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Following on from my mass post-it note session, Sketchboarding, a couple of hours of clarity , I retreated back to my Mac to produce a sitemap. Using the sketchboard method, learned from Leah Buley at UX London 2010, allowed for rapid and easy re-working of my thoughts. With clarity of vision, I moved to creating a sitemap using a mix of Omni Outliner and Omni Graffle. With this run out and stuck together, all 12 A3 sheets of it, I returned to our Ideas Room and stuck it up on the wall.
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Sketchboarding is a rapid, flexible design method, which delivers results fast. It’s a technique which Leah Buley from Adaptive Path teaches extremely well via Adaptive Path’s workshop ‘Good Design Faster’, which I managed to catach while at the recent UX London 2010. For a full description and great video check the Adaptive Path blog post Sketchboards: Discover Better + Faster UX Solutions.
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I didn’t make it over to the UX Lisbon event, but reading through Luke Wroblewskis’ notes from the event these comments and subsequent list from Eric Reiss’ presentation: Killer Content or Content that Kills? hit quite a few notes with me.
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“Inspirational Learning for User Experience Designers” was how the UX London website sold this event and having just returned from the 3-day event all I can say is, they were spot on. What an intense few days,  I’m suffering from brain overload. If you didn’t make it along and you have even the slightest interest in User Experience (UX), then I would strongly recommend that you book up for next years event. Thanks must go to the whole ClearLeft gang who produced a fantastic event. Their hard work bought together a group of truly inspirational speakers.
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Idea Couture have created a fun little quiz to help work out whether you’re a left or right sided brain thinker. “We all have a natural inclination towards either left or right brain thinking, while some people have a combination of both. Which of these characteristics dominate your personality?” read more…

These are by no way definitive, just a suggestion to get you on your way. read more…

Great overview of an old & ongoing debate from Richard Rutter over at clagnut.com

All started from a little tweet:
Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse. – elliotjaystocks
Personally I never touch code of any flavor, but I don’t believe this makes me a bad designer. I do have a good understanding of what is/isn’t achievable code-wise, this comes from working with some great developers. Only when working as a member of a team of experts do you achieve a great result. You can be good at many things, but it better to be great at one thing.
Now it’s worth going over to Elliot’s site to read the full article he’s written about his tweet as he explains his reasoning very well.

This was my entry into the “explain IA” competition, run by IA Institute. With it I managed to win myself a copy of Search Patterns by Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender.

It’s always nice winning things and I look forward to reading my copy when it arrives.

Second week into the New Year and our first new site to go live is for Olivers Mill who are a cleaning and maintenance company, based in London and Kent. With new van liveries rolling out at the end of last year, Olivers Mill required a refresh for their current site to help move their branding along.While the previous site was still looking fresh from it’s 2009 redesign, company director Scott Sumner asked if there was anything we could do to bring the website into line with the new van livery? read more…

As you may gather I’m a big fan of sketching ideas and thoughts down on paper, before going anywhere near my Mac. I’ve been asked a few times what I use for sketching out my UX & wireframe ideas. My answer is always the same, use whatever you’re comfortable with. But that lead me to consider what I do actually use, following are my basic weapons of choice. read more…