Bridge to design

flickr.com/photos/ayankhasnabis
Well, designer has created wonderful designs after hour long interaction with users, vendors, architects, stake holders & etc if any. Everyone has given their buy-in, product managers have worked on final opinions on tweaks to the design.
It seems there are some managers, (apparently from an ideal universe,) who believe, once a great design is hatched, a simple written document is all the development team needs to make it a reality. Unfortunately, for most teams, it takes much more work to communicate anything but the simplest of designs.
As everyone believes, to successfully implement the design, a simple document accompanied with design or a mockup is more than enough to communicate the designer ideas to the developer . But that's where things regarded as shortfall in the design process. Unless the better dialog is setup to help the developer to understand the designs better, it's as good as a bad deliverable. As it might compound project risks, costs of implementation & delayed Quality Analysis etc.,
The design deliverables are a critical bridge between designers and developers. Both the documents and the process that produces and delivers them deserve careful attention.
So what's the solution to bridge the gap between a better design & the developer ?

Jared M. Spool opinions, The most successful teams play close attention to the critical goals behind their design deliverables. The minute details covered design doc & development focussed deliverables win the game of successful applications any day.

>> Read more on 'Getting The Most From Design Deliverables'

Simp.lified



Link of the day:
Russian designer,
Vlad Gerasimov showcases his impressive set of designs.
>>
Visit his website to admire his works.

Patience design


Looks nice & weird, but what's this ?

A sculpture made of pencils & sewed together using a sculptural beading technique called 'peyote' stitch !

These mesmerizing patience involved designs are created by famous artist Jennifer Maestre. Her medium of subject, objects chosen to work on these sculptures are truly amazing. Attention to detail is very much evident at the first glance. After looking at many of her art work, a question evoked in my mind about how she come into decision to work on particular design.
RM: How do you think up the subjects for your sculptures?

JM: Sometimes I have a rough idea in my head for a form, sometimes things go awry, and I end up somewhere I never envisioned. Sometimes I make a 'pattern' for myself, and follow it to see what happens. Many times, one sculpture will inspire the next. Originally, I was inspired by the form and texture of the sea urchin, I still make them out of pencils.
>> Janniter talks with Reuben's blog about her perspective & thoughts on art & pencil designs.

Interesting links of the day:

>> Time pass if you've time to kill - Mouse draw & tab to wipe
>> Right Brain vs Left Brain Creativity Test

Crush graphics


Many of my web application prototypes goes with more whitespace based, findability oriented liquid CSS layouts. But there's no way that I can ignore branding graphics & supportive graphics in the layout which adds more visual liveliness. Challenge is not to make the layout heavy to eye balls as well as to browsers. So question lingers now...

Which is the best graphic image format for web ?

I would say, .png format. An Open, Extensible Lossless Compression image format. Specially rounded corners or thin graphic lines are fad in current design trend. To fasten browser rendering without using heavy graphical images: PNG has an edge. But Internet Explorer have issues with PNGs as background graphics and tends to render them darker than they should be. This is because internal comments and data that is not necessary, including gamma information. Removing the gamma data ends up solving this problem by making .PNG file lighter & browser friendly.

Since I've moved most of graphical elements to portable network graphics format, Fireworks does the neat job of removing redundant or unnecessary data in it, but individually. I was looking out for something which could batch render this kind of work. I found Benjamin's PNGGauntlet -a user friendly .net based tool which does the job of compressing my PNG's neatly. Best of all is its a freeware !
Many PNG files output by popular graphics software packages like Photoshop or even Fireworks are not as small as they could be - PNGGauntlet squeezes the last bit of size out of them. PNGGauntlet also supports a brute-force option that will try different PNGOut settings in order to create the smallest file.
>> Benjamin's PNGGauntlet

There're few freewares to do this task : pngcrus

Madness of owning


Last year I could afford Sony DSLR, Creative PMP & HP notebook. They were badly on my geeky intentions radar. Though I'm not a junky nerd who buys anything & everything, I'm content that I could buy gadgets I dream of.

But if you really evaluate; the behavior of buying expensive gizmos or geeky stuff is nothing but 'madness of owning'. I'm sure till we buy it, it's like mad fever which don't go away from head. The moment we own it, it feels like oh just for this I tried, researched and paid for ?.

I don't quite understand this madness of owning psychology. I think most of these buying segment is a successful hunt of intelligent marketing. For instance: ipod from apple. I still believe, though there're better music players in the market ipod is nothing but a neat marketing hype. Certainly elegant ipod User interface of the product turned table towards apple.

Affording these stuff may burn some ones pockets, but in the era of gadgetry it's inevitable to give up delectable gizmos. But how to afford these gizm stuff though they are beyond our reach ?

>> Ken has an interesting read about it

Extreme Earth


A thick blanket of snow covers West Thumb Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park. There are more geysers in this park than anywhere else in the world.

When it comes to capturing pictures of land scape there's nothing like National Geographic photography team. Their photos always stand a chance in the league of best photos. They make you think. They tickle ones imagination with their awe inspiring composing.

I found this interesting set of Extreme earth photos from NatGeo pages. I had great fun & awe watching them. Experience mother earth in all that beauty & mesmerizing she is vested with. With the courtesy & benevolence of National Geographic, you can get these amazing pictures as wallpapers to beautify your desktop if you wish...

>> Extreme earth - through NatGeo lense

Flickr Update


Wish you all a happy new year ! Some serious thought for new year :)

" Handle every situation like a dog !"
If you can't Eat it or Screw it. Piss on it and walk away !

>> Btw, I've updated my flickr gallery