DigiKev is Web design consultant Kevin Rapley who researches, plans, designs, builds and optimises Web sites using industry best practices, experience, an eye for design and importantly, common sense.
DigiKev builds Web sites with the visitors journey through a Web site in mind, ensuring a good experience.
Whilst searching the new features available in Windows 7 I happened across BumpTop, showcased at the IBM sponsored TED conference. It works in a Windows 7 environment so I downloaded the free version to see whether it a gimmick or a more transient way to organise workspaces. What attracted me to BumpTop was not the 3D environment, but the way items on the desktop are given emphasis and hierarchy through making them small or large. They may also be grouped into piles too just like stacking sheets of paper on a desk. This doesn’t mean you then have to destroy piles of items to retrieve files; piles can be fanned out, flipped through like a book or displayed individually within a container whilst choosing a file. As well as being able to delete items to the trash can, in BumpTop files can be screwed up into balls and thrown about the space. Whether I will use this feature much is to be seen. It may provide a secondary way to store those small notepad files that I may need to keep but not too certain about yet.
At work there are a couple of projects being run in an Agile project development process. This appears to be geared towards assisting the developers in achieving the best results. I say appears to be as I am new to Agile and its processes. I haven’t had the opportunity yet to experience an Agile team first hand but have caught snippets from our UX design meetings. I have also been reading about Agile and SCRUM on Wikipedia and some members of my team have sent across useful documents and blog posts of how UX fits into an Agile environment.
Thumbing through the UK version of WIRED magazine the other day made me realise that online there is very little experimentation or use of quirky or edgy layouts like we see in print. What I mean by this is most layouts online tend to be safe. They express a certain conservative nature with uniformed gutter sizes and content columns of same or similar width. They don’t evoke any emotion. Reading WIRED provokes emotion; each article has its own identity and style related to the content. One column may be far slimmer than the next with a gutter between them that you could drive a tank through.
DigiKev is Web design consultant Kevin Rapley who researches, plans, designs, builds and optimises Web sites using industry best practices, experience, an eye for design and importantly, common sense.
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