Closing the Gap between Design and Web Development – Bring Your Design to Life Interview with Chris Converse, Author, Web Designer and Principle at Chris Converse Design

“A sizable gap between exists between the Print Design and Web Development side of the house” says Chris Converse, principle at Chris Converse Design. In this six minute interview Chris shares his perspective on:

• Steps to close the gap
• How to improve workflow between design and Web development
• Ideas and principles for incorporating HTML and CSS for print designers
• A step by step best practice to render and optimize your design in multiple browsers
• About his book “Bring Your Web Design to Life: Creating Rich Media Websites with Adobe Creative Suite” available at PeachPit Press will be sure to please any experienced developer that works with traditional print and newbie Web designers

Chris in his own words:

In working with design companies and advertising agencies around the world, we at Codify Design Studio noticed a common gap in the web design workflow—a gap between designers and developers, and the creation of the HTML and CSS necessary to bring that design to life within a browser. This gap in the workflow results in aspects of the designer’s vision being unrealized in the final design represented in a web browser.

In my seminars, I ask designers to raise their hands if they would be willing to send only artwork files to their commercial printers, and let the prepress men do the layout work instead of them. No designer raises his or her hand. Just as print designers are responsible for bringing their designs to the press, web designers should be responsible to bring their designs to the browser.

To help designers transition to web design, I’ve written and designed Bring Your Web Design to Life: Creating Rich Media Websites with Adobe Creative Suite. and its available at Peachpit Press. This unique video series and reference guide starts form the very beginning and teaches designers step-by-step how to bring their web design to the browser. You’ll start with a design comp in Photoshop, click on the slicing tool, and get to work creating the assets we need for your web layout.

“We combine graphic design with the technologies necessary to achieve communication goals across various media.”

We designed and developed the Project Rome site to reflect aspects of the software’s interface, while also adhering to requests to integrate social media and online forum discussions into the design. The homepage also features an xml-driven interactive carousel highlighting various features of this new product.

About Chris Converse

Chris is graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in graphic design. He began his career in print, designing and preparing digital files for commercial offset printing. Chris has spent the last 15 years studying and applying design and interface principles to technology. His work spans various distribution media (CD-ROMs, web sites, and interactive DVDs) and applies many authoring media and techniques (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, image optimization, motion graphics, Flash, Director, Shockwave, sound engineering, digital video compression, PHP, and ASP). Chris has a passion for and a commitment to conceiving, creating, and delivering the best possible user experience, regardless of the medium.

More information about Chris can be found on his website at:
http://codifydesign.com

From Traditional Print to Web – Challenges, Lessons Learned and Advice: Interview Nora Abousteit, co-founder of BurdaStyle.com

BurdaStyle.com, is a DIY fashion community and a place for people to sew, with over 500,000 members where you can share PDF sewing patterns to print at home, techniques and projects.

In this four minute video Nora Abousteit, co-founder of BurdaStyle.com shares her experiences and advice with taking a traditional print publication online. Previously, Nora worked at a German publishing house in the staff of the owner – writing speeches, organizing workshops, and events. She is part of the founding team of the DLD conference.

She has been invited to share her experience at Picnic, FOO Camp, Parsons School of Design, Stream, the WEF Media Strategy Meeting, and the Menorca TechTalk.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, WWD, and Fast Company.

Previously, Nora worked at a German publishing house in the staff of the owner – writing speeches, organizing workshops, and events. She is part of the founding team of the DLD conference.

She has been invited to share her experience at Picnic, FOO Camp, Parsons School of Design, Stream, the WEF Media Strategy Meeting, and the Menorca TechTalk.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, WWD, and Fast Company.

Nora holds a degree in Middle East Studies, Political Science, and Philosophy from the American University in Cairo.

Demystifying HTML5 – Interview with Bruce Lawson, Author, Web standards advocate and evangelist at Opera

Suddenly, everyone’s talking about HTML5, and ready or not, you need to get acquainted with this powerful new development in web and application design says Bruce. Some of its new features are already being implemented by existing browsers, and much more is around the corner.

In this seven minute interview with Bruce Lawson, author, Web standards advocate and evangelist at Opera, Bruce shares his thoughts and perspectives on HTML5 as well as some takeaways from his HTML5 book for Web professionals.

