fun
Follow the fun
An Article by Dave RupertAnother great dissertation from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit: The Games that Designed Themselves. It’s the radical idea that designers should ignore their preconceived notions and look to the game itself to find out where the development should lead. How does something design itself? Well… the answer is: Prototypes.
A lot of great indie game masterpieces are the result of experimentation and early gameplay demos that changed the course of game’s development. As Brown points out, there’s a whole history of groundbreaking games that were developed “almost by accident” where bugs and glitches were turned into features.
Exit pages
An Idea by Brad EnslenToday I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.
The Whimsical Web
A Website by Max BöckA curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.
APL386 Unicode
A Font by Adám BrudzewskyAPL font based on Adrian Smith's APL385 font with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif.
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.
The Taft Test
A Tool by Maciej CegłowskiDoes your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
Party in a shared google doc
An Article by Marie FoulstonIn the absence of the cultural spaces my work usually occupies, I’ve found myself chasing the social rituals they evoke and the reverence they embody through abstract digital recreations and pastiche. In these spaces, familiar feelings and experiences reverberate and mix with new ones.
They are events that all at once feel both practical and absurd.
In a time of such flux and uncertainty, maybe that is as good a place as any to be.
Pair Design: Better Together
Pair design is the counterintuitive practice of getting more and better UX design done by putting two designers together as thought partners to solve design problems. It’s counterintuitive because you might expect that you could split them up to work in parallel to get double the design done, but for many situations, you’d be wrong. This document will help explain what pair design is, how it works, and tour through the practicalities of implementing it in your practice.
It involves two brains
It involves two brains on a project at the same time. This doesn’t mean part time, checking in with each other on work that’s been accomplished separately.
Pair design really means being in the same room, working on the same problem, with both brains focused on the problem simultaneously for the duration of the project.
A distinct and complementary stance
Each person in the pair takes a distinct and complementary stance toward the design problem as they work together. One generates solutions. That is, one individual materializes solutions to the problem at hand for discussion and iteration. The other synthesizes the proposed solutions.
Gens and synths
Gens are generally comfortable drawing and drawing in front of their partner. Additionally, the generator needs to have “fearless generativity,” to be able to come up with a dozen pretty good solutions to a problem even with incomplete information.
Designers in the synthesizer role need to be skilled at describing designs and explaining rationale in writing. The role requires the designer to be detail oriented and have a strong memory, to keep the big picture of the system, stakeholders, and users in mind as a reference for designs on the table.
We come as a team
There is a legend at Cooper of one team who found pairing with each other so powerful and fruitful that when they left that company, they sought out opportunities and even interviewed at other organizations as a pair.
Starting off with pair design
It’s better to start small. Find the “genniest” designer you can and pair her with the “synthiest,” have them work through a few projects as a pair to see how it goes, evolve a process that works for your organization, smooth out the wrinkles, and become resident experts. Then, split them up, assign them with new pairs, and begin to spread.
What are the benefits of pair design?
It Makes for Better Design
- Pairing forces constant iteration: idea testing and course-correction.
- It brings to bear two brains and two stances.
It Makes for Better Designers and Better Design Organizations
- They are happier.
- Pair design makes it easier to focus on core aptitudes.
- They cross-pollinate: a mechanism for a learning organization.
Pair Design Makes for a More Effective Process
- Pairing avoids the problem of dueling whiteboards.
- It encourages designers to materialize ideas early.
- It encourages designers to vocalize their rationale.
- It encourages constant course-correction.