October 2000

the color of flurries in the sky north of New York City

FEED interview with Karyn Kusama, director of Girlfight: “…I think collaboration needs an auteur. I am the writer and the director, and I’m happy to say I didn’t design it or shoot it. It’s liberating to give up control to the people you trust. I think that’s love.”

gulabjamuns

The usability lifecycle argues for an iterative design process. This is totally where my head is at these days – apparently I agree with Nielson on something. Still, all three of these methods – iteration, waterfall, and just-do-it – happen at some level of granularity in a project. For example, design may begin with a…

green!

burnt sienna

the color of stress as it builds up and chokes your brain so that you can’t figure out what to work on first… Garrison Keillor’s monologue in “A Prarie Home Companion” always starts with, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town…” I need one of those, a lead in.

Here’s some interesting design pattern-ish descriptions of Early Development. I love starting a new project with these ideas in hand.

gray

Best sign yet that the digital consulting business is hurting. First some background: We recently lost a new business pitch to another, much smaller company. We really liked the client and it seemed like a tough decision for them. We stayed in touch with them just to see how things were going. Good thing, because…

New York Times article on usability testing at Fidelity

Yesterday I read a story in Fast Company about Patagonia, a favorite company of mine. It mentions how they built the walls of their distribution center with compressed straw, which is more eco-friendly than using virgin building materials. This morning I realized the weather in the Northeast is demonstrating its annual change of summer to…

I just saw Girlfight, and I wept, a lot. A movie about boxing made me cry, that’s how awesome this film is. It’s also great to see a Latina lead role, and even better the role was a believable everyday person, so rare in film these days. Reminded me of Brando in A Streetcar Named…

Talk about syncronicity…this new story in the NY Times about bar codes explores their future potential. Maybe bar coding our flesh isn’t such a bad idea after all.

jjg correctly points out that IBM is not the owner of the skin tattoo patent I referenced recently. It brings up an interesting branding question, how people view these pages out of context and, at least in my case, figure the domain name implies ownership.