A special shout out to Bruce Lawson for the interview and his time. Bruce is a down to earth guy and we would like to thank him publicly for all that he does to support Web professionals and the Web professional community at large.

Here’s an intro to his book as well as a few links to check out.

Written by developers who have been using the new language for the past year in their work, this book shows you how to start adapting the language now to realize its benefits on today’s browsers. Rather than being just an academic investigation, it concentrates on the practical—the problems HTML5 can solve for you right away.

By following the book’s hands-on HTML5 code examples you’ll learn:
•new semantics and structures to help your site become richer and more accessible
•how to apply the most important JavaScript APIs that are already implemented
•the uses of native multimedia for video and audio
•techniques for drawing lines, fills, gradients, images and text with canvas
•how to build more intelligent web forms
•implementation of new storage options and web databases
•how geolocation works with HTML5 in both web and mobile applications

All the code from this book (and more) is available at www.introducinghtml5.com

Beyond Usability: Emotion as the New User Experience with Kelly Goto, principal of gotomedia, LLC San Francisco, CA

Today’s connected experiences are no longer limited to a single laptop or mobile device. High expectations and dwindling patience have pushed customer demands to a new level.

In this fourteen minute interview with Kelly Goto, author, blogger and principal at GotoMedia based in San Francisco, CA, Kelly shares insights about “design ethnography” and tips to rethink your design and research approach and gain insight into the needs and desires of your customer in a truly contextual manner.

We also talk about the importance of understanding “Markup and Scripting” for Web designers and how members of her team are most effective as “left brain and right brain” Web professionals.

According to Wikipedia, Ethnography (from Greek ethnos = folk/people and grapho = to write) is “the science of contextualization” often used in the field of social sciences—particularly in anthropology, in some branches of sociology,[2] and in historical science—that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies and cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, an ethnos) through writing. In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a “field study” or a “case report,” both of which are used as common synonyms for “ethnography”.

Data collection methods

One of the most common methods for collecting data in an ethnographic study is direct, first-hand observation of daily participation. This can include participant observation. Another common method is interviewing, which may include conversation with different levels of form and can involve small talk to long interviews. A particular approach to transcribing interview data might be genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols. Questionnaires can be used to aid the discovery of local beliefs and perceptions and in the case of longitudinal research, where there is continuous long-term study of an area or site, they can act as valid instrument for measuring changes in the individuals or groups studied. Traditionally, the ethnographer focuses attention on a community, selecting knowledgeable informants who know well the activities of the community. These informants are typically asked to identify other informants who represent the community, often using chain sampling. This process is often effective in revealing common cultural common denominators connected to the topic being studied. Ethnography relies greatly on up-close, personal experience. Participation, rather than just observation, is one of the keys to this process. Ethnography is very useful in social research.
Differences across disciplines

The ethnographic method is used across a range of different disciplines, primarily by anthropologists but also frequently by sociologists. Cultural studies, economics, social work, education, ethnomusicology, folklore, geography, history, linguistics, communication studies, performance studies, advertising, psychology, usability and criminology are other fields which have made use of ethnography.

Cultural and social anthropology

Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronis?aw Malinowski, Ethnologische Excursion in Johore by famous Russian ethnographer and naturalist ( “The moon man”) (1875) Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Naven (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson or “The Lele of the Kasai” (1963) by Mary Douglas. Cultural and social anthropologists today place such a high value on actually doing ethnographic research that ethnology—the comparative synthesis of ethnographic information—is rarely the foundation for a career.[citation needed] The typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common.[8] Ethnographies are also sometimes called “case studies.”[9] Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities and its variations through ethnographic study based on fieldwork. An ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought. Classic examples are Carol Stack’s All Our Kin, Jean Briggs’ “Never in Anger”, Richard Lee’s “Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers,” Victor Turner’s “Forest of Symbols,” David Maybry-Lewis’ “Akew-Shavante Society,” E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s “The Nuer” and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Tristes Tropiques”. Iterations of ethnographic representations in the classic, modernist camp include Bartholomew Dean’s recent (2009) contribution, Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia.
Bronis?aw Malinowski among Trobriand tribe

