Talent

Jan 27
0

1/25/2016

Posted by | Talent, Truly Wu | No Comments

My talent was Matthew Mullenweg. From the research and some of the interviews I watched, he exhibits himself, as one of the youngest successful entrepreneur with great fortitude and he truly appreciates the benefits of his achievement while continuing development with his initial determinations. This is quite admirable. He was born in Houston, Texas in 1984. It is interesting to know that before he dropped out of the University of Huston in 2004 to work at CNET (an American media website that publishes reviews, news, blogs, podcasts on technology and consumer electronics.), he was going to become a musician. He is now known as the co-founder of WordPress (an open source platform for blogging, which I have introduced in the previous post) and the CEO of Automattic, the investment and development company behind WordPress. An opportunity arose in 2003 when the development of b2/cafelog (a blogging site he was using at that time, to which he contributed some minor coding, such as typographic entitles and cleaner permalinks) had stopped improving. He and Mike Little (a British web developer) created WordPress together from the b2 codebase when he was only 19 years old. Like he said in one of his interviews, he wanted to build an open source platform to give people the freedom to speak without any cost. And of course as the company grew bigger he gained almost 70% of the financial support just from the consumers when they subscribed to anything on the site.

I appreciate how he views the world as a whole. When he first found out there was a guy in Japan who downloaded their site and probably spent hundreds of hours on coding every single script into Japanese, he was shocked. I think this was the first time he started believing in the possibilities of a global phenomenon. His conception of leadership is to lead by doing and that can become the culture of his team, therefore he holds himself to standards and takes responsibility for his actions. There are simple requirements in the company, which are to always be learning since technology renews basically every five years, be curious, and approach the work as a craft.

Matt Mullenweg’s Blog: http://ma.tt/

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullenweg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJwOAucWJJg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUCFRL43Zm4

GRPH325_Truly_Wu_Talent

Jan 27
0

January 27, 2016

Posted by | Emma deVries, Talent | No Comments

Jeffery Veen is an entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California.  He sees potential in fledgling ideas and turns those into business opportunities.  With Typekit he and his fellow co-founders Bryan Mason, Ryan Carver, and Greg Veen focused on the disconnect between the newly introduced @font-face which allowed web designers control over typefaces in web design and concerns about intellectual property.  Font designers wanted to retain control of their art and web designers needed a simplified licensing system to navigate.  Although the original Typekit team have worked together before on projects, an online business the size that would have an actual impact on the design community would take a significant amount of financing.

Veen became CEO of Typekit because of his a team oriented design.  His most successful endeavors are the projects he envisioned and developed with a team of strong designers and engineers.  While developing the idea of Typekit, Veen was also dividing his focus to his other two companies he helped found: Adaptive Path which went on to create Measure Map.  Adaptive Path was a user experience company that operated as both a consultant and design firm.  Measure Map was an analytical tool for blog users that was picked up by Google.  While at Google he reorganizing the Google analytics and was the leader of the UX team involved in Google App’s. Veen was part of many collaborations while trying to launch a new innovative concept.

His earliest contribution to the web was his help founding the first commercial web magazine, HotWired in 1994.  The magazine originated out of the same company that produced Wired, but HotWired was its own separate entity.  The following five years after the web magazine launched other sites branched off such as Wired News, Webmonkey, The Nietzen and Suck.  The business model was corporate sponsorship, which is seen today in the form of ad banners on websites.  Veen’s web development provides an interesting glimpse into what problems early web designers faced and how the internet landscape has so drastically changed.  With his extensive experience in web design Veen has authored two books HotWired Style and The Art and Science of Web Design.

When Typekit was purchased by Adobe in 2011, Veen became the Vice President or Products.  He was part of the process of adopting Adobe to a cloud based service.  In 2015 he moved on to work as a design partner at True Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early tech startups.  As a maker of things Veen is familiar with the process of designing for audiences and he has come full circle to now become the investor in original ideas.

“We invest in Founders of movements and products that capture the imagination.”

True Venture quote.

talent-03 talent-04 talent-05

 

Works Cited
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyveen
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/investors.html
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000799.html
http://thegreatdiscontent.com/interview/jeffrey-veen
https://trueventures.com/ 

Jan 27
0

1/25 Talent: Susan Weinschenk

Posted by | Michael Johnson, Talent | No Comments

susan

“Susan is an International Treasure to the User Experience/Human Factors profession. Through her writing and speaking, she is the most effective bridge between academic research and applied design in the world.”

