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- July 2, 2012
Tabling Toward Greatness
July 2, 2012Read moreThe idea of manning a table at a convention or flea market has been buzzing about on the edge of my consciousness for a while. It’s the first step in one’s epic journey toward life as an independent seller of goods. If you are part of a cultural fan base, manning your own table is crossing the line from consumer to creator in the full view of your peers. Exciting and scary stuff!
I’m not sure where my future table will be. Perhaps at a stationery show? Or maybe at a flea market? It’s a future rite of passage I look forward to with excitement and a bit of trepidation. In the meantime, I’ve been living vicariously through other people’s posts. Here’s a couple recent ones:
- I’ve been a fan of my cousin John Su’s work for a long time, which combines a snarky-humble sense of humor with skillful anime-style rendering. He recently manned his first table at the AM2 Animation, Anime, and Manga Convention, and as is his habit drew a interactive flipbook of his tabling experience. Humorous and informative.
I check in periodically on Sally Carson to see how her transformation to comic artist is going. Is it not cool enough to be a bike messenger turned UX Designer? Apparently not! :) I stumbled upon her informative Tips for Tabling at Comic Shows today, and was charmed by her careful approach toward engaging table visitors without making them feel put-upon. As someone who doesn’t like to bug people, I didn’t have a good sense of how I would theoretically handle foot traffic. Sally’s post gives me a template to follow with a goodly dash of hope.
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p>It seems that quite a few of my friends have been thinking of tabling at conventions or flea markets. Trade shows are not that much different, I would think…looking forward to giving it a try someday myself!
- June 28, 2012
Project Updates: Pens, Tomatoes, Cards, and Guns
June 28, 2012Read moreI’m about to start an intense coding session, which I know from experience will mess up my head. When I’m in the programming mindset, I tend to talk like a robot with a broken speech actualizer. So before I head down the rabbithole, here’s some quick updates on a few of the projects that have been going on.
Tomatoes
As I mentioned before, I’m growing deck tomatoes for the first time. The sub-irrigation planters are doing well! The upside-down planter suffers from its tendency to block the sun, so the plant isn’t getting a lot of light. I also need to install these
Water Probesto get the watering system working while I’m away travelling.
Paper Notes
I had a great lunch with Aaron Mahnke, a prolific print designer, podcaster, author, and founder of the Read & Trust blog network. He’s launched a line of productivity outlining products called Get Frictionless, which falls into the category of “cool productivity stationery” that I’m happy to be part of…the more the better, I say! It was very cool to meet someone who lives relatively nearby that can relate with what I’m doing. I got one of his packs of Capture Cards, which are nice 3×5 index cards for structured note taking. I gave him one of my prototype index card holders, which he later tweeted as an index card dock. That’s a way better name…I’m totally going with it :)
I’ve always wanted an Etsy store, so I finally have something I can put on there: hand-crafted card docks! It’s fun because they’re relatively simple to make, but I can spend a lot of time learning how to sand, stain, and buff them into worthwhile desktop artifacts. If there was every a simple way of getting into woodworking, this is it. I’ve made part of my basement into a temporary construction zone, where my
miter saw righas been set up for production. We shall see where this goes! I would rather be working on this right now than doing C# programming, but oh well. Eventually, I may look into manufacturing a whole bunch of these, because I’m finding them pretty useful to have on my desk. It’s almost like I have a small army of helpers, each with an idea that I want to remember.
Pens
I was browsing ThinkGeek the other day and came across the Bobino Slimp Pen. It’s designed to stick inside your notebook; there’s a bit of adhesive tape on it somewhere. It sounds like a nice idea.
These Bobino pens look more robust than the other flat pens I reviewed some years ago. I am guessing they are easier to find, too. I haven’t cracked the package yet, but look for a review in the days ahead! I have about six pens that need reviewing.
Lessons
I also had the opportunity to take a shooting lesson at Sig Sauer Academy, a well-known instruction facility for law enforcement and civilians that’s part of gun maker Sig Sauer. I’m writing up a long review of this, as there are several interesting parallels I can draw between learning how to shoot well and being a more productive individual. Plus, it was just plain awesome :)
- June 26, 2012
Wireframe Template for iPad Screen Design
June 26, 2012Read more
UPDATED 10-23-2012: PDF now includes second iPad Mini dimensions.
I’ve been wanting to get some iPad versions of the Printable CEO tools out there, but this requires a bit of design rethinking. For one thing, touch interfaces require a minimum button size, and that affects all the proportions of the layout.
Ordinarily, I would do this kind of interface thinking on a computer screen using one of the Adobe Creative Suite programs:
- Flash – Easy design and placement of graphics elements, interactivity and animation features built-in for prototyping.
- Illustrator – Strong drawing support, ok text layout, vector-based for clean output at any resolution.https://davidseah.com/blog/2012/06/wireframe-template-for-ipad-screen-design/
- InDesign – Strong and fast text layout for wordy layouts.
