Design: Carbon Pulse
 This summer I had the opportunity to work on a neat iPhone application, Carbon Pulse. It provides a tool set for estimating an individual's carbon footprint and improving it. This weekend it was approved by Apple and is now available for $2.99 in the iTunes store, with a portion of the proceeds going towards clean energy projects. I've added a page to my portfolio with a few screen shots. Labels: design
Design: New Portfolio
 After noodling around with somewhere in the range of six dozen different, half-finished designs for a personal portfolio, I came across Cargo. Billed as a 'personal publishing system', it is an elegantly simple content management system geared at displaying anything visual. I have it running at portfolio.nattarbox.com, so far so good. Labels: design, Links
Architecture: Marcio Kogan
Links: Honest insight into design at Google
Douglas Bowman recently posted an interesting account of his time spent as lead designer for Google, as part of a public goodbye letter to the company. Particularly fascinating to me is the commentary on how an ingrained engineering culture made adopting design leadership difficult: Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer. Google had plenty of designers on staff then, but most of them had backgrounds in CS or HCI. And none of them were in high-up, respected leadership positions. Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. Reading this makes me grateful for the emphasis and priority on design that Brightcove has had since the founding of the company. We have an extremely productive relationship between design and development, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to work any other way. Doug provides specifics on how an imbalance can cripple the design process: Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. While I believe that testing and empirical data are valuable in making informed design decisions, design by necessity is an intuitive practice. At some point the designer must be willing, and empowered, to be able to make decisions about the right design. I can remember Doug's talk at An Event Apart Boston, and how he went into fascinating detail on the implications of design on products that operate at Google's scale. Specific examples of how the layout for Google calendars had to evolve based on load time requirements, and how a few bytes of extraneous CSS could multiply to massive bandwidth overhead were terribly interesting to hear. Although his talk was very positive and framed these issues as inspiring design challenges, reading between the lines one could see where his current frustration arose. Labels: brightcove, design, Links
Project Launch: iPhone site for Sun
As part of our latest round of work for Sun Microsystems, the Brightcove professional services team put together an iPhone-specific interface for their video portal. This takes advantage of Brightcove's support for MPEG-4 video and multiple renditions, allowing Sun to add a video file specifically for iPhone viewing to each of their published videos.  Sun has deployed iPhones to a large number of their employees, so this should be of use to them. Accessing channelsun.sun.com from an iPhone or iPod Touch will take you directly to this project.  We are also ramping up an initiative at Brightcove to share more knowledge and information about the world of video with our customers, using a new site and forum combination for publishing articles and answering questions. I have planned two articles around designing for video. One will be about simple iPhone-specific websites using the above project as an example, and another will be a longer article about the difference between short- and long-form content, and how the experiences for both should be designed. Fun stuff! Labels: brightcove, design, internet, Video
Design Trends: Houndstooth
For the most part, I'm more than happy to leave all commentary on fashion to my better half, who maintains an excellent (and more frequently updated) blog for her consignment store, The Closet. As a visual person however, every now and then I'll pick up on a theme in product or fashion design, and start to see it everywhere. My first exposure to houndstooth was a You Must Create jacket that I picked up this past spring. I had never really paid any attention to the fabric before, but the pixel pattern nature of it immediately grabbed my interest, and I started noticing it on the people around me.  I'm not sure when exaggerating the size of the pattern became cool, but I seem to recall first noticing it on someone's jacket around the same time I got mine. It seemed like a clever idea, increasing the size of a pattern far beyond its normal state. This fall I've seen the same usage on nearly anything you could imagine, primarily coats, but also skirts, bags, shoes and even umbrellas.  Houndstooth in its standard size is a subtle texture, the product of a particular method for weaving fibers. Once Exaggerated it becomes a brand of its own, a simple aesthetic trick with no relation to how it was physically created. Multiplied across a large number of items worn by a large number of people, the trick is exposed and the trend becomes dated. I will happily enjoy my jacket and its time-tested pattern for years to come, but I imagine the enlarged houndstooth trend will find itself very short lived. Labels: design, fashion, trends
Project Launch: Showtime Video
The biggest project to date from our professional services team at Brightcove launched yesterday: the new and vastly improved Showtime Video. It was great to be able to contribute to such a high profile project, especially for a company that produces shows like Weeds and Dexter, easily the best stuff coming out of premium television channels at the moment. But what was really special about this particular project was the shift away from a large Flash player and towards a page based system utilizing just a single video player. This was something we had been eager to work on since the formation of the services team, and that we were able to implement it for a high profile partner like Showtime really made the project exciting. The benefits of this type of video experience are clear both in the usability for Showtime's viewers, and in the improved search engine visibility of their video content. I'm hoping this project will serve as an example for our other partners of what is possible with the Brightcove APIs. Labels: brightcove, design, Projects, Video
Brightcove Appreciation
Some icons
I had started working on these icons last year for a diagram about my home network that never got finished.  Labels: design
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