While I was attending WAQ in Québec City, I sat down with Catherine Dionne of the UXers. We talked about the mission of the Canadian Digital Service, what we’re trying to accomplish, and what the future for digital services in Canada could look like.
Rotherhithe Farms Honey – From the Archives
My long-term collaborator and friend, Mike Wood, has put some of the most interesting projects across my desk. When we lived in London…
Read MoreDesignX, Toronto
Before leaving the UK, I started looking around for professional associations, groups, and meetups in Canada.
I eventually found DesignX, Toronto's largest UX and Design community, and it's fantastic. They have a brilliant Slack channel that's teeming with activity. Whatever you're looking for, you'll find it there – be it tips for Sketch, prototyping tutorials, job postings, advice, or leadership guidance.
Preet Singh, the founder of DesignX, and I connected in October and he asked me to present to the community about service design and government services.
Despite getting stuck in traffic (long enough that I began to worry, Preet texted me, and I debated getting out and running!), I made it to the venue, gave my talk, and had a fantastic time meeting as many members of the community as possible. I couldn't have had a better time.
Read a Twitter Moment of my DesignX presentation→
View the slides from my talk:
Speaking at CanUX
Photo from a tweet by Anna Lissansky
On Saturday, November 4, 2017, I had the immense pleasure of speaking at CanUX, the largest UX conference in Canada.
It was my first time speaking at CanUX (I made the rookie mistake of wearing red on a stage that was mostly red) and I'm delighted and grateful that I got to be a small part of it. You should definitely attend next year!
Whenever I speak, I'm fascinated by the things that resonate with the audience. For instance, I really thought me calling out some service design as less than legitimate would go over tremendously with the audience. Instead, what stuck with the audience was moments like these:
Photo from a tweet by Josée Charbonneau
Photo from a tweet by Tyler Hilker
You can see the full slides from my CanUX presentation here:
A huge thank you to the Digital & Technology team at the Ministry of Justice – the case study I presented wouldn't have been possible without the hard work of many talented people. Similarly, I owe a debt to Steve Marshall, whose guidance and advice helped shaped my talk.
If you're interested in having me speak at your event or conference about design of all kinds, technology, and the intersection between the two, please get in touch!
Designing for Canada
After a decade in the U.K. followed by a short sabbatical, I'm delighted to announce that I'm going to be the first Chief of Design with the Canadian Digital Service, a new initiative by the Government of Canada.
CDS's mission is straightforward: to design, code, build and deliver simple, easy to use, accessible services for Canadians. When I first met the CDS team, I found a passionate, diverse group of people truly committed to placing user centred design at the heart of everything they do. It's one of the many reasons I'm delighted to join the team and lead the design practice.
Canadians expect web services, like Gmail and Facebook, to be easy to use and accessible. There's absolutely no reason why government services can't be the same. The United Kingdom’s success with GDS and the U.S.’s success with the U.S. Digital Service and 18F are proof of this. During my time with the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom, my team and I designed and delivered services that made thousands of people’s lives easier and, in some cases, saved them money. I'm excited and delighted to have the opportunity to do the same here back at home.
Since the launch of CDS this summer, the team's work and the scope of the projects has dramatically increased. CDS is going to be hiring designers of all kinds over the next couple of months. Please get in touch if you're interested in joining the team.
I firmly believe that there's no better opportunity to make an impact through design. At the Canadian Digital Service, you'll work on projects that matter, in an open, transparent, inclusive, and diverse environment, to make the lives of your fellow Canadians better. It's that simple.
In-App Diversity
For the past few years, I've been using Duolingo to improve my French. I've found it really useful and my proficiency in reading, speaking and comprehension has increased dramatically.
Some time ago, Duolingo introduced stylised illustrations of people speaking the phrases (I suspect this was in order to humanise and bring context to the exercises). While these illustrations must have presented an interesting challenge to the visual designers† as well as the engineers, the thing about them that immediately stood out to me wasn't the style or the execution.
Instead, it was the diversity.
There are illustrations of women, men, girls, boys, people of colour, people of religion, bodybuilders, twins, punks, skaters, hippies, policemen, lumber jacks, zombies, astronauts, and same-sex couples.
Just some of the Duolingo characters
Some of the more unique characters
Some of these depictions must be intentional. In the above image, a character who looks suspiciously like Hulk Hogan proclaims his embarrassment and two women of colour proudly state their love has no limits ( 🌈 ). And if I'm not wrong, that's Riggs and Murtaugh in the bottom left corner.
