Along with the interface, another of my big concerns is attempting to get away from ugly and outdated charts and graphs. Just a little thought into the presentation of data can go a long way (so can using these great plugins!).
Info Vis
Protovis
JQuery Sparklines
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Best.Brushes.Evar.
While I attempt to play catch up with the blog and continue posting the resources I will be using, I think I would be remiss if I did not mention the best set of Tech Photoshop brushes by z-design.
I absolutely love the style of these brushes and will make a huge impact on the final product in a great way. If you're interested in this kind of design at all, go pick them up immediately.
I absolutely love the style of these brushes and will make a huge impact on the final product in a great way. If you're interested in this kind of design at all, go pick them up immediately.
Giants
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -Issac Newton
If there's one thing that has inspired me more than anything, it's the interfaces that I've witnessed throughout the years on the big screen. While most of the visuals are pre-rendered animations and the actors are doing little more than pretending to type the words appearing on screen, the interfaces in the likes of Iron Man 2 and The Island are nothing less than works of art. These are the designers from whom I'm drawing massive amounts of inspiration and would love to produce something of that kind of quality. (This is just a short list and would love links to other sources if anyone knows of them)
Prolouge (Iron Man series, Sherlock Holmes, Tropic Thunder)
Mark Coleran (Bourne Trilogy, The Island, Mission Impossible 3)
MK12 (Quantum of Solace)
If there's one thing that has inspired me more than anything, it's the interfaces that I've witnessed throughout the years on the big screen. While most of the visuals are pre-rendered animations and the actors are doing little more than pretending to type the words appearing on screen, the interfaces in the likes of Iron Man 2 and The Island are nothing less than works of art. These are the designers from whom I'm drawing massive amounts of inspiration and would love to produce something of that kind of quality. (This is just a short list and would love links to other sources if anyone knows of them)
Prolouge (Iron Man series, Sherlock Holmes, Tropic Thunder)
Mark Coleran (Bourne Trilogy, The Island, Mission Impossible 3)
MK12 (Quantum of Solace)
font: "Comic Sans ";
“Faces of type are like men’s faces. They have their own expression; their complexion and peculiar twists and turns of line identify them immediately to friends, to whom each is full of identity.” - J.L. Frazier
One of the most important design considerations one can make is the decision about what kind of font to use. In the NextStep project, I will be focusing on making sure that type will be as readable and flexible as possible. Even through using text substitution services (like Cufon), the ability to generate high resolution text dynamically will go a long way to ensure that a consistent visual style is maintained throughout the entire process. One phrase that I've tried to hang my hat on since the inception of the project is "Content is King." Everything in an interface should be about how to better present the data and help draw relationships between the data. As important as colors and layout are, they should always be destined to play second fiddle to the information you're displaying on screen.
That being said, the fonts I have decided to start off with:
Jaune d'oeuf
Tuffy
Phat Otto
Lindau
(Upon closer inspection, Tuffy seems to be the only GNU/Public Domain one of the bunch... :( )
One of the most important design considerations one can make is the decision about what kind of font to use. In the NextStep project, I will be focusing on making sure that type will be as readable and flexible as possible. Even through using text substitution services (like Cufon), the ability to generate high resolution text dynamically will go a long way to ensure that a consistent visual style is maintained throughout the entire process. One phrase that I've tried to hang my hat on since the inception of the project is "Content is King." Everything in an interface should be about how to better present the data and help draw relationships between the data. As important as colors and layout are, they should always be destined to play second fiddle to the information you're displaying on screen.
That being said, the fonts I have decided to start off with:
Jaune d'oeuf
Tuffy
Phat Otto
Lindau
(Upon closer inspection, Tuffy seems to be the only GNU/Public Domain one of the bunch... :( )
echo 'Hello World';
“The future is always beginning now.” - Mark Strand
My name is Ryan Bailey and I am an interface designer at McAfee Labs in Alpharetta. I work mainly in PHP and JQuery and dabble around with some other languages. I have several years of creative experience in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I've been making websites for over 10 years and really, really love my job.
Now that that's out of the way, I can finally get to what this project is about. The NextStep Interface is my blog about my 20% work here at McAfee. Many people are familiar with the Google 20% timesplit in which employees are allowed to work on their own projects and, as a result, have received multiple great ideas from employees working on side projects. My "20%" that my manager, Anthony has so graciously allowed me to undertake will be to work on a brand new interface, which I have named the NextStep Interface Project.
Here at McAfee Labs we focus mainly on data mining and data visualization, that is, taking massive amounts of raw data and making logical and useful. In the information age that we live in, there is no shortage of data, yet a surprising lack of useful conclusions that can be gleaned from it. So working on making data useful and beautiful is what I attempt to accomplish on a daily basis.
The NextStep project specifically is aimed at answering the simple question of, "Where's my flying car?" So often when watching movies or TV shows, the hero will interact with their computer in mind blowing ways that seem so foreign to the ways that we interact with data on a daily basis (either through spreadsheet or db result lists). I believe I can help take a step in the right direction (more on this later).
By no means do I think I'm doing anything groundbreaking or revolutionary. I'll be using this blog as mainly an area to write my thoughts of how the project is going, cool links, and information to some of the guys and girls who really are the revolutionaries. I think it will be pretty interesting to see how far things go.
My name is Ryan Bailey and I am an interface designer at McAfee Labs in Alpharetta. I work mainly in PHP and JQuery and dabble around with some other languages. I have several years of creative experience in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I've been making websites for over 10 years and really, really love my job.
Now that that's out of the way, I can finally get to what this project is about. The NextStep Interface is my blog about my 20% work here at McAfee. Many people are familiar with the Google 20% timesplit in which employees are allowed to work on their own projects and, as a result, have received multiple great ideas from employees working on side projects. My "20%" that my manager, Anthony has so graciously allowed me to undertake will be to work on a brand new interface, which I have named the NextStep Interface Project.
Here at McAfee Labs we focus mainly on data mining and data visualization, that is, taking massive amounts of raw data and making logical and useful. In the information age that we live in, there is no shortage of data, yet a surprising lack of useful conclusions that can be gleaned from it. So working on making data useful and beautiful is what I attempt to accomplish on a daily basis.
The NextStep project specifically is aimed at answering the simple question of, "Where's my flying car?" So often when watching movies or TV shows, the hero will interact with their computer in mind blowing ways that seem so foreign to the ways that we interact with data on a daily basis (either through spreadsheet or db result lists). I believe I can help take a step in the right direction (more on this later).
By no means do I think I'm doing anything groundbreaking or revolutionary. I'll be using this blog as mainly an area to write my thoughts of how the project is going, cool links, and information to some of the guys and girls who really are the revolutionaries. I think it will be pretty interesting to see how far things go.
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