Feb 25

Ignite Cleveland 2009

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This coming weekend on February 28th, Josh Walsh will be speaking at Ignite Cleveland.   The event will be hosted at Lean Dog Software, a good friend of D-I who has their office on a barge overlooking a submarine… pretty cool venue.

What Is Ignite?

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Could you keep up? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.
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Feb 18

Photoshop Kung-Fu: Evenly spaced columns and rows

When mocking up a web design or creative of some kind I often find myself dividing areas into equal spaced rows or columns.   This is a simple task when dividing into 2 parts, since your guides snap to the center of a selected object.  Dividing into 3′s is a little more difficult.  Dividing into 4′s isn’t too bad since you can just divide by 2, then subsequently split the divisions by 2.  There’s got to be a better way, and alas… there is.

Note: This applies to Photoshop CS2.  There may be a more prominent way to do this in newer versions.

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Feb 17

Why You Should Outsource Usability Testing

Small companies  should consider outsourcing their usability testing instead of doing it in-house.  On the surface, it makes perfect sense to have a designer/developer who has a deep understanding of the project be in charge of usability testing, but in fact this can cause serious problems.

A developer will always look at the product you are testing from the inside out.  They have internalized the entire product and know it inside and out.  This has negative connotations on the evaluation of a test.

It may be appealing to delegate usability testing to a graphic designer on the project, but this also has issues.  Artists minds are naturally focuses on aesthetics and many usability problems arise from confusing visual elements.

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