today's post provides links to some of the online sources that I've found especially helpful. (3024 words, 91 links)
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An embryonic profession: Incomplete and unconscious design work

Humans have been formulating computational logic for execution on digital microprocessors (aka software development) for just a few years, and some people think that this profession is already a full-fledged engineering discipline.

I think this is not the case yet (by far).

Thinking otherwise actually impede the growth of this line of work into higher level of consciousness that allow us to get out of the same expired and twisted mindsets similar to waterfall-like development processes.

A trait of the infant state of our profession is the frequency of incomplete design work as a significant cause for software development projects failures, incomplete work in a central activity and outcome: design.

A mayor factor for such mediocrity comes from a misunderstanding of the role of abstraction in design work, which leads to incomplete design decisions hence incomplete designs that are supposed to be carried out without any mayor design changes.

A role of abstraction is to manage complexity, focusing on a selected set of design attributes at a given time, ignoring —just for that moment— other equally important attributes; waiting for their turn in the co-evolution process of design.

A professional software designer takes complete design decisions. A design decision is completed when the designer walks the abstraction stack all the way down and returns up to the starting level with a set of implications for that particular decision, turning it to a fully informed and conscious design decision.

The fatal state of affairs for software development projects casting crappy software is when designers do not come back and consider the attributes they left behind in their mental stimulation so-called 'abstracting' or 'modeling'.

So, we all can see that abstraction is not a mean for incomplete or insufficient work; abstraction means putting things aside for the moment, for complexity management purposes, not for leaving aspects of your work in a hang state.

