Shoot until u feel great..

Shoot until u feel great..

I recently got the following from a client...

Thus far, I would say that most of the images I've captured are boring and uninteresting. I want to learn to capture images that will stop people in their tracks. Images that will make people say "wow".

This got me thinking... How does one make really stunning photographs? What does it take? How can we aim for, and work toward achieving this lofty goal? So, here are five ideas to move you forward toward greatness:

• Define Greatness
• Define yourself and your work. Identify where you are now as and where you will be.
• Make photographs to please yourself
• Engage people you already dialogue through your work
• Learn from Experts

>> And over to Zivkov for more

Flickr link of the day
>> My friend Vyas has shot amazing pictures with his new Nikon D80

Beauty & the website !

Beauty & the website !

Ramp walker, model, artist, designer & wonderful human being in one cute package :).
wonderful human being because, her paintings don't lie. Wish I could work with Aagencynet.com !
Vist Larissa Meek's cool website

Experience Vision

Experience Vision

When we talk with design teams, more often than not, they articulate that "users are our first priority." Yet, as projects progress, the priority often shifts to the appropriate technology solution and the needs of the business stakeholders. It's not that the design teams don't think the users are important. But somewhere along the way, the primary focus moves off of the users' needs.

It wasn’t that the team wanted to ignore the users. It’s just the demands of the business units they served and the constraints from IT made serving the users take a back seat. In the day-to-day hustle-and-bustle, the long-term perspective gets lost.

When the long-term perspective vanishes, it becomes difficult to feel like you’ve made any significant progress. Sure, you’ll have checked many items off the ever-growing to-do list, but have you really improved how the business serves its customers?

To solve this, many teams are turning to an old tool: creating an experience vision. Is your design team having trouble focusing on the users? Does your organization have an experience vision?

- It's an interesting thought by Jared M. Spool of UIE tips.

>> Mr. Spool speaks about experience vision here

Card design

Card design

Wondering what's is this ?

It's a visiting card of a fitness trainer. Interesting, isn't it !?
( a small wafer of rubber printed with clumsy letters. Stretch to read the info on it. Truly intelligent flexing experience ! )

Business or visiting cards are not just printed piece of paper. They are finding innovative ways to appear on, they're visual identity of oneself. It speaks a lot about you & it's your first hand business impression. Like a neat website, visiting cards are like a promissory notes in personal interaction. A true goodwill reflected on small but effective piece of design.

The paper, material it's engraved on, its quality, typography, design, style, graphics, brief info, the cut, 'one-unique-catchy-thing, the pride it hums, the respect it surrounds -is simply amazing. Every time I receive somebody's business card I get into design swing -even I should create a unique & visually pleasing visiting card for myself. It just remained as a thought. Most of the time, employers give out a neatly designed cards for employees. It depends how satisfied you're with the company card & its design.

I've preserved so many nicely designed cards though the name on it is less important. But that shouldn't deter you from giving me one when we meet next time ;)

>> See the pool of business cards in flickr & in creativebits.org

Design tools

Design tools

If you're into creative domain the common question one has to face is: which tool do you use for design ?. There're many tools in the market which are competing with the market leaders of design software. Every new tool is paving its own contribution in eliminating the bottleneck of the competing product.

View this list of top Simulation & visualisation tools for UI Designers, Information Architects and Usability Specialists:

1. Microsoft Visio
2. Axure RP
3. Adobe Creative Studio
4. Elegance Tech Lucid Spec
5. iRise Studio, iRise Manager, iRise Server, iRise Reader, iRise iDoc
6. Serena Composer
7. Simunication Enterprise Simulator
8. Sofea Profesy
9. Intuitect Professional
10. OmniGroup OmniGraffle
11. Smartdraw

>> Source: simulation-tools

ALT or TITLE ?

ALT or TITLE ?

An interesting way to re-look at the use of ALT and TITLE attributes. Not only proper understanding of these attributes helps a lot in the efficient web standard practice but saves lot of time if followed perfectly as a customary practice, than "going back to add it later" as it's viewed by Ted Goas.

• "It’s important for web designers and developers to know how to write good ALT and TITLE attributes. Practices like these should be employed into each web page element as it’s created. As Roger notes, we should be including accessibility features when initially creating web pages rather than going back to add it later."
• "Alternate text is not meant to be used as a tool tip, or more specifically, to provide additional information about an image. The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element…. Many people seem to confuse these two attributes…"
  

It's feasible to approach drafting accessibility assessment kind of report with the proper usage of ALT and TITLE attributes. Minor confusion between these may yield to faulty AA or AAA report.

> Further Read: Fadtastic blog

Design for End-User Security

Design for End-User Security

In one of the recent project I worked with; much of the emphasis was given to ease of use, user satisfaction achievement while working on the hierarchical user experience modules. The application is idealized to connect remote servers residing as a GUI widget on the user desktop.

One of the crucial concern was: 'addressing security' in information architecture & user experience modules. This was never highlighted as it was regarded as part of application architecture or not in the framework of User interaction design process then. Often information architecture tend to focus more on logical representation of the data & content flow & interaction design tries to achieve ease in accessing desired elements by the end user. Hence user centered methodology is tightly coupled with logical representation & ease of use in element hierarchy.

When we reached usability testing phase, the gray areas were popped out specially when the application was tested with mock user security settings. Giving us a realization that user interface modules need to address very basics of security & users' expectations and system behaviour. This may not be applicable to soft applications which doesn't deal with security or nothing to do with desktop authorization settings, but the aim is to gather front end user data & understand 'consumer' behavior. The user experience prototypes & models were tweaked to represent the feasibility of accessing security related settings.

Meanwhile, I found an interesting principle of interaction design in which 'End-User Security' is a prime concern of user experience module. Though dated, it has some good take away tips whilst designing interfaces for security focused applications:

It is critical to emphasize that security be perceived as easy to use by users, not designers, software developers, or system administrators. Actual behavior is the only definitive metric for whether users perceive the benefits of security to outweigh the costs. Security must be useful enough to warrant the extra learning time and any additional ongoing effort over using a different system with less security, or using the same system insecurely.

>> Principles of interaction design for security

Ethnography primer

Ethnography primer

• Ethnography informs design by revealing a deep understanding of people and how they make sense of their world. Ethnography is a research method based on observing people in their natural environment rather than in a formal research setting. When ethnography is applied to design, it helps designers create more compelling solutions.

Great design always connects with people. Designers inspire, provoke, validate, entertain and provide utility for people. To truly connect, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences. Designers need to understand the relationship between what they produce and the meaning their product has for others. And they need to observe the people they are designing for in their own environments.

AIGA, in collaboration with Cheskin, has produced a simple and straight-forward primer introducing the crucial role that ethnography plays in designing.

> root