Trust is a Choice – Prolegomena of Anthropology of Trust(s) by Stephanie A. Krawinkler 189 pages, 2013 Carl-Auer Verlag (Publisher) [Amazon link] [Extract] Trust is a universal but culture-bound phenomenon and a critical success factor in corporate life. The author provides a compilation of anthropological theoretical threads on trust. She conducted a long-time ethnography of [...]

Posted on 19 June 2013 | 10:27 pm

The physical environment in which a service plays out has a significant influence on the experience of a service. So it’s not uncommon for service design projects to take the physical environment into account. In a recent project focused on the physical environment of the train station, the Dutch service design consultancy 31 Volts, specifically [...]

Posted on 19 June 2013 | 5:23 am

A new Ericsson ConsumerLab report, Unlocking Consumer Value, identifies the needs of today’s smartphone and mobile internet users. “The rapid uptake of smartphones and other connected devices has transformed the mobile broadband landscape – shaping and broadening the way users work, play and communicate. When the uptake of smartphones begins to accelerate in a particular [...]

Posted on 19 June 2013 | 5:15 am

In a second article in a four-part series on the use of tablets in educational settings, Justin Reich of MindShift examines the topic of curation. “As technologies have developed, the tools and objects of curation have become increasingly accessible. For decades, teachers have arranged collections on bookcases, but now we create playlists of songs, folders [...]

Posted on 13 June 2013 | 7:26 am

“In reality, we’re all kind of on ‘Big Brother’ — on a reality show,” says Syracuse University’s Anthony Rotolo, a professor who runs the Starship NEXIS lab, focusing on social networking and new technologies. “Whenever I give a talk, whenever you give a talk, there’s going to be someone live-tweeting it. There’s going to be [...]

Posted on 12 June 2013 | 2:46 pm

An enormous study of how consumers around the world interact with brands finds that only the companies that make life better for consumers create impactful connections. For its second annual Meaningful Brands Index, Havas Media talked with more than 134,000 people in 23 countries about their impressions of more than 400 brands, from Apple to [...]

Posted on 12 June 2013 | 8:23 am

Participatory Design in Healthcare: Patients and doctors can bridge critical information gaps is the title of a UX Magazine article by Andrii Glushko, a UX designer at SoftServe Inc. “What we now call participatory design went through a number of changes, and can be seen influencing urban design, architecture, community planning, and placemaking, as well [...]

Posted on 6 June 2013 | 1:46 pm

This week the Financial Times has run two reports on the Millennial Generation. Part Two (pdf) came out today, whereas Part One is from June 3. Part Two’s leading article is definitely worth exploring, particularly in how it connects technology and mobile devices with empowerment of a new generation: “Technology has played a huge role [...]

Posted on 6 June 2013 | 1:03 pm

“Throughout my career, and especially as a designer at IDEO,” writes Nathan Waterhouse, “I’ve been a passionate believer of the value of placing people first, of designing from an end–user perspective. [...] Perhaps it was the abundance of rhetoric about human needs [at the recent Skoll World Forum] that made me ask the question ‘But [...]

Posted on 6 June 2013 | 12:42 pm

EPIC, the premier international gathering on the current and future practice of ethnography in the business world, just announced the program of its upcoming conference in London (15-18 September) and Experientia is proud to announce that it will be presenting a paper on Monday 16 September. The paper is entitled “The changing face of healthcare. [...]

Posted on 6 June 2013 | 9:08 am

“Google and friends should not be trying to make these things acceptable in polite society,” writes Roger Kay in Forbes. “If they persist, they can expect a wave of hostility the likes of which they have perhaps only begun to imagine.” “People can’t opt in to public surveillance, and we live in a more dangerous [...]

Posted on 4 June 2013 | 10:00 am

The Jörgits and the End of Winter, an indie fantasy novel for kids nine and up, uses interactivity as a supplement to the story, not a stand-in for it, and shows how interactivity can work in a slightly more substantial text. The app was created by Anders Sandell, a Finnish-born interaction designer who grew up [...]

Posted on 4 June 2013 | 9:51 am

The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) is an independent policy and research center, affiliated with the World Bank, dedicated to advancing financial access for the world’s poor. Their next five-year strategic direction lays out five priority themes, desired outcomes, and activities against each priority. The first one is “Understanding demand to effectively deliver [...]

