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Showing posts from July, 2008

cool iPhone buttons

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The last few days I have been working on designing a widget for my company along with an information acritect. It's going pretty well. My inital design looked like an iPhone, and then we moded it form there until we came up with a simple yet cool design (something like 10 mock ups later, lol). My buttons look like iPhone buttons, which I love (I wish I actually had an iPhone, but they're too expensive to own in Canada). On the over state I increased the brightness by 30, suble but nice, and on the down they look depressed. Here's a sample for fun. :) The awesome tutorial to do the buttons I found here - http://blog.jotlet.net/2007/07/05/iphone-style-icon-tutorial/ . To do the over and down effects I came up with all you need to do is the following: The "down style" layer is just a copy of the color layer with an inner shadow: I also nudged the icon down 1px and right 1px. The "over style" is just an adjustment brightness/contrast layer with the brightne

The "IT" pigeon hole

Does it count that I don’t want to be put in the "IT" box? That I think design is about everything from a cell phone interface to the way your local grocery store is laid out? Does it matter that some day I want to use my skills to change the devices I use daily that drive me nuts – like my oven? "Some of what good interaction designers do is make the world better by removing those little irritants in life, some of which we don't know exist until they are gone." - Dan Saffer from his book Designing for Interaction

What's my title today?

This blog is named such because depending on the day I have a different job to do. Yesterday I was a visual designer. Today I am a technical writer. Next week I expect I will be an interaction designer. When it all comes down to it, I may be a generalist, but if there were such thing as a generalist that focused on the end user I suppose that would be me. Problem solver and user empathizer extraordinaire. With an educational background in web design and development, and years of experience coding, I decided to leave the code behind (without any tears) and pursue what I actually cared about; the experience. UI professionals may all agree that we are underappreciated but necessary and often overlooked until the last second of any project. I want to help change that, in my own company, and in the industry as a whole. Just yet another IT professional blog to crowd the already overcrowded web space. But hey, who’s listening?