Scottish Arts Marketers' Forum: accessible web design
Last Thursday I lead a 'round table discussion session' on accessible web design for the Scottish Arts Council Marketers' Forum. It was an enjoyable experience - here are some of the issues that came up and brief versions of my answers.How do blind people surf the web? What should we be aware off when designing for someone who is blind?Many blind people, and people with low vision use a 'screen reader' which 'reads out' (i.e. turns into audio) the text on a web page. This has implications for making a site accessible to someone who is blind:Pictures can't be 'read' - so labels have to be added to the pictures to indicate their purpose or the content they contain. There also needs to be alternative ways to access the information contained in all non-text elements such as videos, or animations, e.g. a transcript or captions could be provided along with a video.Having information read out - is a 'linear' experience - generally screen readers will start to read from the top left of the page and work their way down. Depending on how the site is designed it can either be a long and tedious experience, or one that is a pleasure to a blind person because it either ignores or takes into account how screen readers work. For example, if the first section on each web page is the navigation bar, and the navigation contains 100 links, then the screen reader has to read out those 100 links before getting to the content of the page. There are many ways of getting around this problem; one would be to put the content first on the page and the navigation second, another would be to provide a way of 'jumping over' the navigation bar straight to the content.The arts community needs aesthetically pleasing websites - do accessible websites need to be just text and therefore look boring?The idea that accessible websites need to be text-only is a myth; most of the changes required to make a website accessible do not affect the visual appearance of the site. Whether the site is aesthetically pleasing or not, is not related to how accessible it is - it is related to the talents of the web designer, and how well the designer and the client have thought about the goals of the site. An awareness of accessibility issues can however lead to changes that improve the usability of the site for everyone.For many people a site which contains pictures, animations, sound and video will be more accessible than one that contains only text. Using different communication mediums means offering more choice to the visitor to the site - and that can only be a good thing. Well designer, good looking websites, that make good use of multimedia technologies offer a richer experience to the visitor - however as mentioned earlier provide alternative ways of accessing information within non-text content.Mostly arts related organisations do not have a lot of money - is it more expensive to build an accessible web design?I am not aware of any research that shows whether or not it is more expensive to build an accessible website. Testimony be web design experts during the legal proceedings in Australia (when an individual took the Olympic Organising Committe to court because their site was not accessible), estimated that the cost of building an accessible website adds 2% to the budget of the site.In the medium to longer term the support costs for an accessible website are lower. For one thing, there will be less e-mails and support calls from people who can't access the information on your site. Creating an accessible website helps the designer to think about important aspects of the site such as how the content of pages are structured, and how logically the navigation of the site is organised; getting these aspects right early in the design process will make the site easier and cheaper (certainly in terms of time) to manage in the long term.Some aspects of making a site accessible will be expensive if they requires specialist knowledge, such as adding captions to video, or creating content in several languages. Making a site accessible 'retrospectively' tends to be more expensive than creating an accessible website from scratch.We don't want to discriminate against people with colour blindness, are there any colours should be avoided?First, ensure that you don't design your site in a way that means visitors cannot change the colours to suite their own needs. Second be aware that 15% of men have some form of colour blindness (only .4% of women); the most common combinations of colours that can cause problems are red/green (remember red berries on a tree with green leaves) and yellow/blue (remember the swedish flag or yellow daffodils against a blue sky). Using these colours on their own is generally not a problem, it is only when they are used as in conjunction with one another that problems of contrast occur, e.g. red text on a green backgound; both may look like grey to someone who has colour blindness.
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A Conversation With Jeffrey Zeldman On Web Standards
The website Meet the makers has an interview with designer and HTML standards advocate Jeffrey Zeldman. I am reading Jeffrey's book 'designing with web standards' at the moment - it is extremely good (although I disagree with his advocacy of pixels as the appropriate unit of measurement for setting text sizes on the web).Accessible web text - Russian translationYura Zemskov of http://www.computerlibrary.info has translated my article about accessible web text into Russian:' Part 2 'Accessible web text - sizing up the issues.' done. http://computerlibrary.info/view/article43/'Thanks Yura.Problem with RSS feedsThe 'blogs' page is not available at the moment because I am having a problem with the script that does all the work to fetch and display the feeds. Hopefully it will be back up-and-running again soon.Update: the RSS feeds are healthy again.
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So you Wanna be a Design Strategist? (Part 1)
Once every two months or so I have the pleasure of chatting it up with Bryan Zmijewski during breakfast. Bryan is an IDEO veteran, Stanford University lecturer on design, and the founder of a customer experience design company named ZURB. His experiences have given him great insights into the intersection of design and business. Insights that he’ll be sharing in a three part series on Functioning Form titled: So you Wanna be a Design Strategist? We kick off the series today with part one.

So you Wanna be a Design Strategist?
By Bryan Zmijewski

After consulting for nearly 9 years, I've come to the conclusion that being a designer doesn't automatically entitle you to the collective benefits of any industry. You have to sell yourself and talents every time you walk into a room. Is that good? If you have the skills to drive ideas, it allows you to set the rules and process; if being the person who pushes ideas forward just isn't your thing, you might find yourself becoming the disgruntled designer.

Here are eleven skills of a Design Strategist:

1. Read people
What's the most important skill of business decision making? Knowing what drives people to make decisions. Getting groups of people excited about an idea requires understanding what motivates them. You might have the best ideas in the world, but if you fail to understand the dynamics of the room, you may never get past your first idea.

In my first consulting gig I was invited to present a proposal at a board meeting, unaware that this public company's entire executive team would be in attendance. There were two billionaires sitting at the table. Really. I was wholeheartedly unprepared to sell a single idea to this crowd. I tried getting the group to brainstorm, using some techniques that had been successful for me in past situations. But in less than 5 minutes I was told, 'I think we're done here'. Ouch. It's a lesson that rings in my head all the time.

Reading people is a skill that can be learned, but getting really good at it comes as the result of years of practice. Every meeting, every conversation is an opportunity to hone your skills.

2. Don't over research
By its very nature, a designer's job requires using both left and right brain functions. Sometimes over-thinking a solution makes it hard to get people excited about the emotional content of our work. You do need to present research that helps your point, but don't make the mistake of devaluing your gut instincts or hunches.