Posted on 4 June 2013 | 9:41 am

The deep reading of books and the information-driven reading we do on the web are very different, both in the experience they produce and in the capacities they develop, writes Annie Murphy Paul on MindShift. Recent research has demonstrated that deep reading—slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity—is a distinctive experience, [...]

Posted on 4 June 2013 | 9:22 am

Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman W. W. Norton & Company, June 2013 288 pages [Amazon link] Abstract We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online [...]

Posted on 4 June 2013 | 9:14 am

In large technologically-driven organizations with a broad and complex product range, establishing a user-centric approach to product design can be very challenging. The shift towards designing products and services for compelling experiences for users requires (among other things) changes in planning, resources and processes. This article – by Didier Chincholle, Sylvie Lachize, Marcus Nyberg, Cecilia [...]

Posted on 3 June 2013 | 12:23 pm

Next year Interaction14, the top interaction design conference will be in Amsterdam, the second time it is in Europe (after Dublin in 2012). Now the website is live. And it is responsive (works great on a smartphone). Participate and be a speaker or workshop chair. Register (starts 10 June). Or simply be inspired, as he [...]

Posted on 2 June 2013 | 9:49 am

To be sure, big tech can zap some city weaknesses. But, argues Alec Appelbaum, many urban problems require a decidedly different approach. “The answers that make cities run more smoothly only inadvertently end up being the ones that make cities run more equitably. Deep data can learn and display policy cues that used to flow [...]

Posted on 2 June 2013 | 9:08 am

From the Journal of Information Architecture: Sense-making in Cross-channel Design Jon Fisher (Nomensa), Simon Norris (Nomensa), and Elizabeth Buie (Luminanze Consulting) Successful cross-channel user experiences rely upon a strong informational layer that creates understanding amongst users of a service. This pervasive information layer helps users form conceptual models about how the overall experience works (irrespective [...]

Posted on 1 June 2013 | 5:18 pm

During her keynote speech at the DataEdge conference, Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft Research, identified what she calls “six myths of Big Data.”: 1. Big Data is new 2. Big Data is objective 3. Big Data doesn’t discriminate 4. Big Data makes cities smart 5. Big Data is anonymous 6. You can opt out

Posted on 1 June 2013 | 4:54 pm

Ken Walsh reports on how Team Obama made an unprecedented effort to understand the voters and speak their language, slicing and dicing the electorate with a sophistication and savvy that the Republicans couldn’t match and are still scrambling to replicate. “The Obama team’s opinion research was led by Joel Benenson, a tough-minded pollster from New [...]

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 2:32 pm

For future smart cities to thrive, it must be centred around people, not just infrastructure. This was the overwhelming message from a group of influential thinkers speaking at this year’s FutureEverything Summit. sustain’ went along to find out what smart-city planners can learn from bottom-up approaches. “It seems global corporations and the large-scale technology platforms [...]

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 2:24 pm

James Fallows of The Atlantic interviewed tech-industry veteran Linda Stone, coiner of the term “continuous partial attention,” on how to maintain sanity and focus in an insane, unfocused, always-on, hyperconnected world. “We all have a capacity for relaxed presence, empathy, and luck. We stress about being distracted, needing to focus, and needing to disconnect. What [...]

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 12:33 pm

Hillete Warner of The Enabling City, an initiative started and guided by the very inspiring Chiara Camponeschi, interviewed interaction designer and an event coordinator Manuel Portela about about collective brainstorming, community-building and the power of 10.000 ideas. One of your projects, 10.000 ideas, is a crowdsourcing platform to re-think urban livability in Latin America. What [...]

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 11:00 am

Visceral design is the key to creating experiences people can’t get enough of. Game designers and mobile app developers have done a great job of leveraging visceral design, web designers can and should leverage it too. So what exactly is visceral design? Foster, from Mysterious Trousers, articulates it best when he explains visceral design as [...]

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 10:35 am

Business agrees with governments — the more personal information they gather about us, the more “helpful” they can be. Should we give in to this “harmless” new science of benign surveillance, asks Steven Poole in The New Statesman. “Through Big Data analysis, the “cloud” comes to know an awful lot about us. Simply analysing a [...]

