Blog

Have been busy getting settled on the West coast, so starting back up again and a very short list of links.

• Starter League Want to be the Unicorn? Do it the now. Learn how to code, design, & ship web apps from the pros.
• Experience Maps: Understanding Cross-Channel Experiences For Gamers / nForm / Blog Gene Smith's Experience Maps example.
• Anatomy of an Experience Map From Chris Risdon's article on Adaptive Path, that I missed.
• daneden/Baseline.js Baseline.js is a simple jQuery plugin for restoring baselines thrown off by odd image sizes.
• Learnable Programming Bret Victor on designing a programming system for understanding programs.

I'm spending my final full week as a Brooklynite and feeling the bitter sweet pain of saying goodbye, while looking hopefully towards the next chapter of my life. After 19 years as a New Yorker, I'm heading with my family to live in Marin County, CA.

New York is a city that I've loved from childhood, and the only place I could see myself living as a young adult. With my head full of every cliché dream, I believed it was the place I needed to live to find myself. When I moved here I thought I would work in the art world, where I spent the first few years hustling, but I discovered my path was to lead elsewhere. I've thrived in this inspiring city for a long time, and drew energy from this place. It's helped make me who I am today.

I spent a short time in the first few years living in Manhattan at Times Square and the East Village. The rest of my days were spent primarily in Brooklyn at Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Sunset Park, and in the last 9 years, Park Slope. If you know me, you know I've considered myself a Brooklynite more than a New Yorker. There's an energy, creativity, diversity, and much more relaxed sense of being I've found in Brooklyn that is wonderful. But nothing lasts, and although I thought I'd live the rest of my days residing in Brooklyn, the pull to the outdoors became too strong. With 2 sons that need to bust out, break free from living in boxes, and restraining their boyish need to bounce and scream to be quiet for neighbors, the timing just feels right.

Many of the designers I've come to know, respect and admire have been my neighbors here. This town introduced me to some incredibly smart people who have influenced me, from the original group of IAs that met in Victor Lombardi's IA Salon over 10 years ago, to the more recent impromptu gatherings Lou Rosenfeld, Yoni Knoll, and I have put together with our BK/UX peeps. I've had a good run, and I've met so many incredible people here who I hope to never lose as friends. I hope none of you hold it against me for leaving to the left coast, and I thank you for your friendship.

So it's with a little sadness that I say goodbye to New York, and with hopeful anticipation that I'm welcomed to the Bay Area. If you're in San Francisco, know that I plan to spend a lot of time exploring in your beautiful city, and that I'm always looking for like-minded UXers to have coffee with. I've owed a few people a coffee date for years now.

See you on the other side.

• The Cooper Journal: The best interface is no interface
• Matt Swanson - Move your feet The secret to improving your running—you have to start moving your feet. AKA just do it and start now.
• Responsive Web Above The Fold | CSS-Tricks Great article about taking vertical placement into consideration when doing responsive design, with techniques for detecting height and adjusting vertical space.
• Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery Great discovery and "right design" article in ALA. "We’ve long accepted that for a product to be useful, it needs to have acceptable levels of both utility (“whether it provides the features you need”) and usability (“how easy & pleasant these features are to use”). Yet far too often, we seem to ignore the former in favor of the latter, ending up with lots of easy and pleasant applications that have no reason to exist."
• Revolutionary User Interfaces Great timeline with key user interface designs in history. Uses Timeline JS.
• The f/60 Lens Kitchen Timer I use a pomodoro occasionally as my 25 minute timer when I need to get it done. I like the red, but maybe a fake f/60 lens would look better.
• 28 Days Later Font | dafont.com Nothing says 2012 like an end of days, virus inspired font.
• puxxle: Pixel art decals My son should be making these.
• Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in bullet point format Summarized as bullet point lists, but you should read it for real.
• The New Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine | Evernote Blogcast This could get me to start using Evernote again and carry a Moleskine rather than make my own.
• More Words In case you ever need to do something like find more words that end in "okes" for instance.
• Fbootstrapp by Clemens Krack, based on Bootstrap, from Twitter Facebook iFrame App templates for Twitter Bootstrap