IDUX

I will be speaking at the Designer to Developer Workflow (D2W) Conference in Kansas City this July 14-16 near the Power & Light District. This is a great conference for those of us working on multi-disciplinary teams and who are often moving among design, prototypes, and code.

I will be teaching one all-day class and giving two presentations:

• On Thursday, July 14 I will be teaching an all-day seminar “Introduction to Adobe Fireworks CS5″  that takes students through a series of hands-on projects to introduce the most important features of Adobe Fireworks CS5 and how it can be used for wireframes, prototypes, visual design, and asset and image preparation and optimization.
• On Friday, July 15 from 1.00p to 2.00p I will be giving a presentation “Design 101 with Adobe Fireworks for Developers.”
• On Friday, July 15 from 4.40p to 5.40p I will be talking about prototyping in “It’s OK to Throw it Away: Prototypes as a Collaboration Tool.”

I will be at the conference for all three days, so come join me at one of the best conferences for designers and developers this summer!

I recently gave a presentation at the Adobe MAX 2010 conference and in Los Angeles on using Adobe Fireworks to export the initial CSS and HTML code which can then be easily modified in Dreamweaver. At the start of the session I spent about 10 minutes showing some of the most common issues people run into when setting up a Fireworks file for CSS export and how to fix them. I think I received more feedback about those 10 minutes than I did for the remainder of the session!

(more…)

One of the most common page elements we need when creating wireframes and comps are tables, and one of the most common questions about Fireworks is how to quickly and easily draw tables like this without having to draw and position many (even dozens or more) individual rectangles for each table cell:
When we create wireframes and comps we often are not yet certain how many rows or columns a table will need, and the row widths and column heights may vary throughout the table. If the tables are drawn with individual rectangles or even with individual intersecting lines, it can take much time, effort, and attention to detail to change the size of the overall table. Fireworks offers two autoshapes that can make creating tables a bit faster and easier.

(more…)

I had the pleasure of speaking about interaction design with more than 300 designers at the Adobe MAX 2010 conference in Los Angeles this week. It was a great presentation focused on five basic interaction design principles, and we looked at a few web sites to discuss how these principles should inform our design decisions and how they could affect the visitor experience:

• Consistency
  • BIG KID
• Visibility
  • Anthony Neil Dart
  • Diesel Clothing
• Learnability
  • Cristof Echard
• Predictability
  • Acura TSX
  • IKEA Kitchen
• Feedback
  • Slow Food Membership

If you attended the presentation, thanks! If you missed it, you can download a PDF here.

Interaction Design for Graphic Designers

The recording of the session is now available online via Adobe TV or you can watch it below.