Designers have an innate ability to sense and feel out a problem based on experience. This is a characteristic that many people wish they had. Sometimes, you're just going to know something is 'right' and you won't have the luxury of time to do the research to back you up. Train your clients to be willing to take a chance on your hunches.

3. Build in the metrics
No matter how right-brained and creative we are, in the business world, clients want quantifiable results. Building benchmarks and metrics into your projects will ensure that you get the chance to really show them what you've got, by giving them enough numbers during the process that they feel comfortable.

Remember, lots of people think that Excel spreadsheets and pie charts are the best way to justify budgets and map out next phases. Don't send your clients into metrics withdrawal--with a little work on your part, you can devise a numerical report card that helps the left-brained clients to feel more in control of and informed about the whole process, meaning that there's a better chance they'll sit back and let you work your magic uninterrupted.

There's More...
Continue to part 2 of So you Wanna be a Design Strategist?

Tags: design vision, business, strategy, theoverlap
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New BizTalk Server 2006 Code Samples

We have posted 5 new samples to the Developer Center:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/downloads/samples/default.aspx

SSO as Configuration Store
This sample provides an implementation of a sample class and a walkthrough that demonstrates how to use the SSO administrative utility and the SSOApplicationConfig command-line tool.
Atomic Transactions with COM+ Serviced Components in Orchestrations
This sample demonstrates how atomic transactions work in orchestrations.
Exception Handling in Orchestrations
This sample demonstrates how to handle exceptions in an orchestration.
Implementing Scatter and Gather Pattern
This sample demonstrates how to implement the Scatter and Gather pattern using BizTalk Orchestration Designer.
Using the SQL Adapter with Atomic Transactions in Orchestrations
This sample shows how to use the SQL adapter with atomic transactions to keep databases consistent.

Packaging Design for Web-based Products
Digital Web magazine has published a new article by me about applying the principles and lessons of packaging design to Web applications and services:

Packaging Design for Web-based Products

'Though hundreds of years of packaging design history and best practices may have influenced your offline shopping behaviors and decisions, the lessons learned in this enduring discipline didn’t have much of an influence on early web designs. After all, early web sites were primarily tasked with promoting or explaining offline services, companies, and products.

Following on the heels of these brochure-ware sites came a wave of e-commerce applications: buying, selling, or trading physical goods or services. It wasn’t until web applications became services, products, or content destinations unto themselves that concepts long known in the packaging design world—such as central and peripheral messages, shelf-space differentiation, and self-retailing—came to be significant considerations online.

As a product designer, I’m responsible for ensuring that web applications not only resonate with their target audiences but also embody appropriate brand propositions. As such, I’ve taken it upon myself to dive deeper into the principles and lessons of packaging design in order to learn what lessons can be applied to the world of web applications. Here’s some of what I’ve found so far.'

Thanks to the Digital Web team for asking me to contribute to their great magazine.

