Matt Balara, Freelance User Experience Designer in Sydney Australia

The Design of Conference Badges

Matt Balara — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:32:03 +0000

I’ve been to a lot of conferences in the last couple of years. Without exception, every one of them has had a badge that is either ugly or useless or, in most cases, both.

So when UX Australia announced their badge design competition, I just had to jump on it.

To make the best badge possible, I decided to share my rough designs on Flickr and get your feedback. The first version went up yesterday and plenty of people left helpful comments, so today I threw together a revised version.

Please do me a favour and click here to see the latest version, and leave a comment on Flickr. It’d also be lovely if you would post a link to Twitter and help me get more feedback. Thanks!

The Only Thing I Really Learned at SxSW After down
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What’s Design Mean to You? An Interview with Thomas Vander Wal Like a foo

Sketchbook Love

Matt Balara — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:50:05 +0000

While working on my presentation for UX Australia, I decided it’s about time I had a new and snazzy font for my slides.

Happily, I stumbled across Klim, a so far unknown to me foundry in New Zealand, and their lovely font Newzald, which may be just what I’m looking for. But lovelier still (to my eyes) are the pages of their sketchbooks that they’ve posted. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of creative process and painstaking craft goes into forging a beautiful typeface, you must take a look. It’s all there on the page, for anyone to see.

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Over 50 Typographic Tees

Matt Balara — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:31:17 +0000

Let’s just ignore how long it’s been since I posted here, shall we? Ahem.

I’ve never really understood collecting - the feverish desire to have more, preferrably all of a particular thing - well, it’s always seemed a little bit soft-brained to me.

Then I looked in my drawers.

I have to admit it: I’m a little soft-brained too. I own so many nicely designed t-shirts, I could easily wear a fresh one every day for over three weeks without doing laundry. And as a designer, I’m more than a little in love with typography. Typographic t-shirts are like upperbody heaven to me. Maybe that’s something I should seek professional help with, or perhaps you understand?

So here’s my monster have/want list of typographic tees. Enjoy, and be sure to share your own favourites down in the comments.

Typefaces

Shirts not only set in, but also about particular fonts. No surprise: Helvetica wins the most love, hate, and love to hate.

Ampersands

Everybody’s favourite funky typographic symbol, the ampersand’s become quite a popular subject for shirts. In case you were wondering, according to Wikipedia the ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction “and”. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”.

Numbers

I was surprised at how unpopular numbers are on typographic t-shirts, but there are a few good ones out there.

Hand-Drawn Type

All the warmth and analogue fallibility that Helvetica is lacking radiates from hand-drawn typography, which always brings a smile to my face.

Design Nerdery

In-jokes, obscure jargon, phrases repeated to clients over and over and over… these are the shirts to warm the cockles of any designer’s heart.

Just Shirts with Sweet Type

And the grab-bag of shirts that have nice type, but don’t quite fit into any other category.

If you’re a fan of type tees, there’s more here:

The typography tag on Rumplo
TypoTees blog
The typographic t-shirts group on Flickr
T-shirts on I Love Typography
Tees on Typographica

Have a favourite type tee that’s not here? Throw it in the comments!

The Design of Conference Badges I’ve
Type on the Move I remember

Downgrade Me, Please.

Matt Balara — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:59:25 +0000

I use a 2.6 MacBook Pro with 4 Gig of RAM every day. Everything on this machine runs beautifully, and I rarely, if ever, experience enough lag in any app to become frustrated.

Photoshop CS4 is the only exception.

Extremely frustrating problems include:

up to 10 second pause before refresh when zooming in and out.
5 to 20 second pauses when selecting/deselecting layers.
stuttering and crippling lag when dragging an image around, especially when zoomed in.
unresponsive reactions to layer nudging.
anywhere from 10 second to 5 minute (not an exaggeration) pause while saving for web, accompanied by frequent crashes.
all of the above problems are completely random and not consistently reproduceable, though they occur very regularly.

As a professional designer, I’ve been used to ignoring Photoshop CS3 and concentrating on the work I was doing. This is exactly how a good tool should function. With Photoshop CS4 I spend far more time frustrated and conscious of the unresponsive & clumsy tool than I do paying attention to what I’m trying to do. Apart from being constantly and unbelievably frustrating, it’s costing me time, and therefore money, and affecting the quality of my work.

Dear Adobe, you should be very worried. I have spent a great deal of energy lately wishing for an alternative to Photoshop. Having customers whose loyalty is based on nothing more than a lack of viable alternatives to your product is a perfect opportunity for a competitor to drink your milkshake, and earn the gratitude of customers like myself. You, the creators of the Quark killer InDesign, should know that very well.

