“can I say neither is that cool? conceptually yes, but from a design point of view; neither”
Over on 5 things Stuff, we have two new t-shirt designs. Both are aimed at web and user experience designers. Check them out and the other designs.
5 Apps to Look At - Citymaps, Super, Nutshell & More
Apps that make living in the world easier, more fun and more expressive. Too many good apps out there, and these are the ones I am looking at this week. Stay tuned for more in the weeks to come.
Thanks for all the suggestions for Apps to Look At. Send me yours at twitter.com/5tilt.
Citymaps - citymaps.com
So much of what I ever wanted from Foursquare, Yelp and Google Maps is about places, not locations, but places. Places I've been to, places I've loved, places to share and places to meet at. This is focused way to find and collect those places. You can find my growing maps @rtsnance on Citymaps.
Super - super.me
Visual, fun memes to be made for your friends and the world, Super walks you through building a meme-worthy message. It's a way people love to communicate with their friends, just made easier to find, make and share.
Nutshell - nutshell.prezi.com
Life's little stories, short and sweet
Snap three pictures. Add captions. Choose graphics. And let Nutshell turn it all into a shareable cinematic story.
Reuters TV - www.reuters.tv
TV doesn't mean what it used to mean. It used to be a box you sat in front of. Now it is something that comes streaming through the things we carry around with us. The Reuters TV responds to that in an exciting way: a pre-downloaded, custom-tailored 5 to 30 min selections of news segments, ready for you to watch whenever and wherever you are.
Timeline - Timeline.com
Weaving together the reports that cover events in a quick succession creates a more complex and nuanced story. Such is the essence of Timeline. See how a story evolves over time. Quickly dive into its roots and beginnings. All this helps make sense of the news.
Design Wish - Drawing Gear for a User Experience Designer
Most often the clearest, fastest and most generative way to get to an articulated vision is stay clear of the temptations of polish and presentation and to live instead in the world of hand-sketching. I spend most of my design time drawing and sketching and these are the tools I love.
User Experience Designer's Bookshelf
I recommend Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences as a important book to read.
It very much pushes on the way both the imagined end result and the tools at hand play a huge part in the success or failure of a design. It has totally changed my mindset.
Tufte has become an icon for me in the space that often gets reduced to infographics, but really has to do with the meaning available through comparisons.
One of the concepts that came to me from him is roughly "information is all the differences that make a difference." And this title of his, Envisioning Information, explores the way changes and similarities, represented visually makes information accessible in ways numerical abstractions sometimes hide.
A further extension on this thought, is the way images and the information contained in them can be the heartbeat of a power, convincing and compelling narrative. His Visual Explanations challenges a lot of the notions I had about important and help me refine a key idea for all of my interaction and information designs: salience.
For the actual work of designing interfaces, Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age and Robert Hoekman, Jr.'s Designing the Moment have formed the basis for my process, moving from strategies and concepts through user insights to frameworks structures and finally interfaces.
my pick - 5 Things to Buy an Aspiring User Experience Designer
It may seem counter-intuitive to many, but designing digital experiences, for the web, iPhone and Android apps, doesn't necessarily begin with computer software. In my experience as a UX Designer, the really great designs are unlocked through a massive amount of exploration and communication.
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