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
We’re looking for designers to help create the websites and applications of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Qualifications:
- Member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with a current temple recommend.
- 5+ years of experience in user research and designing public facing websites. Internationalization and localization experience is preferred.
- An Online Portfolio that demonstrates an ability to think strategically, superior visual designs, and strong interaction design skills
Preferred Skills:
- Creative problem solving skills, think conceptually and craft elegant solutions
- Excellent knowledge and abilities in user experience methods, best practices, design principles, problem-framing skills
- Ability to play a major role in defining and developing the user experience for the Church’s products
- Ability to carry the design vision through to completion in an agile development environment
- Branding, marketing or content strategy experience
- Ability to transfer user insights into quality user experiences
- Ability to work with a team of content producers, including writers, audio/visual specialists, and product managers
- Experience with mockups (HTML/CSS)
- Exceptional experience in UI/Interaction, design principles and iconography
- Strong knowledge of technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ajax, XML, mobile
Examples of our websites:
Apply
Please apply online at https://careers.ldschurch.org/ for job ID#60463 (contract) or job ID# 60457 (full time). Note: an LDS Account is required to view jobs.
Please direct questions to [email protected]
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).
Here’s another teaser of some of the new stuff coming for lds.org. This screen is part of the music section.
OXO’s angled measuring cup, via an article on Good Experience: “Customers never said they wanted an angled measuring cup. In fact, users weren’t even aware that there was a problem to be solved. Consumers didn’t say, “I wish I could read the markings more easily.” They muddled through without complaint. And yet the innovation came directly from observing customers. How? Simply by observing the customer experience.”
(By the way—this brand appears to be sold at Kohl’s; Bed, Bath & Beyond; and Sears to name a few… so I might just drop in a buy there rather than pay shipping…)
I have long appreciated the ability to copy layer styles by option + dragging them from one layer to another. For those like me that have also longed for the ability to copy layer styles to multiple layers, you are in luck—there is a way. Dragging the style is a shortcut for the copy/paste layer style option in the layer contextual menu and allows for the application of styles to multiple selected layers.
Working with a team of designers I’ve been getting this error a lot lately opening files in Photoshop. Digging through all the layers manually is a pain and on a few files I’ve not even been able to locate the offending text. Nic Johnson just made my day however pointing me towards the Replace All Missing Fonts feature under Type in the Layers menu.
The More Good Foundation, a non-profit organization promoting utilizing the internet to share the gospel, has launched a redesign of their website.
Here’s a glimpse of us at work. We meet each morning for a design review, printing out our work from the day before, and run it through the gauntlet. The team works together to ensure consistency and feeds off of each other’s ideas. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of any parts would could produce on our own. Once designs are flushed out and approved, they are moved out into the hallway for reference for us and for content and development teams after hand-off.
To the side of our meeting space, we have a row of desks with low dividers that allow of instantaneous and effective collaboration. Our developers and content teams are immediately down the hall and across the cubicle wall. Physical proximity, tactile, analog conversations and design explorations, and being surrounded by our product is crucial for a project of this scale.
Good article by Neven Morgan about designing icons and the various sizes required for iOS. I was especially interested in what he mentioned about resolution independence and how it’s not possible to have a single source file for an icon.
Just stumbled across designer and photographer Steph Goralnick. Excellent work. The energy in her photography is amazing.
This is a preview of the front page of the news and events section coming in the new lds.org. It will be up on the beta site in the next few weeks. It will provide an aggregate of articles and new content being published on the site and by official Church news services.
Sometimes we get lost talking about possible solutions and need a wake-up smack down. (Original at xkcd.)
Google celebrates the PAC-MAN 30th Anniversary. Make sure to play, at least one, before making a search. Use your arrow keys as your joystick. Thanks Google!
So You Need a Typeface by Julian Hansen. Accurate, funny and looks exceptional on a 30” display. Be sure to check out the Comic Sans flow.
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. More than just grids, their entire process. Required reading.