The first Photoshop CS4 update, 11.0.1, solved none of my problems. As a customer who bought CS4 new, and not as an upgrade, I don’t have the option of downgrading to CS3, although I would dearly love to. Providing me with a free downgrade wouldn’t really solve my problem – Photoshop CS4 would still be painfully slow – but at least I could work in peace again.

How about it Adobe?

Are you a designer using Photoshop CS4? Tell me about your experiences in the comments below.

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The 4th Web Trends Map

Matt Balara — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:12:26 +0000

Oliver and the boys at Information Architects have done it again…

The beta version of the fourth Web Trend Map is out, and it’s gorgeous. Go have a look at all the beautiful details, and if you’ve got any feedback, let them know. They’re only printing 1000 of them, so shoot them a mail to reserve a copy! It’s a lovely piece of info-porn for the studio wall.

And if you like this one, the first, second and third web trend maps are well worth looking at as well, even if they’re completely outdated by now.

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Ten Tips for Top Decks

Matt Balara — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:25:47 +0000

If you attend two geek conferences back to back, you get to see alot of slide decks. And while the decks at SXSW and the IA Summit were chock full of good content, many of them had a few little practical problems, which would’ve all been easy to avoid. I’ve done plenty of pitch presentations, so I was thinking, “if I was presenting, I would wish I’d thought of that!” the whole time.

Here are ten practical tips for giving good deck, aimed at geek conferences, but hopefully useful for others as well.

Make sure that your Twitter handle is big and clear on the first slide. If you say smart things, people will want to follow you, and the backchannel will want to use the shortest name they can find for you.
Likewise, don’t forget a hash tag for your session, and keep it short. #gp is better than #greatpresentation, for example. Eating as few of the backchannel’s 140 characters as possible is good for your karma.
If you’re on a panel, tell the audience to ask questions through Twitter. It can be a nice way of answering what you want when you want, and dodging the long, drawn out, “I have something to prove” questions that everybody hates.
Use LARGE typography. From the back of a big room, type smaller than 64 px is going to be hard to impossible to read.
We’ve all got laptops with us. If we want to read, we’ll use them. Keep your slides visually interesting, but go light on the text. The best presenters use the least text in their slides.
Do not put slide-junk like the date, the name of the conference and your logo on every slide. We all know where we are, who you are and what day it is, and we’re having a hard enough time concentrating on your incisive insight without unnecessary distractions.
Anything you really want people to see should be in the top two thirds of any slide. People’s heads will invariably block the bottom third.
You never know how well set up the projector and screen will be, so keep away from the edges of your slides to make sure nothing gets cut off. As a general rule, keep a 10% zone on top, bottom and both sides free of content.
Make sure your type/background combo is high contrast. If you present in a well-lit room, grey on black will be hard to read. Highest contrast, but boring, is black on white. White - or any bright colour - on black works too, and generally looks fancier.
Unless you’re presenting some massively complex essay, present your material, don’t read it. If you’re reading your presentation, you seem stiff and you can’t connect to the audience. Even if you flub a line or two, you’ll always get more sympathy if you present without reading. Reading is a refuge for nervous presenters, but one you should work on getting over as soon as you can.

These tips won’t make you a great presenter, but they will ensure that your great presentation can be seen, looks good, and encourages backchannel discussion. Hope it helps!

Smart Hotel A smart us
What’s Design Mean to You? An Interview with Thomas Vander Wal Like a foo

From the Inbox…

Matt Balara — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:14:57 +0000

A few things that have flown across my field of consciousness in the past week or two…

Jakob Nielsen recommends the use of mega drop-down menus.
I’ve been watching quite a bit of TED lately. My top three TED talks of late are Don Norman on emotional design, Stefan Sagmeister on design & happiness, and Phillippe Starck on toothbrushes, super monkeys & God. In other words, design.
A shocking piece of amateur data visualisation: what does one trillion dollars look like?
And speaking of data visualisation, Wikirank puts a fun data pr0n face on Wikipedia.
Plenty of food for thought in the Cult of Done Manifesto, though as Merlin pointed out, surgeons should please ignore it.
I’m quite enjoying Wireframes Magazine. It’s nice to see how other scribble.
Microplaza is starting to be a standard part of my info-grazing habits. It helps sort through links sent by those you follow in Twitter. Let me know if you want an invite – I’ve got 5.

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The IA Summit Blues

Matt Balara — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:14:18 +0000

The conferences I remember as simply wonderful are the ones I didn’t want to leave and couldn’t wait for more of the same a year later. Today, a few days after the tenth IA Summit, all I can say is that if next year in Phoenix will be more of the same, I doubt I’ll be there.