Tags: packaging, communication, Web applications, user experience, forms
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Arguments for flexible webpage layouts
Some notes: why are flexible web page layouts a good idea?1. The web is not print.From Evolt.org article 'Liquid design for the web'.'One of the greatest advantages of the web is something that your average dedicated print designer or software developer can't get their arms around. The idea that it's a fluid medium, that information can be experienced in as many ways as there are users....' '..On the web, all that goes out the window. Users could be running anything from a text-to-speech browser to the latest version of Internet Explorer with JavaScript disabled. Their systems can be anything from the newest version of BeOS to an old Amiga. And monitors can range from old 14-inch bricks running 16 colors at 640x480 to the latest flat panel running at 32-bit and 1,600x2,000 pixels. Ultimately, the user has control, and no matter how much the designer or developer wants to wrest that control, it just can't be done.' http://www.evolt.org/article/Liquid_Design_for_the_Web/20/15177/From 'The Web Style Guide' 2nd Edition'The Web is a flexible medium designed to accommodate different types of users and a variety of display devices. Unlike a printed document, which is 'fixed' in its medium, the look of a Web page depends on such elements as the display size, resolution, and color settings, the height and width of the browser window, software preferences such as link and background color settings, and available fonts. Indeed, there is no way to have complete control over the design of a Web page. The best approach, then, is to embrace the medium and design flexible pages that are legible and accessible to all users.' http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/layout.htmlFrom the same book/website:'It is possible to create flexible layout tables that resize gracefully without sacrificing the integrity of your design, but if you are turning to layout tables for precision you will need to use fixed-width layout tables.' http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/fixed-flex.htmlFrom the article 'Accessible Web Design - Liquid Design - A Step Forward To Making Web Sites Accessible"For web designers the monitor screen does not have fixed width or height because these variables change, at times in unpredictable ways. People might have larger buttons, toolbars such as Yahoo or Google, they open the Favorites page on the left, they have a double task bar and so on. Therefore the width and height of the screen is different from user to user. Liquid design means that the web site adapts itself to the available space, the same way water takes the shape of the glass it is in. http://www.oyster-web.co.uk/liquid-design.html2. Flexible web design increases accessibility.From the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines 'Themes of Accessible Design'. 2.1 Ensuring Graceful Transformation:'Create documents that do not rely on one type of hardware. Pages should be usable by people without mice, with small screens, low resolution screens, black and white screens, no screens, with only voice or text output, etc.'Checkpoint 3.4 Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values (this is a Priority 2 checkpoint.) (Note, in relation to the above guideline: fixed layouts require the use of absolute unit values; pages using fixed layouts would not pass WAI level 2 accessibility tests.)Flexible layouts are good for accessibility because they will help to accommodate end users preferences and needs, e.g. small low resolution screens, users who require large type (fixed layouts can make it difficult to display large type in a usable way).3. The arguments for or against flexible layouts, are not necessarily related to whether or not the site fulfills its purpose. Sites that use flexible layouts don't have to compromise on aesthetics. The critical decisions about how the site looks, are not necessarily determined by whether it should be accessible or not. In other words, accessible sites can be as fabulous looking, or as bad looking, as inaccessible sitesThat is not to say there are not design 'constraint's, as demonstrated in my first point, i.e. the design must be appropriate to the communication medium. Examples of sites that use flexible layouts: http://www.einfach-fuer-alle.de/ (A German accessibility portal). http://www.stopdesign.com/ (flexible page layout, and uses CSS and XHTML) http://www.markme.com/accessibility/ (uses flexible width tables) http://devedge.netscape.com/ (Uses HTML 4.01 and CSS for layout, and it would only take a couple to tweaks to make it fully WAI level 2 accessible) http://www.movabletype.org/ (flexible layout, a couple of small changes would make this accessible to level 2) http://www.alltheweb.com/ (uses a combination of flexible tables and CSS, only needs a couple of changes to make it level 2 accessible) http://www.wired.com/ http://www.alistapart.com/index.html http://www.alltheweb.com/ (uses a combination of flexible tables and CSS) http://www.digital-web.com/new/ http://www.zeldman.com/
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Structure your menus by marking them up as lists.
A navigation menu is - if we are speaking structurally - a list; but it is rare to find a developer/designer who marks them up as such. I guess the reason for this is that designers don't want to have ugly big bullet points littering their menu's, or seemingly uncontrollable margins throwing out their carefully crafted layouts.So, is it possible to use the correct structural markup, and still make your menus look the way you want them to?A recent rash of articles and tools have appeared to demonstrate that the answer is a resounding yes; you can use CSS to style lists to look more-or-less any way you want.First, undermine your previous assumptions by visiting the Listamatic website to see examples of different list styles (with the CSS used for each): Then visit Mark Newhouse's Taming Lists tutorial to learn how to make your own: And finally - if you can't be bothered learning how to do it yourself - have a look at Accessify's new List-o-matic - where you fill in a few forms, and the List-o-matic tool does all the hard work for you: Why is this relevant to accessible web design?Using the appropriate markup for all the structures in your web documents is the first step towards making them accessible; web pages need to be accessible to the tools, i.e. the 'user agents' people use first, before they can be accessible to the people themselves. Using valid standards based markup means you have the best chance of your pages being understood by those intermediate 'user agents' (usually that means computers and web browsers to you and me).The tips archive is at: Weekly accessible Web Design Tips.Register for your weekly accessible web design tip.Feedback from Andrew Arch Andrew Arch, the Manager Online Accessibility Consulting, National Information and Library Service has been in touch with some valuable feedback in relation to some of my recent accessible web design tips.Re: How to make printable characters between adjacent links invisible:'I used this tip with many clients in the past - a good one for thedesigners who can get very precious about their 'masterpiece'.'Andrew sent the following comments for consideration: even some new speaking browsers (eg HPR) can't distinguish links clearlywhile reading (HPR is fine when you bring up a link list) unless there is a character between them what we have found people doing is using a graphic between links for design purposes - this is ok, but the alt text needs to be set to '
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Design Globalization: Part 2
Part two of Design Globalization: a conversation aabout the impact of large scale global changes, outsourcing, and international design training/firms on design and designers (be sure to check out part one first).

