Tag Archive for 'Design'

Ten Lessons Learnt at FITC

Published
by
Amy Allcock
on May 10, 2006
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I had hoped to do a proper write up of this year?��Ǩ�Ѣs FITC, however, now that several weeks have passed and my mind has settled slightly, I thought I would share this list of key lessons learnt instead.

  1. Personal work fuels the corporate work ?��Ǩ��� Geoff Lillemon (personal and corporate) and Stefan Sagmeister were two good embodiments of this mantra.
  2. Controlled randomness is cool ?��Ǩ��� Mario Klingemann and Joshua Davis are two shining examples ?��Ǩ��� but I much prefer ordered connections.
  3. Web developers are the new application developers ?��Ǩ��� Apollo from Adobe (coming soon) allows web developers to write applications for multiple devices.
  4. Screen capture is a great way to do self-promotion and Kevin Airgid has some excellent examples of how to use screen captures to demo your work.
  5. Interaction and not animation is the real aide to online learning. Kristin Henry rightly pointed out that animation is just a series of still images where as interaction requires user participation which is necessary for learning.
  6. I prefer Super Mario hacks over Atari hacks.
  7. Matrix mythology always makes for an interesting dinnertime discussion
  8. The dot-matrix printer is a damn cool instrument
  9. I enjoyed the creative talks more than the technical ones, mostly because the creative talks shed a lot of light into the artists creative process which I find absolutely fascinating (Geoff Lillemon, Stefan Sagmeister, Joshua Davis, Margo Quan Knight, Geoff McFetridge) and the technical talks weren?��Ǩ�Ѣt technical enough to really be useful.
  10. We need more females to present and represent at FITC

Event pics can be found here.

FITC Here I Come

Published
by
Amy Allcock
on February 23, 2006
in Technology
. 2 Comments

I happy to announce that just officially signed up for FITC 2006, Canada’s first and foremost Design and Technology Festival. This will be my third year in attendance and I’m very excited about this years line up. A few of the Speakers/Sessions I’ve been eyeing include:

I’m sure the list will grow with time, but for now I see plenty to keep both my left and right brain happy.

Flatlined Design

Published
by
Amy Allcock
on February 22, 2006
in Design
. 1 Comment

The other day I was designing a web site for a cardiovascular research group and I needed a simple graphic image for the site that would take up a good chunk of horizontal space without being two distracting. I choose to use this image of an EKG - a graph of the electrical voltage in the heart - for it’s graphical nature as well as the fact that it is a symbol that most people have come to associate with the heart.

I showed the design to the client yesterday, and needless to say I was shocked to find that that the EKG I had selected was that of a person on the verge of death. Oops! Turns out that that numerous peaks represent someone who is suffering severe cardiac arrest that would most likely kill them and apparently a normal EKG has far less of those. Luckily the client saw the humor in the situation and has since provided me with a healthy EKG so that visitors won’t be greeted by a graph of someone having a heart attack on their next visit the site.