Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

A followup to my graphic standards and style guide post: The more often you do something in the same way, the more difficult it is to think about doing it in any other way. Break out of this “prison of familiarity” by disrupting your habitual thought patterns. Eat ice cream for breakfast. Wear red sox. […]

In working with architects and the St. Louis Landmarks Association, I have often ran across a need to render a building or represent a landmark as an architect’s conceptual sketch. Trying out some technics in Photoshop one day, I discovered a wonderful filter called “Find Edges.” With this filter, you can make almost any photo […]

The challenge: Design a logo for a special company event with several color schemes. On websites, the logo needs to subtly change colors as someone visits the site. This would be an easy solution using Flash but because many users have iPads or iPhones that do not support it, those users would not see the […]

An architect built a cluster of office buildings around a central green. When construction was completed, the landscape crew asked him where he wanted the sidewalks. “Just plant the grass solidly between the buildings,” was his reply. By late summer the new lawn was laced with paths of trodden grass between the buildings. These paths […]

A high school teacher drew a dot on the blackboard and asked the class what it was. “A dot on the blackboard,” was the only response. “I’m surprised at you,” the teacher said. “I did this exercise with a group of kindergartners and they thought of fifty different things it could be: a squashed bug, […]

“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” Mr. Jobs said. As an iTunes user, there have been some instances where my itunes preferences have automatically reset based on various updates. I have since learned to check my preferences every single time there is an update to make sure that I don’t lose any […]

  Alright. Here it is. Today’s good morning announcement. Let’s call it ‘setting expectations’. A plain language conversation with users about how to potentially (because they are still figuring it out) smoothly transition your data….in the future (this fall)…. ….iCloud subscription is actually free ONLY with OSX Lion and iOS 5 users (which requires purchase […]

So with all this talk about the Apple iCloud launch today, it all sounds pretty spiffy. Especially if you know that it’s powered by Apple’s iDataCenter – which sounds like pretty powerful stuff. Pay for everything. Access everything. Store nothing! Yay No long upload times of your data to a cloud. (Currently up to 5mb […]

Google Chrome Notebook Order. Yours. Now? Due out on June 15th, 2011. What it is: It is a notebook that is essentially a mobile device – uses 3G, mobile data networks, wi-fi It only has the google Chrome browser installed 8 second bootup Cloud-based data storage and syncing – log in from anywhere – your […]

May is National Inventors’ Month. Established in 1998, this celebration of inventors and their contributions to the world had been celebrated in August until this year. The sponsors of the event – Inventors Digest, the Academy of Applied Science, and the United Inventors Association of the USA – decided that May would better coincide with the National Inventors Hall of […]

Sliced bread is the innovation by which all innovations are measured:  “the best thing since sliced bread.” That phrase spawns the question: “What was the best thing before sliced bread?” Attempts to answer that question range from humorous to contemplative. I recently discovered another possible answer: User research! “Slice of Life” in the April 2011 […]

“Where were you when…” is a familiar start to discussing major recent historic events. In the wake of the news about Osama bin Laden’s death, “Where were you when you heard the news of his death?” is now being asked and discussed in many forum. I realized that for me the most apt answer is […]