Luke Wroblewski
Niti, so what I hear you saying is that the overlaps between business, technology, and people are increasing and that these broader overlaps are at least partially responsible for the greater impact of change found in today's global economy. Because there's more of an overlap between people and the technology they use -always on/always with you mobile phones and 'infinite' memory via personal computers to name a few- any change in technology more quickly and directly impacts people. Likewise for technology and business and for business and people.

This increasing flux -which I'm defining as an increasing rate of impactful change on business, technology, and people caused by any one of the three- has an obvious impact on business strategy. To put it quite simply: the strategies of many businesses are in an ever-present state of flux. Things change frequently, and the impact of those changes is felt quickly. For me, this signifies why design and designers are becoming increasingly important to business strategy. To succeed today, many companies need to be able to:

Make sense of an increasingly complex market (especially one that is in a constant state of flux)
React and adapt quickly (learn to function within a state of flux)
Become increasingly aware of context (both cultural and temporal)

Design can help accomplish these goals:

As Niti mentioned, an inherent ability to recognize patterns enables designers to find relationships within the flux and their storytelling skills (visual communication and metaphor) allow them to communicate those patterns and their meaning to others.
Rapid prototyping and a 'design is never done' philosophy make the design process well suited to react and adapt quickly to changing markets. Bruce Sterling articulated why design is always in a state of flux in Shaping Things: 'People are time bound entities transiting from cradle to grave. Any 'solved problem' that involves human beings solves a problem whose parameters must change through time. A thing is no more stable than the humans who cherish it. Properly understood, a thing is not merely a material object, but a frozen technosocial relationship.” With globalization we also need to consider global technosocial relationships whose parameters shift when viewed though the lens of culture.
The right design answer is always: 'it depends'. Context determines the right technosocial relationship for people at any given time. As Richard Farson put it : 'Designers ... create situations. (environments, forms, rituals, experiences, relationships, systems) and situations are far more determining of human behavior than are character, personality, habit, genetics, etc. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.'

It's the last point about context that particularly interests me. As a designer and visual communicator, for me context is always king. But how do I address continually shifting context in a highly networked global economy? Is the answer more or less control? Open systems that enable multiple dynamic situations or closed system with clearly defined experiences?

Joseph O'Sullivan
Let me first take one of Dirk’s points in defining Globalization: “creating a culturally and geographically diverse knowledge workforce” and couple it with Luke’s question concerning understanding the shifting context of a networked economy. Here I believe lies the opportunity for Design. Designers will be able to understand the shifting context by embracing the diverse knowledge workforce of other Designers around the world. Who better, other than an end user, to offer insights on a Design intended for a specific region or country, than another designer in that location? I am involved in many more conversations regarding the growing concern around the off shoring and near shoring of design jobs than I am on how our industry as a whole is going to gain from the movement.