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 10:31 am

The BBC’s R&D department has been working on how to exploit the interactive functionality now available through connected televisions through a number of projects under themes such as companion screens, authentication, Internet of Things, recommendation services, accessibility and so on. On Saturday 27th April, at the Universite Paris Dauphine, the team co-chaired a day-long workshop [...]

Posted on 27 May 2013 | 11:12 am

Social networks of mobile money in Kenya Sibel Kusimba, Harpieth Chaggar, Elizabeth Gross, & Gabriel Kunyu Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion University of California, Irvine With mobile money technologies, people use mobile phones to send money to friends and relatives, connect to bank accounts, and make payments. This research examines the role of [...]

Posted on 27 May 2013 | 10:58 am

Academia.edu, the platform for academics to share research papers, contains quite a few documents from fields such as design research, experience design and interaction design. Below a selection of the last few months, sorted by upload date (most recently uploaded papers come first): Designer Storytelling David Parkinson and Erik Bohemia, Northumbria University This paper aims [...]

Posted on 27 May 2013 | 10:44 am

Despite all the hoopla about an “open data” society, many consumers are being kept in the dark, writes Natasha Singer in The New York Times. “A few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who generate it — and offering tools to put it to [...]

Posted on 26 May 2013 | 9:01 am

Design For Care – Innovating Healthcare Experience Peter Jones Rosenfeld Media, 2013 376 pages The world of healthcare is constantly evolving, ever increasing in complexity, costs, and stakeholders, and presenting huge challenges to policy making, decision making and system design. In Design for Care, Peter Jones shows how service and information designers can work with [...]

Posted on 26 May 2013 | 8:44 am

“While people are created equal, computers are not. When people share information freely, those who own the best computers benefit in extreme ways that are denied to everyone else. Those with the best computers can simply calculate wealth and power away from ordinary people.” Jaron Lanier is provoking as ever in this article for Quartz. [...]

Posted on 24 May 2013 | 4:32 pm

In the coming years, there will be a shift toward contextual computing, writes Pete Mortensen of Jump Associates, defined in large part by Georgia Tech researchers Anind Dey and Gregory Abowd about a decade ago. “Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive [...]

Posted on 24 May 2013 | 4:23 pm

Some time ago, we suggested to Todd Harple, an anthropologist at Intel, to consider doing his 10 week sabbatical here in Turin at the International Training Center of the International Labor Organization (a United Nations structure). His sabbatical is now coming to an end and our friends at ITC-ILO have now published an interview with [...]

Posted on 24 May 2013 | 4:10 pm

In the wake of Big Data, ethnographers can offer thick data, says Tricia Wang. In the face of the derisive mention of “anecdotes”, we ought to stand up to defend the value of stories. “Lacking the conceptual words to quickly position the value of ethnographic work in the context of Big Data, I have begun, [...]

Posted on 24 May 2013 | 4:01 pm

“We have the technology to do anything. To make things happen you need to turn to design and redesign the context, the decision making and the question.” – Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica, figured out that smart citizens are necessary to make smart cities. The institutions are collapsing, we have to decide on our own! [...]

Posted on 22 May 2013 | 5:11 pm

Justin Reich of MindShift has launched a four-part series to explore four dimensions of using tablets, such as the iPad, in educational settings, examining how teachers can take students on a journey from (1) consumption of media, to (2) curation, (3) creation, and (4) connection. Each of the instalments explores the challenges ahead using the [...]

Posted on 22 May 2013 | 4:57 pm

At the heart of the Smarter Cities movement is the belief that the use of engineering and IT technologies, including social media and information marketplaces, can create more efficient and resilient city systems. In an excellent blog post, Rick Robinson, an Executive Architect at IBM specialising in emerging technologies and Smarter Cities, explains why he [...]

Posted on 22 May 2013 | 8:19 am

People are in the midst of making a Mobile Mind Shift, which can be defined as “the expectation that any desired information or service is available, on any appropriate device, in context, at your moment of need.” Attitudes and behaviors are shifting around the world, and the shift is rapidly accelerating. However there are significant [...]

