UX
RED SKY INTERACTIVE CREATIVE GUIDELINES
by Joel Hladecek
Redefine the “Standard” (or Excuse me, your “multimedia’s” showing! )
Make the concept, interface, art and animation support and drive the interactive experience- Don’t rely on the development programs to do it. Any fool can set a Director transition. Immerse the viewer in your world.
Also, don’t buy into industry interface conventions- most of them were developed by some data engineer named “Earl” with a pocket protector and bad hemorrhoids. Red Sky pushes harder than our competitors to raise the quality beyond what the rest of the industry settles for. In other words, as an artist working for Red Sky, don’t ever say “We did it that way at (my old company), it’s a standard”, or you will be tarred, feathered, cast out and publicly humiliated. SET the standard.
Example: Don’t settle for simple “up and down” button graphics just because it’s commonplace in most multimedia and/or easy to do. Consider creating smoother or more expressive buttons with more frames of animation to further support the metaphor. If memory is an issue- cut something else damn it.
(more…)IBM’s design philosophy and principles
Technical advancements are not creative CONCEPTS
Ongoing advances in technology always open new possibilities for creatives and developers. It’s a way of life in digital media.
But do those exciting new advances make us better or worse at what we do? How do they challenge our inventiveness and our range of skills?
I hate to report, but the most exciting technical advancements in our medium today are a trap of a sort that critically limits how creative most of us are. And many are blind to it.
In fact you could be doing significantly better work than others in your field if you just change your mindset. And I want to help you do that.
The only way I know to explain this is to tell you how I came to this place.
The Two Strings Theory
How Humanity’s Deepest Longing And Beauty Are Hidden In Technology
Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. It’s overwhelming. And while there are countless technical domains that I cannot speak about with any expertise, I can talk about one.
My domain is communication media. And it, like all the others, is advancing wildly, exponentially, and in seemingly unpredictable ways with no end imaginable.
However, what has taken me years to realize is that counter to popular assumption, there is nothing unpredictable about the progression of technical advancement in communucation media, and that the progression does indeed have an actual end-state, a technical state afterwhich no further technical development will be sought.
What honestly surprised me most of all was that this end-state revealed something core, and beautiful about humanity.