Visual Blogging: Real Life Layout

Two "everyday design" examples that I took a second, closer look at this week were Mac OS’s Dashboard and the vending machine at work.

The layout of Dashboard works quite well and is a joy to use. A simple click on the icon on the dock and voila… handy gadgets at my fingertips! I find that I use Dashboard a half a dozen times a day. As a calculator, calendar and quick weather reference, it’s incredibly handy.


On the opposite end of the spectrum is the vending machine at work. It definitely qualifies as “hopelessly confusing”. My main complaint is that I often get something other than the snack I was after. I know this is caused by the fact that the perplexing number of products they jam in there requires more combinations of letters and numbers than I’m using to working with.

In this vexing machine, the goodies are arranged by rows and columns. In order to select an item, you type the letter of the row and the number of the column. Pretty simple, right? Not when I’m the one pushing the buttons!

The kicker is that there are 12 columns of tempting no-no’s to choose from. And, somehow, I always seem to choose something from the three columns on the right. That would mean that I’d have to enter something like A+11. The problem lies in the user (me) and the fact that I don’t have an “11” on my computer keyboard. So, after typing work-related stuff all day… my brain doesn’t make the transition and expect to find an “11” key on the vending machine.

I start to type A+1+… oh #)*%&)(%#&! Again, I end up with the crappy animal crackers from the A1 slot! Sigh.

So, attempting to apply some design sense… I have two suggestions.
1) Switch the rows and columns to numeric and then alphabetical identifiers, respectively. Just the opposite of what I see today. This would still allow for nine rows of products… or even 10 if you use “0” as a row identifier.
2) Give each item a two-digit number.

Either way, I wouldn’t care… if the machine would just cough up my darn Skittles!

Visual Blogging: Activity Centered Design

Imagined Activity: Searching for a Local Birth Announcement
Assumed steps:
1. Log on to newspaper’s Web site
2. Locate navigation that will take me to my county’s “News” pages
3. Get to county-specific information and locate birth announcements
4. Scroll to approximate date of birth and scan for parents’ names

Actual Activity: Searching for a Neighbor’s Birth Announcement on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Web Site
1. Log on to www.jsonline.com
2. Use the search function on the top nav bar and enter “Birth announcement”
3. Use the Article Archive Search to find a birth announcement run in the previous 14 days. For birth announcements prior to that time, access the paid archive service.

I guess it’s pretty obvious that the steps I imagined using were not the real steps I had to use to navigate through my local newspaper’s site. The unexpected detour that surprised me most was that the birth announcements as well as the obituaries were not organized by county in the same way they organize news articles.

I think that newspapers incorporate a fair amount of information that would be best organized by “county”. In addition to birth announcements and obituaries, real estate and rental listings would be two more categories of information to consider for this schema.

Revised Header Artwork

I built this new artwork in Photoshop CS. Starting with a transparent background, I inserted and rotated the image of the quilt I used for the new color scheme. I then built a layer behind the quilt that included the following filter effects: Inner Shadow; Bevel & Emboss; Pattern Overlay-Woven. I then applied colors from my new scheme and finished by adding the text in two layers. First layer of text is the title (48 pt. JazzLET), and the second layer is the subtitle (24 pt. Kino MT).

I then saved one version of the file as a layered PhotoShop file in case I want to make future changes. Then, I "Saved to Web" in a .gif format. Problems occurred when attempting to upload using Safari. Switching over to Firefox, I didn't have any further issues. :-)

Proposed "New" Color Palette

This is the color palette that I'm proposing for my blog. It's taken from a McKenna Ryan quilt that I made last year for a colleague's retirement party. Since he was an "outdoorsy" person who liked to hunt and fish... I thought the quilt would convey a calming picture of the north woods that he could enjoy year 'round.

This was a challenging quilting endeavor, but not as challenging as this blogging assignment. I've gone very slowly this week and attempted to absorb everything from the readings and Web resources. I think it's paying off and I'm putting the final tweaks on today. I used Macromedia Fireworks to select the colors from the photo and tweaked the html to incorporate the colors.

My version of the quilt "Serendipity" is shown below. It's done in batik fabrics which have a ton of tonal depth and a million different shades of each color.

Word Design Exercise – Week 9