Posted on 21 May 2013 | 10:25 am

It seems like the UX community has been struggling a bit to reach a common definition of UX strategy. Is it a framework or an approach? Is it a methodology or a philosophy? According to Mona Patel, there are three concepts and perspectives that are all the rage in our larger design and development space [...]

Posted on 21 May 2013 | 10:13 am

Ericsson’s ConsumerLab studies people’s behaviors and values, including the way they act and think about ICT products and services. Here are some of their recent publications: How young professionals see the perfect company April 2013 A new study from Ericsson ConsumerLab called “Young professionals at work” looks at the latest generation to enter the workforce: [...]

Posted on 20 May 2013 | 10:52 am

Brian David Johnson, Intel futurist, shows how geotags, sensor outputs, and big data are changing the future. He argues that we need a better understanding of our relationship with the data we produce in order to build the future we want. “When you look to 2020 and beyond, you can’t escape big data. Big data—extremely [...]

Posted on 20 May 2013 | 8:56 am

We’re already building the metropolis of the future—green, wired, even helpful. Now critics are starting to ask whether we’ll really want to live there. Courtney Humphries reports for the Boston Globe. “As political leaders, engineers, and environmentalists join the smart-city bandwagon, a growing chorus of thinkers from social sciences, architecture, urban planning, and design are [...]

Posted on 20 May 2013 | 6:37 am

Living by the Numbers [original title: "Leben nach Zahlen"] is the title of the cover story of the German magazine Der Spiegel, available for free in English translation. “For a modern society, an even more pressing question is whether it wishes to accept everything that becomes possible in a data-driven economy. Do we want to [...]

Posted on 18 May 2013 | 1:01 pm

Fernd Van Engelen of Artefact writes about how adding hardware design to a UX practice can create opportunities for a more holistic user experience. “We shared the belief that we could no longer separate what a product looks like physically from the way it behaves and how we interact with it. Where traditionally UI had [...]

Posted on 18 May 2013 | 8:51 am

To solve the issue with content marketing, we need to start looking at content as part of a broader ecosystem, argues Ben Barone-Nugent, a senior digital writer & content strategist at TBWA, in a Digital Marketing special in The Guardian. “If we define experience as the beginning-to-end engagement with a brand, then content is simply [...]

Posted on 18 May 2013 | 8:44 am

Reboot principal Panthea Lee discusses on The Atlantic how people communicate in one of the most dangerous places on earth. “Barbers, for example, are seen as well-informed about local news because they converse with a wide range of people daily. Despite the mobility constraints in many parts of the region, all men — rich and [...]

Posted on 18 May 2013 | 8:35 am

SAP customers are increasingly telling the company that user experience (UX) is the differentiator, not features and functions, starts the introduction to SAP’s new UX strategy. “With [its] large product portfolio, any SAP UX strategy cannot be a “boil the ocean” approach; it has to target the areas that will have the biggest impact. So, [...]

Posted on 16 May 2013 | 11:08 am

A new NESTA paper, Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, navigates the myths and realities of good and bad futurology, from economic forecasting to science fiction. Since time immemorial, people have tried to predict the future. In the second half of the 20th century, these efforts grew more ambitious and sophisticated. Improvements in computational power, data [...]

Posted on 14 May 2013 | 9:23 am

Mozilla’s user experience research and design team has just published the first Mozilla UX Quarterly. Crystal Beasley, Editor and Product Design Strategist, writes: “My hope is that this will be a tool to spread throughout the community of Mozillians the empathy for our users we’ve gained through our research studies and interviews. All of this [...]

Posted on 11 May 2013 | 2:52 pm

SIX UX is a gallery of transitions and animations shown as 6 second videos. Andreas Popp combined Vine app videos with tumblr to showcase otherwise ephemeral movements found around the web. Low fi and awesome. Check it.

Posted on 15 June 2013 | 12:26 am

UI Faces is a useful little tool by Caleb Ogden for generating a grid of avatars that you can use in your designs.

Posted on 14 June 2013 | 8:19 pm

Ben Taylor's Starters Guide to iOS describes an exhaustive range of topics as intro to iOS design. He covers the deliverables you'll be expected to produce, outlines the constraints of the medium, and introduces fundamental iOS and UI design concepts.