My exposure to Designers in Asia has always been very encouraging. Their desire to embrace a user centered design approach is tremendous. This implies more products centered on user need/desire, driving bottom-line growth on a global scale has the potential to shine on a brand new light on the value of our discipline around the world. Our ability to leverage the success of this work will make a difference for our profession, our clients, and the consumers who use them.

Being a realist, that success is going to take some effort. If you took “the red pill, Neo” that opened your eyes to a User Centered Design approach, Globalization offers a complexity in your work that you might not have signed on for. It’s hard enough keeping track of the 2-3 personas for the U.S. release of your product, now add a 30-year housewife in Berlin. How will we judge your global success? Shall we use the Hasslehoff measure? You’re really, really big in Germany, but nowhere else --- will that be good enough? Don't think so. Get one country right before you move to another? Too slow. What if you only nail it for the “housewife” in Berlin, but loose in the U.S.? Back your bags, you've just been transferred to Munich. What will you have gained or learned?

Luke, I think you nailed it on the head when you stated the challenge as being “designing for a shifting context”. I’ll give you an example; we were recently discussing a product launch in Taiwan. Of course one of the questions was: “Will this meet the needs and desires of the Taiwanese people we are designing for?” Well, there is a interesting phenomenon happening in some countries in Asia right now. Korean youth culture/style is starting to drive culture in other Asian markets.

It should also be noted that Korean soap operas are killing in the ratings outside of Korea as well.

But I digress, back to Korean youth culture. What is influencing Korean youth culture/style? The answer: a mixture of early 90s U.S. B-boy styles and current NBA sports gear. Where does that put you as the designer, do you trend watch Taiwan or Korea? Probably both. Sugarhill Gang or the Knicks? Again, both...

So, how will we design for the “shifting global context”? I believe it is going to take an open source network of designers and researchers leveraging skill sets and intellectual property in ways we have not experienced. What do you think?

There's more...
Continue reading part three of Design Globalization right here on Functioning Form.

Tags: global design, design organizations, creative class
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Thoughts On Simplicity
A number of folks (myself included) have been sharing their thoughts on what it really means to make simple products. Here’s a round-up of what’s recently been said:

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated, Don Norman
“Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity.”

The Sweet Spot for Buying, Luke Wroblewski
“Before using a product, people will judge its desirability and quality based on ‘what it does’ (i.e. the number of features). Even though they may be aware that usability is likely to suffer, they will mostly choose products with many features.”

The Complexity of Simplicity, Luke Wroblewski
“While there are many reasons why keeping things simple is difficult, I’ve encountered these three causes quite frequently...”

Simplicity, Joel Spolsky
“if you think simplicity means 'not very many features' or 'does one thing and does it well,' then I applaud your integrity but you can't go that far with a product that deliberately leaves features out.”

Simplicity Isn’t so Simple, Nick Bradbury
“Simplicity is a goal all developers should strive towards, but it's a mistake to think that simplicity means having a small feature set. You're rarely going to sell more copies of your software by providing less features.”

Simplicity is Highly Underrated, Joshua Kaufman
“As a designer, I take simplicity very seriously. (It’s in the first line of my bio.) So when Don Norman comes along and says it’s overrated, I feel obligated to respond.”

Don Norman: simple doesn't sell, Mark Hurst
“The challenge for designers, and executives, and other practitioners is to consider what's a good experience in their context.”

The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda
“I wrote The Laws of Simplicity in late 2005 to early 2006 to get my thoughts down about simplicity. In the course of 100-pages, I outline the Ten Laws as used on this website.”

Tags: simplicity, don norman, user experience
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