Collecting for Design

I just read this brilliant article by Matthew Smith on ‘Collecting for Design’. If you are even remotely interested in seeing how other designers work, this article will inpsire you to read, practice and collect.

I really love Matthew’s use of FlickScreen to grab screen shots and send them straight to his Flickr account with minimum  effort. What a great way to quickly build up Flickr user interface collections for future reference, all tagged, commented and organised.

Now all I have to do is upgrade to a Flickr Pro account to be able to have more than 3 sets.

 

‘Design’ Bookmarklet by Allan Jardine

I was just checking out John Allsop’s blog and came across this posting about a set of web tools called ‘Design’ by Allan Jardine. If you  are into web design this is a cool tool. ‘Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.’ You should also try John’s bookmarklet called ‘MRI’. Great tool for learning how different designs have been achieved using CSS.

 

Canberra Web Standards Group Meeting January 2008

Just announced. Should be good to hear Geoff’s talk and see what he’s been up to of late.

Details

• Thursday 31 January, 2008
• 2:30 pm to 4:50 pm
• NLA Theatre, lower ground floor, National Library of Australia
• Speaker 1: Geoff Dibley (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry), They came, they search, they leave - improving internal site search for users.
• Speaker 2: Paul Hagon (National Library of Australia), Users aren’t as clever as you think they are - search analysis of Picture Australia.

 

Canberra web-blast07

Just attended the Canberra web-blast 07 which is a cool end-of-year party for Canberra’s web community - bringing together web designers, web project managers, interface designers, information architects and other web professionals’. It was alot of fun and a great opportunity to meet and mingle with like minded web people. I ran into a former work colleague from my remote sensing days that I hadn’t seen in a few years, my former supervisor and some of the people that I met at Web Directions South 2007. Even met some new people as well such as Ruth Ellison from Stamford Interactive, Alexi Pashalidis from Oxide Interactive and Matthew Hodgson from SMS Management & Technology. These folk have been working in the web for considerably longer than myself and it is inspiring to draw upon their experience and knowledge and passion for the industry.

There were a huge amount of lucky door prizes and suprisingly I came up trumps with a copy of The JavaScript Anthology by Cameron Adams and James Edwards as well as Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. Both of these books have been on my wish list and it was a bit of a spin out to win them both! Anyway a good night was had by all with plenty of food and drinks and was great stress relief for a pretty ordinary week at work.