So my latest completely valid excuse for not updating my site for the past several (many) months, apart from moving into a new abode, starting a new job and generally getting back into the swing of living in Sydney, is that Megan (my lovely partner of 10+ years) and I have been utterly preoccupied with planning, preparing and celebrating our wedding day this July just passed.

We shared the day with an intimate crowd of our closest family and friends at the Officer’s Mess, Sydney Harbour National Park, Watsons Bay. The building is a lovely old 1930s art deco place overlooking Sydney Harbour, which inspired our vintage theme for the affair.

I designed all the various bits and pieces for the wedding: the stationery, signage and invitations along with a mini-site (I got rid of the password so feel free to take a look), which all helped set the mood for the day.

Thanks to everyone that generously helped us along the way, our guests that shared the day with us, and of course my biggest thanks go to my beautiful wife for going on this journey with me. 

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

The design is strong in colour but super simple and aims to let the words and images do the talking. Diego’s a prolific guy, always taking great photos, painting crazy images and writing deep thoughts, so I’ll be visiting often to see what’s new.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

It would seem that it’s often a tall order to build sites in a way that will work without Javascript as the baseline, but instead going straight for the all-singing, all-dancing full-blown AJAX rich-media awesome experience. I tend to think you can have your cake and eat it too. That’s if you’re epically brilliant.

I love all the new bells and whistles we’re able to roll out on sites these days, just using native browser technologies. But bells and whistles shouldn’t come at the expense of a functional base

I do believe I just quoted myself there. Slightly weird… But anyway, if that’s your kind of thing, do have a read and feel free to share your thoughts.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

“‘Post-digital’ is a term coined by planner/blogger Russell Davies to describe the way in which smart digital and online behaviours have begun to make their presence felt in the real world, on real, tangible objects. It’s not hard to see the appeal of this concept after years of flash-heavy microsites, and of ‘traditional’ vs. ‘digital’ silos: a distinction rendered increasingly obsolete by the swelling ranks of a younger generation for whom such boundaries are meaningless.”

– Most Contagious 2009 – Contagious Magazine (PDF)

Gritty, grainy, rustling old newspaper.

Now to get some people and content together…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

“Good business is the best art.”
— Andy Warhol

Pop Life explores a newer generation of artists that have made use of the media to capitalise on their art and indeed their own names. There was a fairly large section devoted to Andy Warhol’s entrepreneurial leanings in the 80s, at a time where he continued to court celebrity, and made all sorts of unlikely appearances, like in Aaron Spelling’s The Love Boat, as well as randomly taking a stroll about in the back of a late 80s pop video.

There was a wall dedicated to the 80s cover art of Warhol’s magazine: Interview. This was compelling evidence of his part in unleashing that certain 80s style of commercial art on the world.

Also on show were episodes of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, which were a series of laid back chats with celebrities, made for MTV. I managed to catch a few minutes with Jerry Hall and John Oates (the follicly superior half of Hall & Oates).

Upon further exploration, I was pleased to find that there were works of artists other than Andy Warhol being exhibited. Damien Hirst had his False Idol on display – a preserved calf with gold feet. Funny thing about Damien Hirst, I’m yet to meet someone that likes his art. Personally, I take a morbid interest in dead things in formaldehyde. And if they’ve got bling, more power to them.

Jeff Koons had some of his particular flights of fancy included, notably Made in Heaven, discreetly tucked away in one of the “adults only” rooms. Here we get an intimate glimpse of Jeff and his wife, Italian blue movie star and politician “La Cicciolina”, celebrating their special kind of adult love in a highly colour-saturated, Garden of Eden themed series of photos, along with a somewhat generously proportioned sculpture.

The last room in the exhibition featured the very chirpy and only slightly twisted art of Takashi Murakami, where we were inundated in illustrations, sculptures and toys to perfectly compliment the well endowed lactating cartoon lady we saw in the first room. As a nice cheerio, we were treated to a big screen playing Turning Japanese, as sung by a nice blue-haired cosplay Kirsten Dunst.

All up, Pop Life was interesting and provocative, and a good excuse to get yourself over to the Tate Modern. Pop Life will be there until 17 January.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

E-commerce mavens (and benevolent employers) Snow Valley were lovely enough to send a couple of us along to dConstruct 09 down in Brighton last week. This was a good thing, as dConstruct was a quality conference with lots of food for thought.

Hopefully slides or videos of the talks will be put up soon. I’d particularly like to revisit the talks of Adam Greenfield, August De Los Reyes (from Microsoft’s Surface team) and Russell Davies (who I enjoy reading in Wired UK these days). Those presentations were especially entertaining and insightful.

The general theme was “designing for tomorrow”, and what really came through was the idea of taking what we have learned from building online experiences and applying those approaches and user behaviours to the physical world and the urban landscape. Or as Davies put it, going from representing the world on the web to representing the web in the world. I’m totally on that wavelength, and have been keen on the idea of doing creative projects of a more tangible, physical nature. It’s all about the “post-digital”.