That’s not to say that it was crap – far from it. There were plenty of interesting sessions, and I’ll be getting to those later. But the quality was overshadowed by a discussion – in the sessions, breaks and evenings – that seemed, to this first time summit attendee, to be equal parts navel-gazing, tree-pissing and back-biting.

The House Must Evolve or Die Divided

“Big” vs. “little” IA, academics vs. practitioners, tribe vs. community – the posturing around these semantic issues in sessions with melodramatic names like “Evolve or Die” and “A House Divided” surprised me, as it had never occurred to me that they were issues. The summit old-timers, a.k.a. ten-years (tenures?), seemed to be talking to and about each other, leaving us newbies scratching our heads in irritation. Judging by how little this embarrassed anyone involved, it seems to be par for the course. For me, a great reason to skip Phoenix.

There was also much talk of job titles and “a place at the table.” I’m sorry, but no one outside of the field of information architecture knows what the words mean, so what’s your title got to do with anything? A place at the table is earned through competence. Do excellent work, work that unquestionably demonstrates the value of what you do, and your place is guaranteed. Leave the titles fight for those who want to differentiate themselves form their colleagues, and get on with your work.

By the end of the summit it seemed that those in need of catharsis had achieved it. When Jesse James Garrett delivered the theatrical closing keynote, there were applause and cheers, growing in fervor until the penultimate statement:

We are not big or little information architects, we are not interface or interaction designers, we are user experience designers!

This speech earned JJG a standing ovation, and I almost expected him to whip out a big black “designer” flag and the crowd to build a barricade, though to keep what out I couldn’t say.

Hello Navel!

Right about then, I realised I’d been inordinately irritated by the whole discussion. I’d frowned and ranted my way through the conference, which wasn’t like me at all. Why was I so miffed?

The project process begins with strategy and information architecture, which leads to “visual” design, which leads to coding and launch. As an Art Director in a large agency I had a pretty stable position in the middle of the process for the last seven years, with a clear job description and title. Jobs just magically landed on my desk without me marketing myself, which left me free to expand my skill-set “backwards”, towards the start of a project. I already “owned” the visual design territory, but by the time I quit last year I was also heavily involved in sales, strategy consulting, sitemapping, wireframing and more.

Since I moved to Sydney and made the leap into freelance work six months ago, I’ve found it hard to define and communicate what exactly it is that I do, and find, if possible, something to call myself. The struggle of the IA community that I witnessed at the IA Summit mirrors my own struggle, and it’s pretty annoying to have an issue you’re avoiding and ignoring thrown in your face.

ZOMG! UXD FTW!

So I’m a user experience designer (um, and graphic/visual designer), and the rest of you are too. What now?

Well, I’d say you traditional IAs should all take a deep breath. There’s plenty to be happy about, and lots of work to do:

As an experience designer, you’re no longer locked in the HCI box. Experience is everywhere.
Design is a tradition extending back into at least the nineteenth century, so there’s tonnes of work to look at and plenty to read and learn from.
As a designer, you’re related to the “visual” designers you seem to have so little respect for. Get to know them, integrate them, and your work will be better for it.
Look around at how much the concept of experience design can include, and start dismantling the tiny fences of exclusion that you’ve built.

One Love…

And as snarky as all of the above may have sounded, the very last moments of the IA Summit washed away all of my irritation. Five Minute Madness – a summit tradition where anyone who wants to can address everyone about anything for up to five minutes – showed the IA community to be a close-knit, warm, passionate and yes, dysfunctional, family. Speakers honestly shared what they thought and felt. They sang, clapped and were moved to tears.

I found myself wanting to belong, to be one of these great people who obviously care so much about what they’re doing. I found it hard to believe that these people were the ones nit-picking about irrelevant definitions and job titles. And I found myself wishing them the best, wishing them the clarity to get over the pettiness and get on with some epic shit, and wanting to see them all again, maybe next year in Phoenix.

How was your summit?

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SxSW to IAS09, a Roadtrip

Matt Balara — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:40:54 +0000

After SxSW interactive, Andy Budd and I jumped in a Dodge Charger and drove 10 hours from Austin to Memphis, for the tenth Information Architecture Summit. The trip was more interesting than it looks in this video.

What’s Design Mean to You? Interview with Andy Budd The second
My First SxSW After 6 mo
The IA Summit Blues The confer

The Only Thing I Really Learned at SxSW

Matt Balara — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:30:42 +0000

After downloading my photos, I realised I wasted quite a few characters by writing the last post. What I really learned at SxSW, and my goal for the rest of the year, is this…

That is all.

My First SxSW After 6 mo
The…