Articles on design
Sketched, not Stirred: Attempts to Host a Drink + Draw
This is the journal of two LA designers attempting to host a drink and draw series. But to start – why a drink and draw? As designers in an office of 20-ish developers, we felt lonely (or insane) cooing over our own grid paper. Some days felt like far too much screen time and an …
How to Present a Design Review
Arguably the most difficult skill you’ll learn in your design career is how to communicate that you did what you set out to do in a way that gets people to support and continue the work you did. Presenting design successfully is about knowing what you want out of the meeting and structuring it to …
Designing for Engagement
One of the most interesting distinctions we make in design is between service design and engagement design. Service design is oriented around helping someone achieve a task. The interface that asks for information and prints your boarding pass is service design – it’s successful if you get through it without mistakes as quickly as possible. …
Dyslexia vs Typography
Design has made leaps and bounds to accommodate for all types of visual, auditory, and physical limitations. However, there are some boundaries to what it can accomplish. One example of this boundary where design has not been able to bridge the gap is Dyslexia. I was diagnosed with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia at the age of …
Product Management Resources for Designers
Product Managers are awesome! They keep goals in mind and priorities at the forefront – and when designers get to work with them, it’s a real treat. Clearly, there is a lot of overlap in skill sets, but sometimes you’ll find yourself on a team without a dedicated PM. So if you’re a designer in …
Designing artifacts for Conversational UI
Here at Carbon Five, we’re pretty fascinated by bots and conversational UI. Recently, we worked with Cooper to test and launch a new Alexa skill, a meeting manager to help teams run daily standups. We’ve already written a fair bit about our collaboration process in general, and in the following post I’m going to get into …
Flexing the Rules of Material Design
5 Steps to quickly differentiate your Android app design while being Material Design compliant.
Mise en World
I gave this talk at Kluge’s Evenings at the Loft on March 20, 2015. The theme of the event was Aesthetics. Skot Carruth and Jeremy Mumenthaler also spoke. Video is forthcoming. Special thanks to Arturo and Cameron at Kluge and to David and Courtney at Carbon Five for helping me shape this. My background is …
Delivering value, Making money
When I begin working on a new product, I’m always looking for ways to optimize the interactions for business and user value. I believe the best way to accomplish that is to get to market as early as possible with the proposed value. By getting to market, I mean everything from talking with customers about …
Introducing Tinderbox
Check out our new meetup Tinderbox. We created Tinderbox because we wanted a forum about creating products using software (and sometimes custom hardware). Tinderbox is technology agnostic because we all use a variety of tech to build things. At Carbon Five, we’re building with Ruby, JavaScript (client and server) and Objective-C/iOS, but we dabble with …