Posted on 7 June 2013 | 4:56 pm

Mike Rohde's Sketchnote font can be purchased on Delve for desktop and webfont use. Mike created the font for the Sketchnote handbook and writes about its design on his blog. The family has four fonts: Sketchnote Text in Reg­ular, Bold and Italic, plus Sketchnote Square.

Sketchnote Text is a friendly, casual script with a bouncy baseline and a warm texture. To emulate natural hand­writing, OpenType features auto­matically switch be­tween multiple versions of each letter or number, with over 240 alter­nates in each text font. OpenType kerning classes are used with unique kerns made to tame pairings of all those wily alter­nates for con­sistent spacing.

Sketchnote Square is a bold, somewhat com­pressed head­line type that complements the text fonts. Drawn in­stead of written, the characters in Square have neat little hap­pen­stance voids within the strokes. Square also fea­tures a handy selection of fun icons, rules, and arrows—some functional tidbits for your design projects.

I've already purchased a license for myself and used it in Mockups and it's outstanding. You can peep it in a wireframe here. The character there is perfect.

You can download the whole family for $99, or by individual fonts for $29. More info at Delve.

Posted on 5 June 2013 | 3:49 pm

FontPrep is a web font generator for the Mac with a simple drag/drop interface for adding your TTF and OTF font files and generating all of the respective font-formats for the web: WOFF, EOT, and SVG. Each converted web-font is bundled with @font-face declarations, and a subsettings feature allows you to select which character sets to include.

Posted on 3 June 2013 | 5:25 pm

• Designing (and converting) for multiple mobile densities | Teehan+Lax Converting graphics for different resolution densities.
• How to be mediocre | neilcrofts Reminders for being aware of when you fall into the traps of medicority.
• Pure A set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project.
• Hexo - Node.js blog framework A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js.
• Commit Message Generator
• DODOnotes | DODOcase Carry your iPhone naked and also like paper? DODO makes a notebook that fits your phone perfectly into its cover, and holds it snug with an elastic band..
• Pingendo - web authoring with comfort
• Flat Route Finder I like biking hills, but not necessarily SF hills.
• Easily Remove Image Backgrounds Online - ClippingMagic
• Two.js Two.js is a two-dimensional drawing api geared towards modern web browsers. It is renderer agnostic enabling the same api to draw in multiple contexts: svg, canvas, and webgl.
• Retinize It - Photoshop actions for slicing retina graphics
• Snap.js A Library for creating beautiful mobile shelfs in Javascript
• OSX: How to copy plain-text always, everywhere, without exception? - paste copypaste plaintext | Ask MetaFilter
• If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

Posted on 31 May 2013 | 10:23 pm

screensiz.es displays a table of screen specifications including resolution and pixel density for popular devices and monitors currently on the market.

Via Swissmiss

Posted on 29 May 2013 | 5:28 pm

Sketchmine provides .sketch files for use in Bohemian Coding's Sketch app for Mac. The files are free to download and are contributed by the Sketch community.

Posted on 20 May 2013 | 4:12 pm

PowWow is a free simple service for scheduling user research using your Google Calendar. The fine folks at Pointless Corp (aka Viget) created this as a side project for handling scheduling of user interviews and testing, but could be used for any kind of event.

There are other apps like this that remove the fuss of coordinating schedules via email. PowWow does it simply, and provides a polished and pleasing experience. You pick the times that work best for you and send out a calendar with available appointments and any additional information to potential participants. Participants can select the appointment time that works best for them and you will be sent a confirmation with their contact information.

Posted on 13 May 2013 | 5:23 pm

Sticky Jots is a set of storytelling sticky note paper and paper prototyping kits for designing mobile and tablet interfaces. The product is designed by Rae Milne and Pamela Jue, two grad students in the SVA Interaction Design program.

Pam writes about the thinking behind Sticky Jots.

The idea came from our constant prototyping and ideation process in almost every project this semester. While it’s great to do, it’s still frustrating how time consuming it can be. We started thinking more of how we can we integrate a better experience with our process so that it could be more collaborative and efficient with time.

