mind hum

[mindhum]

Always fun to do #caricatures, and the smiles on their faces make it all worthwhile; like this happy swim squad from Manly.

[mindhum]

Pickle your fancy

I’ve been enjoying some virtual painting with Adobe Fresco. And fermented vegetables are good for you, too.

[mindhum]

Upcycling

Our local billy cart derby is nearly upon us. Competitors bring their own home-grown carts to the circuit and the design stakes are just as heated.

Hot tip: you can use any old cardboard box if you prime it first with gesso. It gives your acrylic paints something to grip onto, and, with opaque white behind it, your colour seems brighter.

My added challenge this year is theming our one cart for two teams to use. I’ve painted the base cardboard chassis with a pixelated Minecraft look for the boys. Then, at changeover time, we clip on painted panels for the girls’ Cosmic Girl theme. Arriba!

[mindhum]

Sea creature safety factor

Insurance companies care about what color cars are the safest, but seem to have conflicting research. To me, it’s not so much a question of colour, as it is contrast with the background, which can vary.  The location and intensity of the sun affects the reflectivity of a surface (albedo), and the color of a car could appear differently on the shaded side. If other drivers can’t see a car coming at a glance, this increases the chance of collision.

Now, consider the octopus (stay with me). They are a master of disguise with the ability to change colour, pattern, shape and texture. Once, while snorkelling, I encountered one hunting on the edge of a reef. It changed from pale white to a dark mottled pattern almost instaneously. It positioned in a hole, and crumpled its upwardly raised tentacles to look like seaweed. Incredible!

Shape and texture aside, the key to their colour and contrast change is specialized skin cells called chromatophores. These are essentially layered pigments that can be individually stretched to create a different density of a particular colour. To the eye, the different colors mix like the RGB of TV screens (additive colour). Combined with a reflective background that shows through in varying degrees, they can camouflage or display themselves with an amazing mastery.

So how about a car covered in something like chromatophores and sensors? The wavelength of detected light determines what colour to show on the registering side of the car, which could be a different colour to what is needed on the opposite side. Allow for a scale of high contrast to adequate contrast, and maybe different patterns for personal taste. Could this reduce road accidents? or maybe you just get more molluscs stuck under your wipers?

[mindhum]

Mac Attack! Upon finding a macbook pro prone to power problems, such as shutting down while in use or not charging up) I replaced the battery (and magsafe power supply which showed signs of corrosion). While inspecting the open innards I noticed a foreign object in the fan. No wonder it had been heating up! The object was a piece of the screwhole bracket that had probably broken off during a previous battery installation. Take care with those tri-wing screws, peeps.

[mindhum]

Not your average flow chart

Here’s an interesting UX artifact that I recently produced, to illustrate two possible paths. By being deliberately vague at this stage, complexity is greatly reduced, and user journeys simply boil down to this or that (a dichotomy).  More options can be added on, but they can now be viewed as exceptions or enhancements to the core application.

[mindhum]

I’ve just launched this website, and now a digital marketing campaign for Justin Wessels (2017 NABBA Masters Mr Universe) is underway. The social media strategy promotes the website I produced. http://justinwessels.com/

[mindhum]

I kinda feel like this should be underlined, or sitting on a tray or something...

[mindhum]

Here’s a little life hack to help hang framed pictures in a grid layout, much like magazine column modules, or responsive CSS grid systems. I've laid my pictures out on the floor first, to work out their placement in relation to each other. Then, to ensure consistent gutter widths (or margins), I've used children's building blocks as spacers. These can be physically picked up during hanging to measure on the wall. Neato as a burrito!

[mindhum]

RESPONSIVE EMAILS (part 2 of 2) - Robust and responsive

Following on from previous post:

THE PROBLEM: The browser bundled with Android 4.4 doesn't allow a responsive technique that has worked on other versions of Android. The TDs won't stack because the doctype declaration is being stripped out, which effectively invalidates media queries in this case.

THINKING IT THROUGH: In the spirit of object oriented thinking, we may want to treat any HTML element like an object, but considering some elements are specialised to behave differently by default, we can encounter issues trying to reliably override properties with CSS.

These tds need to be wrapped in a div (a more generic HTML element) with the display property set to display:inline-block. This will allow them to occupy the next available space. But let's not forget we're dealing with table elements (specialised HTML elements). The table cells will want to behave as such, adhering to columns and rows. This is great for an immutable layout, but we're trying to make it responsive. SO we need to treat each column's content like a tile.

SOLUTION? Nested tables. With each one wrapped in a div with display set to inline-block. Now width should be 100% to fill available space on small screens, and a max-width set to allow side by side on wide screens. Table elements can be set to width of 100% so that they respond to the width of their parent element, and contentment can be centred using inline attributes. So this is responsive design without media queries (you can still include them); makes use of tables for robust layout; but compensates for their immutability with a fully stylable parent DIV.

LOOKING BEYOND: A new browser version that behaves different from its predecessor isn't something new (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer). The best approach, to my thinking, remains giving court to across-the-board standards, and then identifying and addressing the exceptions.

[mindhum]

RESPONSIVE EMAILS (part 1 of 2) - TD stacking Emails are a valuable component of a good communications or engagement strategy. Tables and their associated elements have long been required in eDMs to ensure a robust layout, but the tradeoff is the flexibility of a liquid layout, particularly useful in a world of mobile devices.

Responsive design techniques have been a boon for anyone serving up screen-based layouts and, in the context of emails, the use of media queries to adjust layout for small screens has allowed for the TD stacking technique to handle multiple columns.

Put simply, several table cells (denoted TD for table data) are displayed side by side (in columns), but if the screen (or viewport) is small (like on a mobile phone), the table cells stack (in one column). The best of both worlds, right?

So, you check it in testing platform previews (Litmus, et al) and all views are good - except one! The layout breaks on Android 4.4 (aka KitKat)!! Previous versions of Android are not affected by this, so what gives?!

Stay tuned for an explanation and how to fix it…

[mindhum]

I like to moo-vit

Animals are a fascinating study for movement (and time). I had the benefit of Eadweard Muybridge's photos tracking motion over time and distance, to make a series of sketches. Then, I generated an animated GIF, with the images presented one after another, in relatively quick succession. The amazing thing is our brain interprets it as the continuous motion of one cow; not a set of different images of the same cow, or even different cows.

[mindhum]

Blue steel

Elomeno PR has changed it up, moving from earthy ochres to a fresher brighter palette. We introduced a colour we've been calling Blue Steel, and thats as good an excuse for a caricature as any.

[mindhum]

Category Winner!

I'm chuffed to be part of the team that delivered these websites. Rabobank, in partnership with creative agency Ogilvy, received a Sitecore Experience award late 2015 for innovative implementation of a Sitecore CMS that goes beyond the box. Go Team Jellyfish!

[mindhum]

The Pizza Experience

After an affinity map, and discussion about personas, we're mapping out user flows for a pizza ordering app. Now where's that primary path?!

[mindhum]

Stay hydrated.  Well, this is just generally a good message, isn't it?

[mindhum]

buttons to UI

Illustrating a transformation from buttons/links into a user interface component. In this case 3 separate log in buttons are integrated in a widget. Submit the same form, and inputs are parsed unseen to the users.