KonzeptioNerd

Agency Workflow 1.0

When Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, first enters the garden outside the house behind her mirror, she finds things quite curious indeed. She walks around, talks to some rather haughty flowers, until she encounters the Red Queen. From here, things become deceidedly weird.

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Bottle business - how user testing might have saved my shirt

If you’re familiar with German meeting rooms, you probably know the single serving Granini juice bottle that are often part of the catering: stubby little glass bottles with wide necks and nubbed bodies. There’s a typical gesture to drinking Granini from those small bottles. Grab the neck with your right hand. Place your thumb firmly [...]

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To name is to create (on Mark Bernstein on Wikis)

Mark Bernstein asks interesting things about Wikis these days, for example: is it possible to link ironically, or lyrically, in a wiki?. Mark argues that “to name is to link” and that “a link to SomePage goes to that page; it can’t easily lead to a commentary or a rebuttal or an alternative or an [...]

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Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Disorder makes a great tandem read to Norbert Bolz’s bang design and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. Weinberger, too, is dealing with things gone out of control. But when items break out of their traditional categories, Weinberger gets all excited and fired up.

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see #3 conference

Visualize Information
Third see conference in Wiesbaden, yesterday. Cool location Caligari FilmBühne), relaxed atmosphere, nice conference.
The see series focuses on the visualization of information and the organizers, web design agency Scholz & Volkmer, managed a lineup of resounding names, engaging speakers:

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Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience

Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience: User Centered Design for the Web is certainly the piece de resistance of or the user experience design and Garrett’s something of the godfather of the discipline. You simply cannot do UXD and not have read the Elements. Together with ia/recon and the Visual Vocabulary (already drafted [...]

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What you want (to be)

At first I thought, Paul Arden’s It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be was your average load of motivational mumbo-jumbo. One reason for this may be the misleading German title, which translates exactly to It’s not who you are, but who you want to be, putting the whole thing [...]

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Bashing the blurb

I usually have a hard time finishing Gerry McGovern’s New Thinking because I can’t scroll very well with two thumbs up (maybe the new MacBook Air with its ingenious multitouch technology could be of help here?). But last week’s instalment? (Great websites do, not say, Jan 14, 2008)
McGovern apparently has a bone to grind (or [...]

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If the great philosophers had been user interface designers (pt. 3, Oscar Wilde)

Although an information architect at heart, Oscar Wilde spent much of his life working as a graphic designer, trying to disprove common fallacies of interface design by blatantly extolling them.
However, the finer points of his humor were by and large lost on colleagues and clients alike who held him as one of the greatest proponents [...]

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Web design defined

Jeffrey Zeldman defines web design:
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
(A List Apart: Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding Web Design)
That’s quite a way from “web developers make the web work, web designers [...]

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