Sculpture at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park in Seattle. Re-posted from last year, in honor of the holiday and the man.
When we lived in Seattle, we would usually go to this park on Martin Luther King Day to honor this great man and talk to our kids about what he stood for. I Have Dream must stand as one of the greatest and most inspiring speeches ever.
At familysearch we’ve been working on a standard tool set for front-end developers to be amazingly productive/happy/awesome in. We settled on Node.js and have recently launched it in production. It is performing fantastically and we are falling in love.
If you’d like to work with Node.js and you’d like to do it at familysearch, give a holler to schlegel “at” familysearch dot org. Then we can tell you about all the other cool stuff we’re doing.
I liked this article on Breaking the UX Status Quo. Some good thoughts on enlivening various design deliverables by integrating personas and related information throughout.
I like the subtle design changes to the banner area on LDS.org that have gone out over the last few months. This week’s Easter messages have been a good example. (I also appreciate that they got the title and alt attributes fixed, so the thumbnails on the right are more accessible to blind readers—and others who want some text to describe what they’ll get.)
I’m always amazed at people who can take such beautiful notes… These are Benjamin Norris’s notes from the LDSTech Conference last week.
BBQ, plaid shirts, and midnight networking at The Belmont. Yep, it’s that time of year again and we’re hosting our annual meetup at SXSW on Sunday, March 11th from 6-8 PM. If you’ll be in Austin, we’d love to meet you. We’ll be offering a behind-the-scenes look at several applications supporting the LDS Church’s global operations and over 13 million members. The event is invite-only, so please contact us for more information or find one of us for an invitation.
Colleague Carrie Fox called this a “wordle on steroids.” Interesting interactive word cloud from CNNMoney on the best places to work and why employees think so. Make sure to click around a bit… I like both the presentation and the data…
A designer above all should be a problem solver. I love Matthew Smith’s thoughts on the subject that he contributed to “The Pastry Box Project.” Enjoy™
Google is taking action against SOPA and PIPA. Quote from Google, “Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.”
I liked this illustration of the Knowledge Gap in Jared Spool’s recent newsletter article, Riding the Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge.
To close the knowledge gap, you either ride the user up the escalator via training, or you bring the target knowledge down the escalator by simplifying the design. Those are really your two main choices, 99% of the time!
Cool bookshelf design on Design Inspiration (via Cameron Moll).
Love the idea—though a little high for the average reader in my family!
A lesser known feature in Chrome that I love, is the ability to directly search only in a given site AND end up on that sites’ search results page. To enable it, do the following:
1. Go to youtube and do a search. This is a one time step that teaches Chrome how to search.
2. Then, in the location bar, type youtube.com and hit the “tab” key
3. Type your search query
This will dump you onto youtube’s search results page. So far I’ve got it to work on Facebook, LinkedIn, Craigslist and Amazon, among others. From what I can tell it “learns” as it goes.
In a great example of practical living thru great design, the founder of Etnies shoes is building a dream house where every surface – even the furniture – is skateable or grindable.
Best. house. ever.
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There are many things I love about working for the LDS Church. Being able to walk through Temple Square on occasion is one of them. (That doesn’t happen as often since our department moved to Riverton, but I still get downtown now and then, and others can go more frequently.)
This photo was taken with my phone at the conclusion of a service project and team building day, spent helping to landscape the grounds adjacent to Temple Square. (That’s another thing I love about working here—the emphasis on service.)
Sunrise just before work. Riverton, Utah.
We’re hosting a get-together at SXSW on Sunday, March 13th from 6-8 PM. If you’ll be in Austin, we’d love to meet you. We’ll be offering a behind-the-scenes look at several applications supporting the LDS Church’s global operations and over 13 million members. The event is invite-only, so please contact us for more information or find one of us for an invitation.
Armin from Brand New posted last month a very interesting two part article of the best and worst identities of 2010:
The Best and Worst Identities of 2010, Part I: The Worst
The Best and Worst Identities of 2010, Part II: The Best
Congratulations lds.org designers… Christmas looks very, very nice on the new site.
Redesign of iTunes Store sign in screen by Nitin Garg. I enjoyed his commend: “It appears like they want me to forget my ID quite frequently!”
Some cool insight from Campaign Monitor on their new office space. This part was particularly interesting:
“After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you’re a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.” —Paul Graham, Great Hackers
Every company I have ever worked for uses offices in conjunction with rank (which is fine) but I can definitely see how having a place to concentrate is important. But I’d trade an office for some open spaces with big whiteboards, lounges, games, and food. It’s no coincidence that nearly all my ideas that I would consider innovative have come when I wasn’t in the office (or even working).