Corvus Consulting

I’d usually post this to the CorvusTweets twitter stream, but it’s notable enough to bring to a post. Cameron Lee of Vancouver’s LiFT Studios has a post that reminds us of the irreplaceable experience of hand-made items in a world of copied-and-pasted distractions:

Simple pencil, chalk and biro pen drawings are now common place in galleries around the world. These artists are taking ‘the basics’ to whole new heights. There are so many examples of amazing art made with the simplest of tools. here are just a few samples from some amazing artists that you should check out.

Quietly dropped at the end of the post, Cam includes his own hand-made gift to the digital world: the beautiful Sketch-Block font, free to download.

Also in the vein of hand-made and artful works, I recently spotted one of Rachel Ashe’s Altered Book pieces on @somisguided’s desk in our office. I wasn’t aware of these before, and found it absorbing in a way that can’t be conveyed on a screen. Lest you believe that hand-made art is on the decline, Cam and Rachel are providing ample evidence to the contrary.

Joe Clark has a near-perfect short post that rejects the grandiose wailing of bloggers falling apart over the iPad. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but this is where he hits the bulls-eye:

…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

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I knew it was coming for a couple weeks, but this tweet from @somisguided was one I’d been looking forward to:

Totally and utterly thrilled to launch the Namaste Publishing website: http://ow.ly/1kJDB

Seeing any work go live is a satisfying moment, and with the new Namaste Publishing site that is especially so for three reasons:

• the client vision
• the team I worked with
• the information architecture and experience design challenges in meeting the vision with the audience and subject matter

With all that going on, this project deserves a full writeup.

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This year marks my seventh as an independent consultant, and to mark the milestone I first toasted with a fancy beer, and then commissioned an update to the site’s theme. I think every product should have a story, and since I see my site as a product (as well as a sandbox), looking back at how I got here seems appropriate.

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The proverbial They are often heard to say that a hallmark of good design is that it’s obvious.

It’s hard to argue that understanding what something does should not be as immediate and easy as possible. There are exceptions, such as in games where exploration and challenge happen in part by decrypting the utility and purpose of the unfamiliar.

Embracing that maxim, however, can lead us to dismiss the reasoning behind a design choice when the need itself isn’t immediately obvious. I learned just that by taking a close look at the recent update to the Apple Remote and its puzzling addition of a Play/Pause button.

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If email were an animal it would have to be a shark: it’s been around almost forever in internet time, its basic design all but unchanged by time and circumstance. Email’s success is impressive: it’s an almost universally understood concept; it was the nascent internet’s first killer app; it’s an underpinning of identity in (some) new and legacy web applications.

Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.

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Last week Garrett Murray’s commentary on the state reviewing culture on the iTunes App Store reviews circulated through the the blogaverse, catching my eye by way of Lachlan’s Pool Room.

Garrett’s application, Ego (iTunes Link), lets iPhone users check in on their Google Analytics stats on the go. A snafu with Analytics caused his app to be blocked, but in true web spirit Google and Garrett worked out the problem, and an update to Ego was submitted into the App Store’s approval process, which takes about a week.

Meanwhile, on the App Store and Get Satisfaction, Ego customers reacted badly, giving rise to the Garrett’s two core grievances on how commenting on the App Store and elsewhere works:

• Reviewers can be quick to criticize and don’t read every detail before doing so.
• The App Store doesn’t give developers a way to respond to specific comments, or comments in general.

These are fair criticisms, one rooted in problematic human-computer expectations (and if we acronymize that to HCE, we can go on speaking tour), and the other in the design of the interface at the App Store. Along with people commenting on Ego’s problem, we have Google Analytics and the App Store not coming off very well. But there’s a fourth leg in this interaction dance, which is how the Ego app itself handled the unexpected use case of being blocked by Google. Read more »