- 8/8/8: EightShapes’ First Public Workshop is Coming!
One of the things Dan and I wanted to do with EightShapes is offer training. Sharing our experiences with other user experience professionals is enormously valuable, and contributes to our own education in the field.
I’m therefore really excited to announce that EightShapes is holding its first public workshop on August 8. Dan and I have […]
- Bloat Me or Bloat Me Not: InDesign Document File Size
Ever have your InDesign document file size starts to balloon seemingly out of control, or seem oddly really big to be posting on Basecamp or Beanstalk?
Often times, the reason is that as you Save, Save, Save, Save your file iteratively over it’s life cycle, INDD’s format tends to save alot of historical information about your […]
- InDesign CS3 vs. Fireworks CS3, Round 1
At EightShapes, we’ve invested heavily in the use of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 collection of products for creating user experience design and documentation, and leveraged Adobe InDesign as the primary product for creating deliverable PDFs. But what’s this we hear about Fireworks?
With the CS3 release in early 2007, Indesign offered the enhanced capability […]
- Audiences & Artifacts
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Monday April 14 2008, 9:30 - 10:15AM
As designers, why don’t we concentrate more on designing our documentation? Too often artifacts of our design process are initiated haphazardly, difficult to maintain, unusable by recipients, and organically grown into something we never anticipated. […]
- Instant Deliverable Mix Playing Cards
So, the big concept with my IA Summit poster on page patterns is that visitors will be encouraged to create their own deliverable on the fly, taking pattern cards from the library of ingredients and placing them in the deliverable slots. Creating the actual cards was a real exercise that lasted about three hours, […]
- Instant Deliverable Mix (2008 IA Summit Poster)
The IA Summit 2008 approaches fast, and I’m putting the finishing touches on my talk, poster, and Wall of Deliverables to-dos.
Tonight I just completed the Instant Deliverable Mix poster for the 2008 IA Summit, which presents a thumbnail gallery of page patterns under a blank deliverable, and explanations of page patterns, recipes, and practical tips […]
- Creating a Component Library, Step 1: Discovery
Every component library gets “discovered.” As the first stage of the library development process, discovery activities identify component candidates and enable a unified vision of what’s essential, what’s nice to have, and what can be thrown out before you even begin building any assets.
Once a library is discovered, information architects can collaborate with other […]
- InDesign Inline Objects & Text
With the large number of component systems under our belt, I’ve begun to significantly change the nature by which I construct combinations of objects and text within a page or component.
Up until now, nearly all wireframes are composed as a combination of many independent “objects,” those vector-based descriptions of a shape (e.g., gray outline box […]
- Pattern Library vs. Component Library: What’s the Diff?
Our methodologies and deliverables for producing large-scale pattern and component libraries play a significant part in EightShapes‘ user experience design services. One might say that it’s a core strength of ours, or at least a leading practice area. So, I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to actually formally address the oft-asked question: […]
- Interpreting Interest in Types of Baby Photos
Yesterday morning I posted 20+ photos that detail the recent birth of my daughter, Caroline. The photos were posted as a Flickr set, and the set’s thumbnail gallery URL was sent to a wide range of family and friends, perhaps nearly 100 email addresses.
I tried hard to take some quality shots, get good lighting, […]