A typical ethnography attempts to be holistic and typically follows an outline to include a brief history of the culture in question, an analysis of the physical geography or terrain inhabited by the people under study, including climate, and often including what biological anthropologists call habitat. Folk notions of botany and zoology are presented as ethnobotany and ethnozoology alongside references from the formal sciences. Material culture, technology and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure. Kinship and social structure (including age grading, peer groups, gender, voluntary associations, clans, moieties, and so forth, if they exist) are typically included. Languages spoken, dialects and the history of language change are another group of standard topics.Practices of childrearing, acculturation and emic views on personality and values usually follow after sections on social structure. Rites, rituals, and other evidence of religion have long been an interest and are sometimes central to ethnographies, especially when conducted in public where visiting anthropologists can see them.[15]

As ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and what Clifford Geertz termed the “ethos” of the culture. Clifford Geertz’s own fieldwork used elements of a phenomenological approach to fieldwork, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about a region, winks remained meaningful in the same way. In this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about “webs” instead of “outlines”[16] of culture.

Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing “bio-confessional” ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan). Later “reflexive” ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. “Experimental” ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun.
[edit] Sociology

Sociology is another field which prominently features ethnographies. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, with some well-known early examples being Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr.. Some of the influence for this can be traced to the anthropologist Lloyd Warner who was on the Chicago sociology faculty, and to Robert Park’s experience as a journalist. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. Other important ethnographies in the discipline of sociology include Pierre Bourdieu’s work on Algeria and France, Paul Willis’s Learning To Labour on working class youth, and the work of Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, Loic Wacquant on black America and Glimpses of Madrasa From Africa, 2010 Lai Olurode. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.
[edit] Communication studies

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely employed by communication scholars. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen’s analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar, working class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Speaking ‘Like a Man’ in Teamsterville, paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication.

Scholars of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communication behaviors, seeking to answer the “why” and “how come” questions of human communication. Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally or the way firemen communicate during “down time” at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, participate in and/or directly observe the particular social group being studied.

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere.

For today’s podcast, I reached out to Abbey Tosic, eHub Design and Usability Lead at 3M. Abbey is also a WOW member and the recipient of one of a number of Design and Development conference event scholarships that WOW provides to its members annually. In addition to sharing her thoughts on the challenges that she faces on the job, Abbey also shares her perspective on the value of attending and staying connected to the community. Abbey will also be podcasting live from the Future of Web Design Conference in London this year, May, 2011. We look forward to hearing from her and her perspective of the event and the take aways in future podcast.

From Abbey’s Blog:

I’m ecstatic to be attending The Future of Web Design Conference in London this year, May, 2011. I’ll be reviewing the conference for the World Organization of Webmasters. If you’re thinking about where you may want to go to learn more about Web Design conferences in your area, check out their detailed site. This site is the Mecca Library of Web Design Conferences and they post comments about what you can expect from each one. A valuable tool for your planning.

The Future of Web Design conference plans to cover the topics that matter most to today’s web designers and front end developers, including HTML5, CSS3, typography, wireframing, iphone and UX. They have dozens of professionals from around the globe coming in to give talks, and a full day workshop with 4 subject matters to chose from.

This year’s conference will take place at The Brewery in London. The Brewery has played host to many of London’s most iconic events. Nestled amongst the city’s high rise high flyers, the Brewery provides a welcome respite for guests seeking solace from today’s identikit venue options.

Style, workshops, smart folks talking about what’s up and coming… are you going? You should! If you are, come find me. We’ll talk mobile and user design over a strongbow at the pub. What could be better?

Visit their conference site, and be sure to sign up for their eNewsletter if you’re looking for more information on the schedule.

Visit their conference site, and be sure to sign up for their eNewsletter if you’re looking for more information on the schedule.

FOWD:

http://futureofwebdesign.com/london-2011/

Featured Speakers:

http://futureofwebdesign.com/london-2011/speakers/

Schedule and Workshops:

http://futureofwebdesign.com/london-2011/schedule/

Find a Web Design Conference that’s right for what you’re hoping to learn:

http://webdesignconference.org/locate

Startups should collaborate, Wozniak tells Business Leaders

Greetings WOW members and Web Professionals everywhere.