I absolutely love this. I can't remember the last time I used an app that actually had so much diversity represented in visual form. I think it's commendable in this day and age, to say nothing of the fact that Duolingo allowed their designers the time and the budget to render these characters.
Hell, they even included a bear.
† From what I can tell, the illustrations are the work of Gregory Hartman and are based on a standard template – libraries of heads and shoulders are mixed and matched with other libraries of facial features and accessories. Fantastic stuff.
Portrait Photography
Following up from my previous post on food photography, here's a portfolio of my commerical portraiture work.
Food Photography
For years, I've run a separate domain and website for my commercial photography. Recently, I made the choice to let that domain expire. But rather than let those photos disappear into the ether, I thought I'd publish them here on my blog.
Here's a selection of my published food photography:
Slack Glitch
Here's what happens when you encounter a major glitch in Slack, the productivity tool. All things considered, it's a rather nice way to make a bad situation a little less unpleasant for the user.
Choosy Icon
Choosy is one of those tiny pieces of software that quickly becomes indispensable. Its premise is beautifully simple: open the right link in the right browser, every time.
That premise belies its incredibly power though. Choosy also lets you set behaviours and customs actions. Always open mail:to links in Chrome? No sweat. Send a link from Chrome to Safari? Easy. The accompanying extensions – for all of the major browsers – make that a piece of cake.
I was introduced to Choosy by George Brocklehurst, a former colleague and Choosy's creator (when he saw me copying and pasting links between browsers). I used it for years and was dismayed when it finally stopped working because of changes in OSX.
The old version of the Choosy icon
When it came time to update Choosy, I happily took George up on his offer to update the icon. The previous icon felt complicated, especially given how simple Choosy is to use. In fairness, the original icon was a product of its time and reflected Apple's Aqua aesthetic with reflections, gradients, and 3D effects.
My goal for the icon’s redesign was to simplify it as much as possible. It needed to feel elegant, simple, and straightforward.
After some thought, I chose to base the new version on one of the original icon’s triangles. This creates a tie between the original icon and the new one. It's a strong geometric element and communicates the concepts of direction, navigation and movement.
Finding the proper balance of the C to the triangle proved to be a surprising challenge (turns out that mathematical alignment was completely visually wrong). I also found drawing a geometrically perfect triangle with rounded corners very, very difficult (I was trying to use the Pathfinder tool to merge circles with the corners of a triangle and then remove the negative spaces).
Eventually, I realised that Adobe had probably solved this problem. A quick Google search later and I used the incredibly simple “round corners” option. ಠ_ಠ
In the end, I’m very happy with how the final version turned out. A particularly difficult challenge was ensuring that the icon represented well at all sizes – as small as 16 pixels square, for use in the Apple menu bar and as a favicon (the 16 pixel square version actually has a slightly different layout and font weight to render properly).
The final icon. From left to right at 1024 x 1024, 512 x 512, 256 x 256, 128 x 128, 64 x 64 and the tiny 16 x 16!
And here’s what Choosy looks like when it’s running in your Mac’s menu bar:
You can buy Choosy for $10 USD. It’s worth every penny.
A suggestion for the New Year
With last year's being light-hearted, it stands that this year's sentiment is a bit more serious. By the way, the image above happens to be the perfect size for your iPhone's wallpaper.
Eva-Lotta’s Sketchnotes
Eva-Lotta Lamm is well known for her sketchnotes, beautifully drawn notes taken on conference talks.
Back in 2013, my friend Steve Marshall asked me to speak at the Expedia Summer Symposium. Steve knows Eva-Lotta from their time together at Yahoo!, so I didn’t think anything of seeing her at the evening. Also, I’d just started at Expedia that week and was singularly focussed on delivering a good talk.
I spoke about how wayfinding is an intrinsic part of the human brain’s spatial awareness (memory palaces!), how this should be applied to signage systems, and how it can benefit the web.
A few weeks later, Eva-Lotta messaged me to tell me that her sketchnotes from my talk were on Flickr. What I didn’t realise until April of this year is that, for the fourth time, she compiled all of her lovely notes into a book.
She sent me a digital copy and it’s a great piece, full of lettering, beautiful sketches and genuinely interesting tidbits.
SuperLocate
In 2013, my friend (and former colleague at Reevoo) Chris Zetter released an iPhone app, SuperLocate. Like all good apps, it solves a problem that he had: how to find the nearest grocery store.
