Tina pointed to NY Magazine's short article on the architect/designers, Massimo and Lella Vignelli. There's a great quote in there that speaks about how the Vignellis arrive at solutions to design problems, and is certainly appropriate to the work we do while working on user experiences for the web.
It’s a matter of discipline, and it starts by looking at the problem and collecting all the available information about it. If you understand the problem, you have the solution. It’s really more about logic than imagination.
(via swissmiss)
I sent feedback to OmniGroup requesting that they add jitter/squiggle line stroke styles to the next release of OmniGraffle. Omni responded that they will add this request to an existing request for hand-drawn effects, but that feature requests usually make it to the product development team when there is enough clamoring for the feature. So if this is something you're interested in, send them feedback via their support page (scroll to bottom of page for email address.
Here's the feature request I sent:
I've been hearing a lot of people asking
for some way to make drawings created in OmniGraffle appear to be have
an unfinished look by simulating hand-drawn lines. A lot of people get
by doing squiggly lines in CAD or other drawing programs. But we've
also seen people use Visio to do this.What would be ideal for Graffle is if we could have a stroke option
that simulates squiggly or jitter line effects in a future release.
Please consider this a vote from the many of us who are asking how to
do this on the design mailing lists.
I've updated the OmniGraffle Wireframe stencils. In this release the following elements have been added or updated:
* New callout styles added
* New forms elements added: contextual help, captcha
* Tabs and controls added
* Some commonly used icons have been added
I think I will have more of the icons to come, and may eventually separate the icons from the wireframe stencil if there ends up being too many. Since the set is small for now, I'm keeping it in this document.
All drawn in OmniGraffle. No bitmaps. I'll release a stencil for these soon, to accompany the Wireframe Shapes stencil.
My OmniGraffle Web Design Template has been updated. The master canvases now use the file name to populate the document title and the canvas name to populate the canvas title. This eliminate the need to manually edit these page elements in the master canvases.
To make this work, title your files without extensions and format exactly as you want it to appear in the document, e.g. save as "X Project v. 1.0" rather than "X_Project_v1-0.graffle". Mac OS X should understand the file name and association, but you may have issues around these file naming schemes depending on the file server environment you're working with.
Lou announces the UX Zeitgeist, an excellent aggregator of recommendations and pointers to published work from user experience thought leaders. Excellent stuff, and I've already benefited from finding new literature here.