Here’s the final Linder shirt design. It’s great to make something and then actually get it out into the real world.
I made a little mistake in the “Cooperative” text — the text layer was on “Snap to pixel grid” and when I converted it to outlines all the created points snapped to the pixel grid, too. It’s most noticeable on the Es: they look a little muddy.
Also, the ring around the twin pines was supposed to be the same width as the lines in the house. But the house lines are made up of ink and the circle is the absence of ink. So if the ink bleeds even a little bit, you get that difference. I guess the fix there is to think about how each line is made and adjust the widths accordingly.
I got them printed at Underground Printing which was a huge mistake. Underground doesn’t care about your artwork or colors, they just want to get as many people through the system as possible. They got the colors completely wrong the first time, and told me that they don’t even look at the shirts before giving them to customers. And they were rude the entire time. Next time I’m going to VGKids in Ypsi.
I’ve been working on prototyping a new interface for browsing movies called FilmGrid. Here are some of the things I’ve been doing to make the design and development process smoother, faster, and more fun.
JavaScript
I’m using jQuery, but also TouchSwipe for detecting swipes on iPad and boxy for dialog boxes. Not having to write all this code myself is clearly a Good Thing.
I’ve also been making use of the Module pattern to make my JavaScript cleaner, more readable, and easier to refactor. My $(document).ready() function is less than ten lines of code and easily readable.
Google App Engine
GAE is great because I can develop locally, but also push a copy to Google-hosted servers with one line (appcfg.py update .). That makes it super-simple to show other people the prototype. I can get feedback from someone over IM, make a change, upload it, and have them look again, all in five minutes.
GAE also can also host multiple versions of the same app at the same time. So I can have a stable version and another one for playing around with new ideas.
git
I’m using git for version control and hosting the source on GitHub. Even though I’m not actively collaborating with anyone on this project, having my code publicly available inspires me to write better and more readable code. It’s also really satisfying to code a new feature or fix a bug, and then commit it — it’s like checking something off a checklist.
Real content, but not necessarily live content
When I started laying out FilmGrid I just had a bunch of rectangles that represented movies. Not only was that ugly and uninspiring but it didn’t really give me a feel for how FilmGrid would actually work. Grabbing a bunch of random movies would have fixed the ugliness problem but FilmGrid’s layout is deliberate: adjacent movies are related, like browsing in a library or Blockbuster. So I wrote a script to fetch movies from themoviedb and put them in a JSON object. It’s a little slow, but I only have to run it once, and it populates the grid with appropriate content.
I just found the fantastic Transform effect (Effects → Distort & Transform → Transform) that lets me create a reflection of a shape and translate it so that it’s next to the original. And all in real-time, so I can edit the shape on the right and the whole shield changes!
This is truly fantastic. When I first read the instructions — “play these together, some or all, start them at any time, in any order” — I thought, “There’s no way this will sound good.”
I’ll post more about this soon but here are the slides from the pitch/presentation that Jane and I gave in Boulder this past weekend for the Interaction ’11 student competition. All of the brainstorming, ideation, research, iteration, and creation happened during the 3 days of the conference. Lots of fun.
The slides make more sense with narration, so I’ll be adding captions to them soon, or maybe I’ll post a video of the presentation, depending on how the quality is.
Many of the icons are from the free Glyphish set that is licensed under CC-Attribution.
I was just showing a friend the awesome Girl Walk // All Day project on Kickstarter and we both went “Whattt??” (in a good way) when we saw this live/instant/visual search interface. Try for yourself!
You’ll also want to click the scissors towards the bottom of the page. Maybe a couple times.