They're going to be offering storyboard sticky notes, as well as mobile or tablet dot grid pads. There are also iPhone and iPad backs, which look like they'd be great for paper prototyping and testing. They've already surpassed their production cost goals on Kickstarter, which ends on Apr 24. Find out more about how to back the project.

Posted on 18 April 2013 | 11:58 pm

• UX
• Design
• Development
• All

Posted on 15 April 2013 | 5:35 pm

Jakub Linowski, creator of Wireframes Magazine just started writing a newsletter called Good UI on how to design sites that are easy to use and also yield high conversion rates.

He's looking at how to employ practical ideas that satisfy the business side as well as the people using it, which I'm sure is something we all want to do on sites that sell a product or service. He plans to publish the newsletter monthly. Check it out.

Posted on 11 April 2013 | 10:16 pm

Protosketch is a new free app for iOS from UI Stencils to convert sketches to interactive prototypes. The app is made to work with their sketch pads and stencils. Sketch your screens, add them to the app, define hot areas for links, select link destinations, and prototype.

Posted on 11 April 2013 | 12:04 am

About this template

This is a template for doing desktop application design using Sketch, a vector illustration tool for the Mac.

The idea for sharing this template is to give a quick starting point for anyone who wants to create their visual design comps in Sketch. When I started using Sketch to design and export controls for an iOS app, I quickly started liking the application, particularly the styling properties, simple vector editing and combination features, and the well thought-out grid and export capabilities. Moving on to a Desktop project afterwards, I started to experiment with using Sketch for design comps as well, and have decided to try using Sketch rather than Photoshop.

How to use it

NOTE: This file was created using the latest build of the Sketch Beta, so you will have be using the Beta to open it currently.

The template provides the starting point for creating visual design comps and includes an application window with a few basic elements: window, scrollbars, window title and several icons, sidebar, some styled text, system buttons, radios, and checkboxes. You can copy the styles for some of the elements and save them to your style presets to create others.

The template provides a 1024px x 800px artboard with a Comp slice that's ready to export your entire app window. There's a 12 column grid with 60px columns, 25px margins, and 12px padding on the horizontal edges.

You will likely need to modify this template—it's only meant to provide a demonstration of what you can do, and a starting point for new projects.

Download the zip file and extract it on your Mac. Open the file in Sketch.

You can use the menu File > Save as Template... if you want to save it to your templates.

Download the Template
This template is free to use, but may not be distributed without permission. If you like it, a donation is appreciated.

Teaser: 

<img src="" class="screen-thumb" alt="" />

This is a template for doing desktop application design using Sketch, a vector illustration tool for the Mac. The template provides the starting point for creating visual design comps and includes an application window with a few basic elements: window, scrollbars, window title and several icons, sidebar, some styled text, system buttons, radios, and checkboxes..

More info...

Posted on 3 April 2013 | 7:54 pm

Mixture is a rapid prototyping and static site generation tool for Mac and Windows. It works with the Liquid templating system, supports includes and smart paths, handles HAML and SASS comilation, CSS and JS minification, and provides a simple model system for global and custom data, and supports access to form and query data in their request model. It can produce static HTML that you can push to a hosting service, and allows use of your own domain. Service integration for testing with BrowserStack and other services is planned.

Via Ryan Riatno

Posted on 1 April 2013 | 9:39 pm

I've been looking for ways to energize my creativity in between the longer stretches of time spent on difficult, routine, and less creative work. The thing that has been doing it for me lately is working with static html on some of my smaller production sites.

I was playing around with static html tools for a little side project I've been toying with. I was tinkering with Stacey and Kirby. Awesome tools for static PHP page building. I was also playing around with CodeKit, which looked like the most promising tool for little projects. But I figured it was all just playing and there wouldn't be a real static site project for me to work on for a while probably.

Then last month we launched UX Apprentice using WordPress. We were on a stable server that hosts some pretty massive sites, so I was happy. But then, as web hosts always do, it went down for a short period. Some rare issue on load balancers was the cause we were told. Downtime happens. But then while discussing this issue I said, "Fuckit. This site is so simple, let's make it static and put it on an S3 bucket."

A week earlier I was playing with Hammer for Mac, the latest static site builder I had found. Among my options, including just doing it all by hand, this was the simplest of them all. I looked at what I would need to port the site to Amazon's S3 service for websites with no fuss. All I needed to do was suck the WordPress site down and convert it to static HTML.