I volunteered to help with the interaction design and the flow of the user journeys. Additionally, I contributed to the visual styling and the refinement of the app icon.
Overview
The app opens with half the screen devoted to a map view, and the other half a list of the nearby grocery stores. If the user touches the map, the list collapses. This allows the user to pan and zoom the map to refine their search.
Selecting a grocery store from the list brings up the hours of operation, as well as giving the user options for walking and driving directions, and calling the store.
Early Sketches
Sketch for main screen (top) and the About/credits screen (below)
Sketch of supermarket screen (top) showing opening hours, walking and driving directions
Main screen
Main screen with listings visible
Supermarket screen
Icon design (from left to right): original, revised, alternate revised
The app is simple, intuitive, and a brilliant little side project from a very talented developer. Check out Superlocate (App store link) on the UK App store.
Eames and Delaunay Triangles
Recently, I was experimenting with a new illustration style. Rather than render an object in its whole, I abstracted the representation slightly by using geometric planes. At first, I tried using polygons but the overall effect was jumbled and not quite what I wanted.
After doing some reading about polygons and geometric planes, I eventually came across Delaunay triangulation. The mathematics behind them are fascinating but I was instantly drawn to their application to my problem.
After drawing a couple of simple objects with Delaunay triangles, I decided to apply them to an idea I had for a series of prints. My friend Steve is passionate about mid-century modern furniture and we’d recently had a conversation about the work of Charles and Ray Eames.
With that conversation fresh in mind, I drew the Eames’ classic chairs with Delaunay triangles, wrote a short history of each chair, and had the finished posters printed on a beautiful mocha FSC paper.
The finished posters:
Eames DAW (Dining Height Armchair Wood Base)
Eames DSW (Dining Height Side Chair Wood Base)
Eames DSR (Dining Height Side Chair Rod Base)
Detail of the so-called Eiffel Tower base
Detail of the DAW seat
It was only after I finished my prints (and drawing hundreds and hundreds of precise triangles) that I discovered DMesh – a beautiful little piece of software that will render a vector version of any raster images with Delaunay triangles. Oh well. ;)
The Hype Machine II: The New Pornographers
Following up on my previous work for the Hype Machine, I was asked to create a piece of work representing the Canadian supergroup, The New Pornographers. I felt it critical to avoid the obvious connotations of the name so I created a piece of lettering whose aesthetic paid homage to the Rat Pack, the Vegas of days-gone-by, cocktail lounges and luxury.
The final piece
The Process
There were a couple of concepts that I considered for this piece: London tart cards (the postcards left by escorts in London phone booths), Times Square in the 1970s, and cheap ads found in the back of seedy men's magazines.
Times Square in the 1970s
Tart cards
Sleazy classified ads
While sketching out possible layouts, it struck me these concepts and any variation on them were far too obvious. As such, I quickly wrote out a list of adjectives corresponding to my concepts and then tried to think of antonyms.
Classy, modern, and art house stuck out as keywords (classy appeared twice somehow). With these in mind, I then sketched out a couple of layouts before settling on the final piece.
The Faltering Hearts
The Faltering Hearts, a ukulele trio of women, approached me to design a logo for them. Their previous logos had been clichéd, obvious approaches based on hearts, usually accompanied by overly-decorative typefaces. Considering that the Faltering Hearts are quite a unique group, I suggested a hand-lettered approach to make the logotype feel human, distinctive and warm.
Read MoreAlice … in Wonderland
A book cover with custom lettering that I created for as a gift. Whimsical? Ornate? Excessive amounts of flourishes? Seemed like a good fit for the Victorian nature of Lewis Carroll's most famous work.
The Hype Machine: Camera Obscura
The Hype Machine asked me to contribute an illustration to their Annual Zeitgeist. With Camera Obscura as my chosen artist, I sketched a few different concepts, one of which was a highly-illustrative execution with inverted typography (like a true camera obscura).
In the end, I settled on the simpler execution above: lettering which references the pulp magazines and horror films of the 1930s. The application of texture to mimic shoddy printing and some scratch/hashed type helped round it off nicely.
Another rotation around the sun
While cleaning out my files, I rediscovered these somewhat cynical birthday cards that I made a few years ago. While the lettering isn't the most refined, I quite like the writing. Despite this being a personal project, there was still an approval process – Leah vetoed a few of the copy options including "ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE GRAVE". ;)
On New Year's Resolutions
A silly little graphic I made for those suffering through a healthier January. Available as an iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus wallpaper.