~ LinkedIn Reviewer

Her clients call her ‘The Brain Lady.’

Forbes called her “a real Ph.D. level expert.”

To the rest of us in the design community, she’s known simply as Susan Weinschenk. Her accolades on right on the mark though— she graduated from Penn State University with a (you guessed it) Ph.D. in psychology. She specializes in brain science, behavioral science, and user experience design. What started out as one psychology student’s interest in technology developed into a lifetime of innovation in combining the fields of neuroscience and web design.

Her early career focused on studying the ways that people remember, think, and perceive (called cognitive psychology). Her goal was to understand this kind of everyday unconscious mental processing we all go though so she could use it to make technology easier to use. It was just an interest then, but one she would carry with her throughout her career.

Weinschenk recieved her undergraduate degree form Northeastern and then she went on to finish a Masters as well as a Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University. After graduating, she became a professor and taught psychology for several years at State University of New York (Oswego).

Today, she lives with her husband in Wisconsin, and her career focuses on using psychology to enhance user experiance. By studying what motivates and influences human behavior, Weinschenk is better able to understand not only what consumers need from products, but what companies need to do to attract more customers. Weinschenk is the founder of The Team W, a business wich consults and coaches individuals and companies on the design for websites, medical devices, software, television commercials, physical devices, experiences, and physical spaces to make them more usable, motivating, and persuasive.

She is a pioneer in behavior design, a field which is behavioral psychology applied to design (be is product design, web design, graphic design, etc) for greater consumer engagement. She has published five books on the subject, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, How to Get People to do Stuff, and Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?

For an article written by Weinschenk about her work with user experiance, click here.

For an interview with Weinschenk by Dominion Enterprises, click here.

Citations:

  1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanrosensteel/2013/01/28/why-online-video-is-vital-for-your-2013-content-marketing-objectives/#25f91bb929a3
  2. http://www.theteamw.com/#about
  3. https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanweinschenk
Jan 27
0

Lev Manovich Research

Posted by | Kelly Kretchmer, Talent | No Comments

About Lev

Lev Manovich is a 56 year old author, designer, and teacher that comes from Moscow, USSR. In Moscow he studied architecture, painting, semiotics, and computer science. After completing school in Moscow he moved to New York in 1981. While in New York he completed his M.A. in Experimental Psychology and Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies. He also managed to work as a 3D computer animator from 1984 to 1992 while continuing his education.

Manovich is an author of several books on New Media, his most well known one being The Language of New Media. It was one of the first books teaching this subject. New media refers to content that is accessible on any type of digital device and it allows interactive user feedback and participation.

After his career in 3D computer animation, Manovich became a professor in 1992. Manovich previously taught New Media at UCLA, but currently he teaches computer science at CUNY (City University of New York), and is a visiting professor at a European Graduate School in Switzerland. His teaching and research centers around cultural analytics, data visualization, social computing, big data and society, digital humanities, history and theory of media, software studies, and digital art history.

Manovich is important to design because of his teaching on New Media as well as because of his current projects. In 2007 he began the Software Studies Initiative research lab. It is a computational analysis of large collections of data, usually images or videos. He calls it cultural analytics, a term he created, as he creates visualizations of cultural datasets. His work for this initiative has been commissioned by Google, the NY Public Library, MoMA, and many others.

On his website he lists twelve total New Media projects that he has created. Some of his most recent work includes the Selfiecity data set and the On Broadway interface. Both use images and social media posts to paint portraits of cities and places from a unique perspective.

Selfiecity uses instagram pictures from across the world to create a database for certain cities. The individual cities can be compared based on things such as how many people posting in a city are male or female, and how many people of each city are posting selfies with a head tilt in that location on average. It also analyzes which gender in a certain city is posting more selfies, breaking the information down by age, and it shows the general mood of selfies in each city based on facial expressions.

On Broadway is another of Lev’s projects that looks at 13 miles of Broadway street in New York City. It collects data from Instagram posts, Twitter posts, Google street view images, Foursquare check-ins, and taxi pick-ups and drop-offs that center around the location. Using this data Manovich created a interactive timeline that gives a glimpse into the lives of millions of people in the Broadway area. The timeline is broken down by various things such as time of day and the actual location with the 13 mile stretch.

Overall Lev Manovich’s work is important in our ever evolving interconnected and interactive world. His current work is among leading data collectives that provide meaningful breakdowns of data coming from individual social media posts across the world.