I know this is small potatoes compared to the bigger things people are doing out there, but I got a kick out of doing this.

Here's how I did it, in case anyone out is considering doing the same:

1) Download
SiteSucker pulled the site down for me and converted it to static HTML. You can do it on the cheap with wget.

2) Create a Hammer Project
Look at your downloaded site, and clean out the cruft. Open Hammer for Mac and create your project. Open the source folder.

3) Organize files, use HTML editor to convert PHP to Hammer-smart stuff
I then moved my img, css, and js folders to the new project's assets/ folder. When Hammer builds, it reads your entire project and then knows where everything is so you can use the @path directive to reference files only by name, and include styles and css simply by name without paths using the @stlylesheet and @javascript directives. I cleaned all files up to use this.

I did the find/replace grunt work using Coda on my CSS and html files. Replaced the PHP that I use in my header to use the @include directive and the $title variable. My SCSS files got picked up and compiled with no problems. I then used the @path helper on images in my SCSS.

About two hours of this clean up and it built with no errors.

All my SCSS was compiled, my includes worked, and my CSS and JS were optimized (combined and minified).

4) Testing
I set up my hosts on my machine so I could test locally in the browser so all the TypeKit would work after I added that domain. I also learned that you can't test Typekit with a url using the file:/// protocol. Bummer. I already use VirtualHostX which makes simple work of managing multiple hosts on your local machine. It edits your httpd-vhosts.conf and hosts file. I had bought it originally because the web sharing option went away in OS X, and I'm too lazy to edit files just to turn PHP on.

Then of course, I tested on all my browsers and tested the responsive layout. We were ready to go.

5) Publish
Publishing on S3 is pretty simple. A normal person just needs to set up a bucket and use an S3 aware FTP app like Transmit and you're done. We ended up commiting it to a repository that is watched by a server that kicks off updates to S3 for pages that have changed.

That was the whole mini-relaunch that happened quietly after we launched UX Apprentice. We were live on WordPress for a week, and now we're hosted on an AWS instance and I expect the uptime will be awesome—as good as any S3 site. We do the same for our main balsamiq.com site and every time I see our blogs report downtime, I feel this wave of relief knowing our static pages on S3 are happily being pushed out without issue.

Anyhow, that made for an exciting day last week. It's energizing to feel frustrated by something and quickly turn something around that's better. And for anyone that's doing UX work that's looking for a decent HTML prototyping workflow and knows enough SASS and JS, Hammer may be the thing for you.

Posted on 29 March 2013 | 9:57 pm

Hammer is a static web site builder for the Mac that lets you build out sites quickly with no server side requirements.

Hammer does includes without PHP, compiles Coffeescript to JS, SASS/SCSS to CSS, has an auto-refresh feature for never having to reload the browser, and provides some simple to use helpers. Since it knows about all of the files in your projects, you just reference names and it knows how to build out paths. It has a helper for selected link classes in your navigation elements. When you're ready to share your prototype you can upload to your own server, zip and send the Build folder, or use their own built in publishing system.

Posted on 29 March 2013 | 9:11 pm

Drawscript is an extension for Adobe Illustrator that generates graphics code from vector shapes in realtime. Generates OBJ-C, C++, JavaScript for HTML5 Canvas, Processing, Actionscript 3, JSON, and Raw bezier points.

Posted on 22 March 2013 | 6:11 pm

Christian Naths' Redacted is a set of fonts released under SIL Open Font license with block and scribbled font faces. Main difference between Redacted and BLOKK (which the font is copies/is inspired by) is that Redacted uses smaller widths so your text blocks won't end up wider than your normal font setting.

Git it for free.

Posted on 6 March 2013 | 8:08 pm

Tapotype is a reference library of transitions for mobile prototypes created by Gene Lu using Fireworks and the TAP platform, a framework for iOS prototyping developed by UNITiD. Gene provides tutorials on building prototypes with Tapotype and TAP, and shows how to integrate InDesign and its documenting capabilities into your Fireworks/Tap prototyping workflow.

Posted on 25 February 2013 | 8:05 pm