On this day, in 1999, I let xBlog out.
Those were some wildly fun days at XPLANE and in the nascent blog world back then (they still are, but we’re all much more grown up now, and those worlds have gotten so much bigger than we could have imagined).
I started xBlog as an internal resource for the folks at XPLANE. As the “web guy” back then, I was sort of like the in-house “Seen it” version of Anil Dash. If someone said they needed to draw Singapore’s flag, I sent them a link. If someone wanted to find an Isotype library, they asked me. And so on. So I started saving and sorting those links, and soon released it to the world as xBlog | The visual thinking weblog.
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Here’s a brief (seven minutes) description of the workshop XPLANE founder Dave Gray will be giving at UI15 in November: Visual Thinking for User Experience.
It’s a new workshop on effectively communicating design ideas. Wireframes don’t help us with the Why, only the What of our designs. Dave’s simple sketching techniques are powerful tools for communicating your design’s rationale. You’ll learn solid strategies for visualizing your ideas, which will help you identify issues while creating great new experiences. (Psssst! If you register for the conference using the promotion code “GRAY” you will save 400 bucks on the conference — or 50 bucks on any one day!)
And if you’re in Philly for IDEA, don’t miss today’s conference kick-off with Dave and his Gamestorming co-authors James Macanufo and Sunni Brown. They’ll be talking with Peter Morville and sharing insights from their new book — discussing how Gamestorming can address the cross-media challenges of ubiquitous information architecture.
After the panel conversation, they’ll facilitate break-out sessions in which participants will work together using methods like sketching and bodystorming to explore ideas for visualizing and mapping complex, blended (offline/online) products and services.
Follow them on Twitter to keep up on what’s up at #idea10!
Visual complexity is a paradox. On the one hand, complexity is a compelling feature known to capture a viewer’s attention and stimulate interest… On the other hand, complexity only arouses curiosity up to a point. When a visual is extremely complex, viewers may tend to avoid it altogether.
There are a lot of reasons why I really like Connie Malamed’s 2009 book, “Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand.” Here are three:
1. Balance | The book balances examples of great design, explanations of core visual principles and informative bits on cognitive research about how the brain processes graphics. Some pieces you might be familiar with: Nicholas Felton‘s Annual Reports, the HistoryShots series, and Nigel Holmes‘ and Alberto Cairo‘s work all appear here. But a great strength of the book is in the mix of graphics projects you’ve almost certainly not seen before.
2. Context | But it’s not just about infographics. It’s not just about charts. It’s not just about data visualization. It’s not just about posters or maps or illustrations. The book clearly places each of those outputs into context by using specific projects as examples of a key design principle rather than sorting them by deliverable, or style, or date, or provenance or designer. Seeing each piece according to its best qualities is almost better than having an overall project case study. It helps make successes clear and repeatable.
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For the fourth consecutive year XPLANE secured a spot on the Inc. 5,000, Inc. magazine’s listing of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. We are proud to achieve the overall ranking of #2759, and #248 within the Business Products & Services industry. XPLANE‘s growth rate for the past three years has been a very strong 82 percent. Perhaps most impressive of this year’s ranking is that it demonstrates XPLANE’s perseverance and growth over the course of a very difficult 2009.
The 2010 Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2006 to 2009. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by June 30, 2006. Additionally, they had to be based in the United States, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of December 31, 2009.
Last year XPLANE started experimenting with something some call “Ballroom presentations.” We like to call them “Did You Know?” videos. They’re short videos that use simple motion, graphics, illustrations, text and photography to explain something or make a point.
The popularity of our “Did You Know? 2.0” video got us a lot of attention (4 million views worth of attention, and counting). With its release, more and more organizations started asking for something similar.
So we decided to put some more muscle into these videos by requiring less muscle. Instead of using Flash to build DYK videos we started to experiment with Apple’s Keynote presentation software. Which meant that people who had never touched Flash or Final Cut Pro could easily try their hand at motion graphics.
Now, you may think of Keynote as the designer’s version of PowerPoint — which it certainly is — but I think of it as low-end video software.
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XPLANE has a regular thing we do called Visual Thinking School — VTS for short.
It started as a way to take a break from client work and get together to safely learn new skills and innovate. The format is wide open — the only real requirement these days is that the exercises be interactive. By that, we mean that everyone should be involved and active. No death by PPT. No one-way lectures. Get people up, get them working together in small groups or discussing things, report back.
So at VTS we make things, ask questions, sketch, scribble, draw, design, share. It’s a time for XPLANERS (and the public, on the first Thursday of each month) to focus on becoming great at what we do and have some fun at the same time. (Contact me at bkeaggy at this domain if you’re in St. Louis or Portland and would like to get on the invite list.)
Anyway, today I’m going to tell you about one of the more fun VTS sessions we’ve done. Actually we’ve done some of these a few times. It’s called Design Challenge Night!
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Lots of quick tips, trick, profiles and samples over at Storyboard Central.
Part ‘History of’, part showcase, part bitch fest… a place for those interested in the fine art of the comp and storyboard — especially as they are used in advertising.
The acquisition was announced this morning — this is exciting news for all of us!
More info here: Dachis Group acquires XPLANE and be sure to check out the buzz on Twitter.
Well, this looks quite nice.
The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces.
The guide contains: 1) an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands 2) how to utilize these gestures to support major user actions 3) visual representations of each gesture to use in design documentation and deliverables 4) an outline of how popular software platforms support core touch gestures.
Haven’t watched this yet but very much looking forward to it after reading some excerpts over at Scott Berkun’s blog.
There were plenty of high profile people at the Economist event in March, but hands down the best session was a simple interview with Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.
Martin Giles from the Economist did the interview, and did an excellent job letting Catmull cover some excellent territory…
Interesting, related to the talk I gave on The Myths of Innovation at the same event, how little he used the word innovation (I don’t think he says it once).
