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Dreaming of Tokyo
Saint Paul Cathedral repainted
Speaking with the CMU BXA panel -
Alumni Panel
March 22nd
Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, Room A-11
The College of Fine Arts is partnering with the Career and Professional Development Center to bring almuni back to campus to share their journeys and discuss their career paths. These CFA alumni have achieved great success in their fields, though the path may not have been linear. Students joining them for the Alumni Panel Discussions will be able to ask questions about those individual and inspiring journeys, as they themselves prepare to embark on their own careers.
Swing by if you’re around!
Cut flowers are one of the nicest perks of having a bit of disposable income.
I always want to remember how beautiful life is.
80% of users only use 20% of features. Part of good product design is hiding 80% of advanced features from those users so things do not easily go astray.
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As per Marc’s piece, my process isn’t an exact match-up, but I do wholeheartedly believe –
Don’t force a process on a design team that everyone must follow.
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Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a [seemingly] better design process.
Bad design processes are like 1984. They dumb down everything to the lowest common denominator so no one feels excluded. They make the team slow, bloated, and insipid. They allow non-designers to make terrible design decisions. They furthermore get non-designers to believe those decisions are better than their designer’s.
Luckily, there isn’t a sharp toned pitch in this story, so we are able to diagnose the poison. I wish I had good advice for how to navigate this situation. It would be right here [ ]! Check back in 5 years.
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We have a flat hierarchy
True flat hierarchies do not exist. Think about your small group of close friends, don’t nights hanging out go smoother when there’s a leader? Someone who breaks the ice, who nudges the group.
In the more serious case of work, there always has to be someone responsible, someone making trade-offs, someone at the helm. Things fall apart when everyone or no one is responsible. Also, the same person doesn’t have to be the leader over and over again.
Structure isn’t a bad thing just know flat doesn’t actually mean flat. Flat ideally means fair, flat ideally ends up being a very well executed democratic system. Discern for mutual respect from strong leadership.
Open seating makes a maker more productive
In short, no, no it doesn’t always. What about constant interruption via extreme accessibility makes things more productive?
Most spaces have embraced open seating, so look for a place that has carved out ample areas for those times you need to do heads down work, including flexible work from home arrangements.
That being said, open seating is phenonmenal for making communication more productive. Discern for a balance of the two.
“We are a start-up”
Most, if not all, organization are using start-up as a buzzword to try to attract you. There is nothing wrong with medium-sized or large-sized organizations. There is a bowl of porridge right for everyone, but for some reason, the valley currently believes otherwise. Know that when you are told with a straight-face that the 1,000 person company is a “start-up,” it’s likely a means to win the favours of your heart.
When another popular term gets coined, let’s say ‘beehives,’ both the 100 person and 1,000 person company will tell you they have a ‘beehive environment.’ You’d know it! Discern for buzzwords and do the due diligence of evaluating numbers.
For the record
I don’t forsake any of these things. I’m spelling out dreamlike expectations which my past self found to differ vastly from the reality.
At every position of the cursor you can picture a triangle between the current mouse position and the upper and lower right corners of the dropdown menu. If the next mouse position is within that triangle, the user is probably moving their cursor into the currently displayed submenu. Amazon uses this for a nice effect. As long as the cursor stays within that blue triangle the current submenu will stay open. It doesn’t matter if the cursor hovers over “Appstore for Android” momentarily — the user is probably heading toward “Learn more about Cloud Drive.”
And if the cursor goes outside of the blue triangle, they instantly switch the submenu, giving it a really responsive feel.
What does not ship does not exist. It’s not going on dribbble, it’s not going in siteinspire, but it goes out to millions of users.