Whether you’re an enterprise level Web professional within the technical, creative or business side of the profession, working for yourself or small to medium sized Web companies, please take a minute consider some *really* sound advice regarding collaboration that came out of an IT event in California last week.

According to the Sacramento Bee, Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak brought his upbeat message about the power of innovation to Sacramento, CA last Friday, saying collaboration, not cutthroat competition, is a key to the growth of the region’s high-tech sector.

Speaking before 600 local business and community leaders at downtown’s Hyatt Regency Hotel, the high-tech pioneer urged local startups to build networks and alliances within their community.

“It’s not so much ‘Oh my gosh everybody is a threat,’ ” said Wozniak, the keynote speaker for the Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance’s annual Tech Index luncheon.

“Try to get more and more of the networking or threads … between your company and some other companies,” he said. “Even if you’re going in the same direction, make the good things happen for the world and you’ll all have huge successes.”

Wozniak’s message comes as Sacramento’s tech sector remains a niche player in a regional economy dominated by big government and real estate.

But in recent years, it’s become one of the area’s faster growing sectors.

SARTA said its technology index – which measures sales, employee growth and investment activity at 50 local tech companies – grew about 25 percent during the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2010.

During the third quarter of 2010, the companies that make up the index added a total of 100 new jobs, added Meg Arnold, SARTA’s CEO.

“This shows remarkable strength during a very difficult time,” she said. Some of that growth can be attributed to the type of collaboration advocated by Wozniak.

Examples include local software maker Synergex International Corp., which helped “incubate” a number of promising local startups at its Gold River headquarters in recent years.

In 2002, the company agreed to lease excess office space and provide administrative support to Altergy Freedom Power, in exchange for company stock. Altergy is now a leading manufacturer of low-cost fuel cells.

Glue Networks Inc., a locally based cloud networking firm, credited support from SARTA for introducing the company to investor groups that have recently raised $4.5 million for the company.

“You can create success in Sacramento,” said Jeff Gray, Glue Networks’ CEO. “The only thing we need to do is believe in ourselves.”

During his speech, Wozniak talked about how innovation at Apple helped usher in the revolution in personal computing.

Wozniak and Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 with the proceeds of the sales of Wozniak’s Hewlett-Packard calculator and Jobs’ Volkswagen bus. The duo initially tried to sell a low-cost personal computer to Wozniak’s then-employer Hewlett-Packard Co., but Wozniak said they were turned down five times.

After launching the Apple I computer, they received $50,000 in orders, for which they built the computers in 10 days with parts that they received on 30 days’ credit, he said.

Wozniak said experiences from Apple’s early days provide an important lesson for today’s startups.

“Look around for what you can do with the money you do have and … don’t think you can go to the moon on Day One,” he said.

State of the Web Today

For today’s podcast, I gave a shout out to Sandra Niehaus, VP User Experience and Creative Director of Closed Loop Marketing. I asked Sandra to provide her perspective on the state of the Web today. Specifically, I wanted to know the level of adoption of Web services within medium level organizations and the enterprise. I also wanted to know if today’s Web services falls within the responsibility of the IT department, marketing or both. Additionally, I wanted to know how the various departments work together and if any issues existed between the two.

Sandra heads up the company’s usability and conversion optimization projects. She is co-author of the book “Web Design for ROI” from New Riders Press, and regularly speaks on the topics of usability, design, and conversion at industry and business conferences. Sandra has contributed her expertise to projects for a wide range of companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, ReelzChannel, and Allstate.

Sandra’s creative and scientifically-inclined family fostered her early fascination with technology and the arts. After discovering computer programming in high school, she balanced college courses in computer science and electronics with orchestra, music theory, and composition.

Sandra’s music studies took her to France, Hungary, and the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music, resulting in a Master’s degree in music composition. She complemented these studies with graduate courses in business law, IT management, and, as the Internet emerged into public awareness, multiple web development languages.

She joined Closed Loop Marketing in 2004 after nearly a decade as an independent web consultant. She resides in Northern California, where she surfs, writes, practices mixed martial arts, and thinks about stuff.