For the past 3 years, I’ve been trying to connect with other web and interactive designers in Eugene. I did not have much success in finding people who were into that sort of thing. I would meet developers and artists but I couldn’t find designers who cared about user experience and the craft of the things we build. I was looking for the type of designer who obsessed about details and was proud of their work. The design communities in Portland, Austin, and New York, and the work that came out of that active, creative environment made me jealous. I considered moving to one those towns but a timely job offer kept me in Eugene.

After several months of toying with the idea of organizing something to get designers together, I joined forces with James Madson to co-organize Eugene Interactive. After meeting James, I also met several Eugene designers who share our design interests and love the craft. The problem isn’t that Eugene lacks talented designers but that there has never been a community to bring them together. I’m hoping Eugene IXD will help with that.

We had our first meeting last week and I’m very happy with the way it turned out. We also learned some lessons for future meetings. I’m very excited about this group and what we can offer each other and the possibilities for future collaboration. This may be the first step to put Eugene designers on the map.

Download

Here’s my first shot:

The idea was simple: I needed to get rid of one thing every day. Most of the items where old books or tools that have been collecting dust but that I could donate or even sell in some cases. The result of this experiment was less stuff and more room for me. Of course, this was also an opportunity to design an interactive infograph to track these items and to play with some CSS and Javascript. I built a simple responsive layout with a timeline and some of the numbers from this project. I also used this as an opportunity to play with LESS and Highcharts.

You may be thinking “I already know how to export for the web using Photoshop, why use yet another tool?” Unfortunately, Photoshop does just an OK job at compressing images for the web and it doesn’t fully optimize them. ImageOptim finishes the job and makes sure images are fully optimized. With the increase of mobile device browsing it’s extremely important that our websites are as lean as possible and image optimization is a good start.

Using ImageOptim is very simple. First save for the web using your favorite image editing tool; in my case I use Photoshop.

Then all you need to do is open ImageOptim and drag the image from Finder to compress it. That’s it. Your image has been optimized. Also, you can make sure it has been completely optimized by clicking the “Again” button.

An even easier way to use ImageOptim is by using Finder’s toolbar. To do this go to your Applications folder and drag ImageOptim to your Finder’s toolbar.

You’ll notice the ImageOptime icon is now on the toolbar. Now you just need to drag the image from Finder to this shortcut.

If you would like to know more about how this tool and PNG compression work I would highly recommend reading this post by ImageOptim’s developer Kornel Lesi?ski.

I’ve also been noticing how bigger corporations, not just startups, seem to be giving design more attention. This is a great opportunity for us designers to show our value as more than just pixel pushers.

Porter wonders about the precursor for this is. I would say Apple is the obvious answer but I would also guess it’s because we’ve reached a point where just making something isn’t enough. With so many apps and services out there design and UX are key differentiators.

I talked with many people who were building startups and their top priority was getting great designers on board. But they didn’t just want good designers. They wanted designer co-founders, people who could help them from day 1 and be invested in the company. This is a change from the ever-present search for technical co-founders…designer co-founders are in demand as well. This makes sense. In a sea of competition…the survivors will be the ones who can communicate most clearly and provide value most quickly. And who specializes in those things more than designers?

This is another example of why a good idea without good implementation is nothing. It’s just an idea and not a product.

Goodbye Wave. It was good to meet you.

Dear Wavers,
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012. If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012. For more details, please see our help center. Yours sincerely, The Wave Team

I personally have to deal with this issue almost on a daily basis and have tried different methods with no luck. A few months ago I developed Compy, a simple system that lets me share the comp as an image inside a website. I like this method because I know the client will be opening the comp in a web browser and I don’t have to worry about zooming or weird scrolling.

How it works

Using Compy is relatively simple. You will need a Dropbox account or, if you are a more advanced user, a web server. All you need to do is create a public folder in Dropbox (or your server) and drop the contents of the latest release of Compy.

Export your jpg comp to this folder and rename the html file to the exact same name as the image. For example, if you have the file home-page.jpg, just change the name of the html file to home-page.html.

That’s it. No code needed.

Now you can get the public link from Dropbox and send that to your client. You can also use Compy with multiple images by duplicating the html file and renaming it after the corresponding jpgs. The great thing about Compy is that it will automatically adjust the height of the page it displays based on the image so you don’t have to deal with code.

Disclaimer: I’m making Compy public because I think it could help other designers with my same problem. The tool works great for me and I’ve tested it in most modern browsers (including IE6-IE8) with no issues. However, Compy is still in beta and it’s distributed “as is”, with no warranties of any kind. There’s a lot of room for improvement and I’ll be making updates and improvements as soon as I can.

You can go to the Github repository and download the latest version of Compy.