- Photoshop – My least favorite, but it works at the pixel level. I hear CS6 fixes a lot of the stupid UI bugs that have crept in over the years.
Each of them has their pros and cons, but all of them lack the essential size and scale experience, which is important for a touch device. That’s something you need to hold in your hand to feel. I hunted around the Internet for an existing iPad template I could print out, but didn’t find one I liked. I also didn’t think they captured the feel of the frame.
So I made one. The frame is a thick outline, which I think is better than being solid-filled to keep from distracting your eye too much when looking at your sketch at a distance.
Usage
In the sketch phase, I start with a blank sheet to do some thinking. Then, I created the layout in Illustrator, placing the PDF template in a locked layer and drawing elements on top of it. After that, I printed it out so I could “hand-simulate” it and see how I felt about it, writing notes directly on the design.
When it is time to make production graphics, I will import the AI file into Photoshop at the appropriate resolution and hand-tweak the layout so it is pixel-perfect.
The template has a dot-grid that is spaced at 44/132 inches, which is Apple’s minimum UI element size recommendation (look under “hit target”). I’ve assumed that the “point” size is 132ppi, based on the original iPad’s screen resolution and the documentation’s use of the iPad as an example. Verify through testing, I say…the number is somewhat arbitrary, I believe.
There are also areas marked off for the status bar on all sides, and I’ve also included 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 screen division marks to help apportion the screen aesthetically. The advantage of designing this way is that you get a more intuitive sense of the element dimensions with your finger and stylus, and it’s easy to imagine the interactivity. Translating back to pixel dimensions is easy with a ruler and a bit of math.
Download
TO USE: Print it out on a high-resolution (600DPI minimum) monochrome printer. Make sure that the printer dialog specifies 100% (no “scaling to fit” option enabled) to get as close to the real iPad size as possible.
Enjoy!
- June 22, 2012
Mail Bag: A Collection of Productive Ideas
June 22, 2012Read moreMore catching up on the mail bag, featuring some correspondence I’ve had with three people earlier in the year. I haven’t used these products or ideas myself in great depth, but I think they are interesting enough to pass along.
A Structured Meeting Planner
Reader Randy Riggs emailed me about a meeting planner he made based on the ideas of the Emergent Task Planner and the Day Grid Balancer graphics. He writes:
Took some of your ideas to build a meeting planner, styled much like the Emergent Task Planner. Working through the first field tests right now. Currently, I am experimenting with the Day Grid Balancer for week planning.
So when I see a meeting for the week during my Monday look-ahead, I fill out a Meeting Planner. Then, as the week progresses, I can add relevant things I want to bring up at the meeting.
I invited him to share it to see if it sparked any ideas from other readers. You can DOWNLOAD THE DRAFT PDF and leave a comment if you are so inclined.
Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy
Jay Uhdinger wrote in to tell me about some writing for his variation of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Theory (MBCT). From what I gather, it’s a psychological technique to recognize when you’re going down a certain undesirable chain of reasoning, stopping it, and then taking corrective action. He’s released several chapters of a free course he’s developing to help people develop. Each chapter has a video that explains the concepts, and citations of referenced works are included. It’s an interesting combination of cognitive science with practical tips on learning how to be mindful. Check it out on his Success Does Not Equal Happiness page.
The Works of Nicholas Bate
Many years ago when I was getting my feet wet with this blogging thing, UK-based Nicholas Bate sent me a sampling of his beautifully-designed books as inspiration. While one could technically group his work into the “self-help” category, that label has associations with books that dress up common wisdom with new clothes, buoyed toward credibility by supportive anecdotes that were obviously hand-selected. That’s not what Bates does. Covering a range of topics from personal change through productivity to business, I find Bate’s works to be clearly written, intelligent, and highly approachable. The book design is balanced and quietly bold, which creates in me both delight and a touch of jealousy. It’s quality work!
I recently got an email from him to inform me that his latest book, Do What You Want: The Book That Shows You How to Create a Career You’ll Love, is now available. It occurs to me that if I wasn’t so stubborn about learning things the hard way, I could save myself a lot of time just by going through Nicholas’ back catalog, and so I’ve made a mental note to review his books in greater depth at some point in the future.
- June 21, 2012
Matt Shafeek’s “Create / Consume” Project for July
June 21, 2012Read moreMatt Shafeek, a writer/performer in NYC, is challenging himself to balance his “consuming” (watching TV, playing video games) with “creating”. To do this, he’s kicking off July with an entire month of logging his consuming time and matching it with an equal amount of creative work. So, if he spend an hour surfing the net, he is going to spend an hour doing something creative like writing a blog post. He invites us to follow and participate at his Create/Consume Blog. Here’s a video that explains the concept further. Thanks for the heads-up, Matt!