Lev-Manovich-Talent3

Sources: www.manovich.net, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich

Jan 27
0

January 24

Posted by | Allison Sutton, Talent | No Comments

For my talent I had Samantha Warren, an interactive designer at Adobe, San Francisco. Samantha grew up being interested in traditional art making forms, but started to enjoy design after obtaining her BFA. She learned CSS + HMTL (like us!!) when she had her first job as a “web developer”. Now she has become one of the more well-known names in design, most notably for sharing her design process using Style Tiles. She has been featured on .net magazine and has worked for clients such as National Geographic and Ford Motors. She is a type junkie, so most of her design feature beautiful typographic forms. The majority of her work is focused around interactivity.

Check her out on Dribble: Samantha!

Here is a larger version of my talent page: StyleTiles3_Sutton

StyleTiles3_Sutton

 

 

Jan 27
0

1-25-16

Posted by | Emily Phillips, Talent | No Comments

My Talent is Jongmin Kim, an amazing interaction designer. I was surprised to have never come across him before now because his style and type of design (minimalism, clean, geometric) are very my type. He does the kind of things that I would love to do one day: combining design with technology to create interactive and responsive experiences. His website is amazing, every little detail of it was something unique and really brings the user into his world. He uses the technology we have (HTML5, JS, CSS) to create such powerful and sleek interactive designs, yet his user interface is so simple that anyone can enjoy the project with ease.

Site.

person

Jan 27
0

Richard Rutter

Posted by | Aubrey Samson, Talent | No Comments

Reading

Today we read about inheritance, and how using this concept (to achieve coherence in a design) can save us a lot of time and effort. It kind of goes with the whole family metaphor, certain tags will inheret properties of its ancestor. This can sometimes get you into trouble tho, and may not always work for your design. Use wisely!

Talent

Typography is one of the most important elements on the web, it needs to be clear, readable, and approached differently than print typography. We talked about a couple of differences in between print typography and web typography in class. Richard Rutter, the talent assigned to me, is obsessed with the thought of typography, even more specifically, web typography. He is one of the pioneers of website design, and really understands what factors make successful web type. During his career, he has developed true methods to understanding and achieving better web typography, and he wants to share it with the world. He is the co-founder of a company called “Clearleft” which specializes in user experience and responsive design, using digital strategy and planning to consult and innovate groundbreaking products for their clients.

GRPH325_Samson_Aubrey_RichardRutter

See the website here

Jan 27
0

1.25.16

Posted by | Leah Urbank, Talent | No Comments

Reading

Style Inheritance

This blissfully short chapter covered style inheritance, where things are headed down from the parent tag to the nested child tag. In all honesty, it really is makes sense. It’s seems pretty clear what would be handed down and what wouldn’t be, although it’s nice that they have a list of what gets passed down and what doesn’t.

Ian Adelman

Be assaulted with type at his website, here.

GRPH325_Urbank_Leah_TalentDefinition

Jan 26
0

1/25/16

Posted by | Olivia, Talent | No Comments

Fred Dust is a partner at IDEO, and works with leaders and agents to help reach the potential of innovation is businesses. He serves on the IDEO’s Board of Directors and has been employed with IDEO since March of 2000. While he works at IDEO, he is a speaker, advisor, and lecturer

Many of skills include: Experience Design, Strategy, Design Thinking, Art Direction, Product Design, Design Strategy, Branding Identity, Sustainable Design, Service Design and the list goes on. Fred got his Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from Reed College and a master’s in architecture from the School of Environmental Design at UC Berkely.

While doing research on Fred Dust, I really found it interesting how he started out in his school with Architecture. Before reading more about him and on design thinking, I wouldn’t have even thought about architecture as a career that uses design thinking. But the more I read, the more I realized when you are working on designing a building, you have to really think about how the way the design of the building is going to create interaction with its daily audience. In an interview written by Pualette Beete, Fred only practiced architecture for a short time before he went to IDEO because he felt that he could take the idea of design and stretch it further- which is a complete inspiration. Whether it was architecture or working at design firm, design thinking was being used to gain innovation.

I really liked this quote from Fred – “To be honest, it’s heartening. Because what it says to me is that there [are] many new ways of doing things but the reality is there may be kind of baseline things as humans that we actually are always going to be seeking, just maybe using new tools to get there. I find it encouraging.”

sources: www.ideo.com

https://www.arts.gov/NEARTS/2011v4-what-innovation/fred-dust

FRED DUST