Design

I'm old enough to remember the great laments aired when vinyl started to die it's still ensuing slow death, how would musicians and their artists still be able to shrink their exquisite works of art down from a whopping 12" to XX CD inlays. Well, unsurprisingly they coped, they managed, they learnt new tricks and still created a mixed bag of wondrous masterpieces and piles of crap. There have been some classic Album covers that I feel wouldn't have even worked on vinyl. Radioheads' 'OK Computer' is one example, pop out the CD holder and you find a wealth of extra art lurking beneath the surface. Not forgetting cardboard covers, flexipacks and a wealth of DIY efforts that were far simplified by the smaller size of a CD. CD bodies themselves also offer an extra surface for artwork that previously never existed, not to mention those more adventurous musicians who add bonus material through the extended CD format.

The Web Directions - <a href="https://wdyk-melb-sept13.eventbrite.com/" target="_blank">What do you know events</a> are always a fun night and tonight was no exception with many running 'jokes' about some of the appalling policy decisions just announced by the coalition that will affect our industry, one which has been a boom area for Australia, but largely unrecognised on the larger national scale. Anyway, enough of Politics, what were the talks? Bear in mind there were 10, so this will be very brief...

It seems as the year draws to an end, we&#39;re having some of the best talks! Damn Christmas&hellip;

I've been sitting on the post for a while, a series of (comical) screen shots on what different people want from a website during it's design process. You may recognise some...

The old paradigms in software design have been on life support for a long time.

I've had Lollipop (Android 5) on my phone for about ten days now, so it seemed like a good time to report back on my feelings and experiences with this new, 'material design' laden Operating System.

I have started building the site for the "One Day the World Ended" project in Ruby on Rails and thus needed some designs. Here are my rough ones so far.

Continuing my reviews of research I have just finished the classic "Kobold Guide to Board Game Design<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=gregamamma-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1936781042" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" width="1" />" and can highly recommend it as a good overview of board game design advice. It is a collection of essays more than an end-to-end guide, so some essays will hold more relevance with you than others. However I picked up enough nuggets of advice to make it a worthwhile purchase and have a long list of 'todos. it includes essays from some stalwarts of the industry such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield" target="_blank">Richard Garfield</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_(US_game_designer)" target="_blank">Steve Jackson</a> (who created large parts of my childhood) and is divided into sections of the design process. One of the encouraging outcomes of reading the book was realising that I am currently on track and already doing a lot of what was recommended, but also realised I have a long way to go yet!

This week has been a fervent flurry of activity as I prepare for <a href="/its-all-change-again" target="_blank">starting my new job next week</a>.

Trade your developer hat for your philosopher's cap and take a look at the ethics of weaponized tech design and engineering.

If you want to build your applications and business on existing APIs and not reinvent all functionality yourself, how do you decide between the plethora of options available? This article helps you make that decision based on the developer experience (DX) you should expect from an API.