iphone GUI link

So i want to make my writing in the blog slightly more regular and documented. That means not just the once in a blue moon sitting on the toilet design idea (thats where all the good ones come, right?)but also just nice observations and findings in the design world. That means two things


1a. i am going to start storing links i like here for later use when i cant remember where i saw something

2b. i am going to start tagging these post! who would have thought someone invested in usability and interaction would not be tagging his posts to make it easier to find.


So to start, here is a link i found a few months ago

Great if you need to toss together screens for an iPhone interface. Mad props to the creators of this file and for publishing it to the net. I have a strong tendency to use illustrator over photoshop though and rebuilt all of the elements in a glorious .ai file. Soon to be posted though I havent placed it anywhere on my server yet.

a designer's personality...

an interesting observation of late:

are all designers trained to hate the world, and thats why we strive to make it better?

i have always had a certain amount of crowd anxiety, frustration with servers at restaurants despite being one not too long ago, and have shaken my head at the behaviors of people so immersed in their iPhones they almost cause accidents crossing the street.

i always thought it was me, and yes i know that falls into the narcissistic behavior of everyone as well. but then i was at dinner last thursday with a former professor of mine and at least three times during the meal that i can recall, we looked at each other and shook our heads in reaction to people in the environment. our server was less than enthusiastic about working a thursday night, other customers disregarded the public setting yelling at their loudest, and all we did was shake out heads in dismay.

so, my question is simple. where as designers do we draw the line between observing the world and society and being a member of it? when must we stop criticising people and realize that we too are human. i feel that as designers we take it for granted that we understand how a system works and how a story is told, but at what point do we become victims to our own skills and personalities? at what point are we as guilty as the users we shake our heads about in the restaurant.

It's the same everywhere...

Dont think for an instant that becuase you work for a corporate design office, or a smaller consultancy that things will be different. From my observation, the design industry as a whole is so young that in either environment the same issues persist. For an industry based around promoting consistency for usability, both environments lack it. From my recent discussions with friends in consultancy positions, it has become clear that all of us struggle to find internal design guidelines by which to make public documents.

This makes me questions how we, as designers can convincingly communicate to the world when we ourselves dont have a cohesive method of communicating between each other. I recently read a post on ixda.org discussing the changes in the profession and how designers change forums as the title by which we go by shifts. This goes along the same lines. As long as there is no standardization of what we do, it will be difficult to find it in our products. Still, we as a design community come up with great results to challenging design problems. I am curious though to see what else could be accomplished if designers didnt have to reinvent the wheel every time a spec document was built, every time a work flow had to be modeled.

Irony...

Just an interesting observation about my current path with design.

Freshman year at Carnegie Mellon I applied and was accepted to the dual major program in Human Computer Interaction. Being asked by family and friends what that actually was, I began using the phrase "cell phones and atms". This was generally accepted by my audience in that everyone has had experience with shoddy cell phone interfaces and how they map, or dont map, to the physical device and everyone has had experience with ATM machines.

Lo and behold, now I work for PNC bank. The focus of my work is on mobile banking. So, I am not doing anything with ATMs, but I sure am in the financial market, designing cell phone interfaces, keeping in mind the physical and digital realms and their overlap.

Just some entertaining thoughts.