Good to catch up with some web peeps and have a few drinkies too – good times. I’d put it up there with SxSW Interactive as far as interest and inspiraton goes, so definitely money well spent.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Now that the dust has settled on the launch of TurnTubelist a bit, not to mention Mr Speaker’s awesome continual improvements, I thought I’d share some thoughts about a few possible next steps, at least as far as user experience goes. If you haven’t had a play, go there now.

None of these are set in stone, it’s more of a rough to-do list for improving TurnTubelist’s user interface:

• Improve playlist and playlist management
  The playlist controls (loading, info, delete) that appear on hover are a bit weak. Going to rejig the interactions there, they’re just a bit finicky to use and not obvious enough at the moment.
• Simplify playlist publishing
  The new publishing functionality is pretty cool, but the positioning needs tweaking.
• Increase video size
  We want to do more stuff with video later, but at the moment, it’s not the focus. BUT that doesn’t mean we should necessarily limit the video players to such a small size. If at all possible, we want to make them larger so you can use TurnTubelist as a cool way to watch your favourite YouTube vids.

• Improve messaging
  We want to improve the way message dialogues are presented when the app needs to tell the user something, such as an alert or error. There are still the odd Javascript alerts appearing too (…eek!)
• Make forms better (and bigger!)
  Tiny forms aren’t generally a lot of fun, so we want to find a place to put forms in such a way that lets us make them bigger.

In general, we want to use the available viewport space more effectively. I’m planning to use funky overlays that use the whole viewport, rather than being constrained to small containers and such.

User feedback has been really helpful, and the ease of which users can submit feedback is also something I want to improve. Always interested to hear people’s thoughts, so feel free to leave us comments using the feedback form on TurnTubelist, or of course here.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

UPDATE 2: TurnTubelist is now LIVE. Go now and play with it and let us know what you think. We are still tweaking it but we decided to get it up and out there. More details to come soon…

So Webjam 8 was the biggest and best so far by all accounts. There were brilliant presentations and competition was as tough as ever, but it was to Mr Speaker’s and my absolute delight to win first prize for TurnTubelist, a little pet project we’ve been mucking around with in our spare time. Props where due, Mr Speaker (aka Earle Castledine) presented brilliantly as always in his own inimitable style, not to mention his JavaScript prowess in turning a beer-idea into something well cool. When it’s available, I’ll also put up the vid of the presentation hereThe vid is now at the end of this post.

Mr Speaker at Webjam. Photo by Halans

TurnTubelist demo. Photo by Halans

Sneak-peek at TurnTubelist

TurnTubelist is a web application that lets you crossfade YouTube videos and build your own playlists for continual YouTube fun. It currently works entirely on the client-side using HTML, CSS and lots of JavaScript (mainly jQuery). It’s not up yet but we aim to put a beta up on the web really soon.

Earle has come up with some neat wizardry that hooks up to YouTube via their API, does some nice AJAX to search for YouTube vids without interrupting playback and stores your playlists in a cookie. Not to mention, the sliders, keyboard shortcuts and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I worked on the graphics, the user interaction design and got my hands dirty with some jQuery for a lot of the user interface bells and whistles. There’s still a lot of work and testing to be done, but I think it’s just about time to put it out there to get some feedback.

Stay tuned for when we launch the beta, this thing is a hell of a lot of fun to use if I do say so myself.

In the meantime here’s the presentation video:

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

This was very timely as the topic of data visualisation, though by no means a new concept, seems to be pretty hot right now and has certainly piqued my interest. I’ve previously linked to a favourite project, On the map, by Stefanie Posavec where the artist has mapped out patterns and structures found in selected literary works.

• Digg Stack – a real-time interactive visualisation of what is currently getting Dugg.
• Newsmap – a map of what’s in the news as listed in Google’s news aggregator. Nicely illustrates patterns and bias in the world’s news media.
• Gapminder World – an animated graph of world progress using various indicators such as income per person, GDP per capita, CO2 emissions, etc.

Elsewhere, Viget Inspire has written about interactive data visualisation and social networking, Smashing Magazine featured a big data visualisation round-up and Coolinfographics is an entire blog dedicated to the subject.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Adobe have launched the service with Buzzword, an online service that lets you share and collaboratively edit PDF-style documents (think Google docs but schmicker), and ConnectNow, a web-based video conferencing tool. There’s also some file sharing and online PDF creation tools there too. Like Photoshop Express, Adobe have again opted for the full Flash interface. I’ve gotta say, it really is impressive what you can do with Flash these days (other than animated splash pages). ConnectNow lets you see the host’s desktop and (with their permission) you can even steer, all the while chatting via text and video conference.

Take a look for yourself and see what you think.

More info at the Acrobat.com blog.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

This week SitePoint published an article entitled Design contests made me a better designer and tell their side of the story with the help of a designer who has done well for himself through contests. You’ll notice healthy doses of promotion for both 99Designs and said designer throughout the article.

In the end, the whole editorial angle on this article amounts to a load of spin and is quite telling of the defensive stance SitePoint has taken on the issue.

Other links

• NO!SPEC
• Spec work in the Internet age
• Andy Rutledge on re-design contests
• Zeldman: Don’t design on spec

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things