Interview With a Designer: Homer Gaines

After taking some time to tweak the sketchbooks a bit based on feedback, I have released my first three iPhone application sketchbooks online for sale.

• The iPhone Application Project Sketchbook is structured for developers and has plenty of space for notes and sketching.
• The iPhone Application Storyboard Sketchbook is structured for designers and has more space for story boards and planning UI and UX.
• The iPhone Developer : Barry Ezell Edition of offers the same features as the firstiPhone application sketchbook.

I have many more sketchbooks on the design table right now and I will be posting them as they are available. I also have a few request for personal projects so if you are interested in the possibilities, drop me a line.

Bellow are images of what the site looks like currently and my suggested design.

My suggested layout

CNN

• Text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 to Haiti relief.
• You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti.
• The State Department toll-free number to call for information about family members in Haiti is 1-888-407-4747
• UNICEF: Help children affected by the earthquake in Haiti https://secure.unicefusa.org/site/Donation2?df_id=6680&6680.donation=form1

Reference:

• http://twitter.com/wyclef
• http://twitter.com/RedCross
• CNN – http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/impact/

The ideas going through my head are in water color. Sumi-e inspired,  faint wet traces of paint on rice paper.  Minimalistic layout giving just as much value to the  negative space as the content.

For now the UI. Maybe I’ll build out the design as a Wordpress theme or a flash site. We’ll see.

Using dummy content or fake information in the Web design process can result in products with unrealistic assumptions and potentially serious design flaws.

Personally I don’t think using Lorum Ipsum is a bad thing. I don’t think the problem is the use of Lorum Ipsum but more an issue with requirements and understanding what the outcome should be. The above mentioned “issue” would be the case if the requirements were incomplete or loosely written and ambiguous. In that event, the use of Lorum is the least of the problems.

I do agree with the fact it gives “unrealistic assumptions” of what the final will look like, but it’s not meant to be the final. In my experience as a designer, Lorum is often used in the prototype phase of a project where ever that is in the overall business process.  The idea at this point is being hashed out and tweaked to meet the initial vision of the requester. Most of which should be fairly close, provided the requirements are good.

I feel the post assumes there is data or copy to begin with, when in some cases content hasn’t been created. However, if the necessary data and or copy exists, it would only make sense to design and build the prototype with it in place. This would provide a closer “real world” picture of what the final will be. Another assumption made is that the data is dynamic which also is not always the case.  Again,this is the type of information that should be in the requirements. Yet, if a project does require a level of flexibility in the way it’s presented, it’s the responsibility of the designer to understand how to design the layout to be flexible. All which should be reviewed and approved while still a prototype.

Mozilla announced the support of the WOFF file format in the upcoming Firefox (3.6) release. WOFF fonts are a smaller, more compressed format that allows for faster downloads.

Related articles:

• Rich Typography On The Web: Techniques and Tools – explains all the current techiques
• @font-face in Depth
• Becoming a Font Embedding Master
• cufon
• Web fonts — where are we?
• Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows
• Guide to CSS Font Stacks: Techniques and Resources
• sIFR
• 10 Great Free Fonts for @font-face embedding
• WOFF

For more info on barcampswfl, follow them on twitter.

Not sure what barcamp is all about, pay barcamp.org a visit.

Final design

Twitter avatar and background

Initial ideas

• 320×480 (iPhone)
• 1024×768
• 1280×800
• 1280×1024
• 1440×900
• 1600×1200
• 1680×1050
• 1920×1200
• 2048×1536

For more information check out

• Web Statistics and Trends
• Display Resolution

My neighbor and I hit the water about 1pm. He was in a eight footer and I was in an eleven footer. They are wide kayaks but very stable. The only drawback is they are slower. We made a plan to get to the mouth of the river and back in 3 hours. A distance that’s roughly 6 miles out. It sounded good until we realized that we were going to be rowing into the wind with the tide coming in. This pretty much sucked when either of us needed to take a drink of water because we’d stop rowing and literally come to a dead stop then start drifting backwards. This was the story the whole way out.

There were more boats out on the water today as well. About 3 miles into the trip, we come to a bend in the river that Jay and I refer to as “Dead Man’s Curve”. It was here where some guy comes around the blind turn reenacting Tokyo Drift in a fishing boat. We heard the boat but could not tell the direction it was coming from until it was almost too late. I looked back just to see the the boat hit the corner. The front of the boat was in the air which means this guy had the outboards open up all the way. I’m surprised he even saw us because from where we were, we could only see the underside of the boat. He killed the engine and slammed back into the water about 40 yards from where we were. The boat coasted by us still creating a wake that would have flipped us had we been in the narrower, less stable kayaks. As he passed us, Jay and I laughed about what almost happened and about how I would not like telling his wife why his hat is the only thing that made it back from the trip.

The fear of being hit by a boat had quickly come and gone and left us with a false since of security. Yeah, more boats. For the remainder of the trip we dodged 3 pontoons, and 2 other fishing boats. We didn’t make it out to the mouth of the river like we had planned because we were short on time but we did make it out roughly 4 miles. The trip back to the dock was not bad at all. We saw a manatee, had the wind at our backs and the tide was still coming in which meant we could stop rowing and drift a bit.

We’ll try again next week.