Archive for October, 2007

Oktoberlinkfest

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

• Bernie’s better beginner’s guide to photography
• A little visual perspective on the $87 billion being spent on Iraq – or ‘big numbers – just how big are they?’
• How does it feel to die? – fascinting if morbid New Scientist article
• I just discovered this hilarious comic strip called Garfield and Conceptual terrorists encase Sears Tower in Jell-o – The Onion, of course

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Comics and personas

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

Inspired by Rebekah Sedaca’s Boxes and Arrows post, some workmates and I took a social day out learn the art of comic drawing. I can barely remember the last time I attempted to draw anything ‘for real’ – it’s long been something I’ve decided I couldn’t (and therefore shouldn’t) do.

And, well, I’m still not hugely talented, but I must admit I surprised myself. Somewhere, previously untapped, is a minimalist and amateurish style that I appear to have plagiarised from Julian Opie and John Porcellino.

Of course it was a very fun day, but it’s also not entirely frivolous. Let me explain.

Scott McCloud talks about closure being an important part of the appeal of comics. We see faces in all kinds of inanimate objects: plug sockets, houses, fishsticks – this is an effect called pareidolia. Even the simplest of structures are recognisable: two dots and a line.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=409536472&size=m.

But this face obviously lacks detail, state and emotion. So we interpolate these; in effect we fill in the gaps with our selves. In this way it’s possible for us to relate more to a stick figure than a highly-detailed 3D rendering.

And this empathy is precisely what User Experience folks try to achieve with personas.

Now, honestly, I think some people go too far with personas. I’ve heard tales of UX people dressing up as their personas, adopting their accents and basically acting them out over the course of a day. I’ve heard of people decorating entire rooms with the artifacts of the personas’ lives: “Bob’s room” etc.

If you have time to do all that then you’re clearly not busy enough – get on with your wireframes! (Although must confess I do actually like the idea of lifesize cardboard cutouts to take to meetings.)

Comics can be much quicker, particularly if you spend a bit of time up front to create a character sheet, showing how to draw them, what clothes they wear, what their regular scenarios are like. Using these prefab elements, we can knock up a quick storyboard in 10 minutes before a meeting. And the comic can act as the agenda: “Here’s the scenario we need to design a solution for” or “User tests show the following reaction to X. What can we do to improve it?”.

But we’ll see. There’ll be some people who ‘get it’ right away, and some who think we’re just faffing around with cartoons. If nothing else, at least I know I can now draw a passable female arse.

Tags: comics, personas, userexperience, drawing

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Chess is officially difficult

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I’ve started to play chess again. And wow, they’ve made it lots harder since I’ve been away. I’m putting it down to my more open brain. Yup. Remind me to write about my strange left-brain-to-right-brain conversion some day; there can’t be many designers with Physics degrees.

There doesn’t seem to be a great lot of advice for people who know their fundamentals but need to shake off the rust. So I’ve had to make my own tiny training list:

• Remind myself of some basic tactics to get my eye in
• Brush off a couple of sharp but not overly theoretical openings – I’m thinking Sicilian (Sveshnikov as Black, Morra Gambit as White), Benko Gambit against 1. d4, or maybe Dutch Leningrad.
• Finally understand the endgame (my eternal weakness)
• Most importantly, play lots.

As a kid I played a fair bit but spent a long time doing what I thought was studying – playing through games, nodding sagely at nice-looking moves, but never really putting the graft in to improve. Can’t say that I’ll put in the graft this time either (I’m hugely busy, and it’s not likely to ease off) so I think my only chances of making any sensible progress are by playing, not worrying about my grade, and learning from my mistakes.

In retrospect, I think that’s why I never progressed the way I should have as a kid: my grade sat around 80-90 and never accelerated like most juniors. Too much trying to get better, not enough playing for the love of the game. Bit like this blog, recently…

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In Rainbows

Monday, October 1st, 2007

It’s very late and as such I’ve yet to work out how important an announcement this is. Hasn’t even hit Digg yet.

Radiohead have a new album coming out. In ten days. No pre-release hype, no PR, no Letterman appearances. No surprise there. The surprise? You choose the price.

You could say this is something that only rich bands can afford to do. Possibly. But there’s definitely the nagging feeling in my mind that this is the one of the biggest nails yet in the coffin of the old industry.

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