- 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, […]
- Object Styles
Adobe InDesign object styles enable you to quickly apply (or change) a collection of formats from paragraph & character styles, fill & stroke colors, spacing, padding, text wrapping, corner options (rounded, anyone?), independent effects for text vs. object vs. stroke vs. fill, and more.
In EightShapes custom documentation systems, our focus has been on paragraph styles […]
- Macworld 2008 Reax? Sigh…
Ok, so I got a bit obsessed today. At around 12noon EST, I started hunting around the net for bloggers writing on the Macworld 2008 keynote by Jobs. Live feeds? Nah, obviously all those sites sputtered. So I found a blog, refreshed about once every four minutes, and enjoyed my lunch reading the successive posts […]
- Modularity: Choosing a Toolset
How?
While Microsoft Visio has rudimentary capabilities for placing and cropping linked files, by far the most effective toolset for employing modularity has been the Adobe Creative Suite. And while Photoshop remains the obvious tool-of-choice for high-fidelity visual design, modular user experience deliverables can be successfully composed via combinations of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. Recent, successful […]
- Page Patterns
A Page Pattern is a framework of placeholder text, markers, and other objects that - when applied - enable the designer to easily place artwork (e.g., wireframes) and annotate (e.g., content specs) into a consistently structured deliverable page.
As I demo custom documentation systems that we build at EightShapes, I often implore attendees to think about […]
- Audienced Deliverables
Think about the word deliverable. It implies something you deliver, carrying a certain sense of finality. The word is also singular. In my experience, neither is true. Deliverables that I author are iterative and rarely have a designated “final” state. To date, I’ve never published a “final” deliverable that didn’t […]
- Why Modularity Matters
Modularity provides a range of benefits and addresses many drawbacks of a typical documentation process. Useful for many UX staff members - not just your typical IA - it’s benefits increase alongside increases in team size, project scale, project duration, and more.
» Key Benefits
» Common Pains
» Who uses it?
» When is it valuable?Key Benefits
CONSISTENCY
You […]
- Modularity & Design Hierarchy
In a design process that documents a digital user experience, documentation can be modularized to varying degrees based on a design hierarchy. Such modularity results in independent files for components, views, and flows that are all systematically unified into published deliverables.
The design hierarchy provides a foundation to conceptualize and execute this approach. As a […]
