Say Yeah!

Kipu for your phone!

Lee Dale — 2010-06-25 07:08:00.0

Earlier this week we put up some I Need Sugar wallpaper to help combat the general lameness of Apple's built in lock screen options and the busy home screen wallpapers that make your icons difficult to see. Well, we're super excited now to offer Kipu wallpapers which are not only cute as can be, but the home screen wallpaper is so springtime it'll make your icons want to dance!

Download lock screen.

Download home screen.

How they look in action:

Download lock screen.

Download home screen.

Our Value Pricing deck from last week's NXNE Interactive panel.

Lee Dale — 2010-06-23 07:46:00.0

Last week we had the pleasure of joining Sam Ladner, Jon Lax and our moderator Simon Conlin on a NXNE panel discussion about value pricing. Abolish The Hourly was a well attended session and, from on stage, appeared to be capture the audience. I suppose any time you challenge the status quo, people take notice. But this topic is really nothing new, though it may be somewhat foreign to the creative services industry.

To help with this introduction, Sam laid some groundwork around the history of the hourly and time tracking. I followed with the presentation you see below as an intro for freelancers and small businesses. Jon riffed on these ideas and brought some further insight based around his agency experience and working with US customers.

View the slide deck on SlideShare.

We're hoping to continue the conversation online and at future conferences. And I believe one area where we'll need to expand the discussion is on the value this model brings to the customer. Jon touched on this with some examples, particularly CP&B's relationship with Burger King. The key being how much more dedicated any service provider will be when their client's bottom line affects them. Instead of counting hours, you're focused on delivering results.

As the discussion grows, we hope you'll join us in sharing your insight, thoughts and feedback. Particularly the dude at the end of the session who said there are no issues with the hourly model. Being that we couldn't agree less, I'm ever more interested in hearing his point of view.

As always, you can view more of our decks on SlideShare and please feel free to add your comments below or join the discussion on the Teehan Lax blog.

Talk to you soon.
Lee

Sugar for your phone.

Lee Dale — 2010-06-21 14:54:00.0

Boy that new iOS 4 is pretty snazzy. But it has those super complex textured backgrounds that make reading your icons more difficult than reading anything should be. So without further ado, here's a lock screen I Need Sugar wallpaper for your iPhone (4, 3G, 3Gs or whatever, it works on'em all) and a matching home screen desktop for your iOS 4 phone that'll help your icons pop. Enjoy!

Download lock screen.

Download home screen.

How they look in action:

Download lock screen.

Download home screen.

And don't forget, you can still get the 3G/3GS skin from Stick Stick Bang Bang.

Towards better readability on the Web.

Lee Dale — 2010-06-10 07:18:00.0

Proponents of Web font options have been given a boost with @font-face, Typekit and now Google's support with the Google Font Directory (of course, in Google ubiquitous Beta). However, the greatest barrier to Web legibility is not typefaces but rather screen size.

With the adoption of standards based Web browsers across Apple, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile 7 and other portable devices, you now have to design sites for screen sizes ranging from 3" (or smaller) to 30" and everywhere in between. On the larger size, the standard generally remains suitable for a maximum 1024 pixel wide screen, but as we head down to the iPad sized 1024 pixel (landscape) and 768 pixel (portrait) on just a 10" screen, those 23" 1024 pixel websites now become very small. Even moreso with all the clutter of ad space, menu columns, and more. To this end, we now see Apple's introduction of Reader in Safari 5, design to get rid of "annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles". Presumably this will filter down to their mobile devices as well, which is where the real benefit will be found. However, there's one major issue with the Reader implementation.

Highlighted even on Apple's promotion page for Reader in their side by side comparison, sure Spin's ads have been removed allowing you to focus on the article, but they've move from a left justified rag to full justified text, sans hyphens. What this does, as shown in the image below, is create absolutely brutal spacing and, in their own example, even create single word left justified lines. This isn't easier to read, it's a disaster.

Here's the same article zoomed in so you can get a better feel for this:

But, hey, this is encouraging. The idea of focusing on legibility over style and glitz is an important step in allowing for increased Web based consumption no matter the device (desktop or mobile). So what's next? Well, optimizing type for multiple screen sizes and hyphenation.

Which points to Blain Cook's excellent "Beautiful Lines" article. From the article through the comments there's a great discussion on maximizing type for variable screen sizes rather than fixed width designs and supporting hyphenation, which is currently a flawed implementation at best. So, where's that encouragement? Well, if Apple insists on full justification for Reader, it won't be long before we see a solid implementation of hyphenation in Safari which ideally will filter across to other Browser's. More form W3C on hyphenation.

Here's an excerpt from Beautiful Lines as shown in Safari:

To give you a feel of how broken Safari's implementation of hyphenation is, here's what happens when I copy and paste a small excerpt from the Beautiful Lines article:

jus ti fi ca tion and hy phen ation and drop caps and in dents

As you can see, when I paste, the hyphen that was originally in the sentence is removed but multiple spaces have been inserted.

In Firefox there's only one hyphen in the entire article, on a word that is longer than the page width, which of course makes for similar awkward spacing to the Spin article above.

Here's the same excerpt from above, as rendered in Firefox:

Of course, given this lack of hyphenation in Firefox, the same citation copy and pastes as expected:

justification and hyphenation and drop caps and indents

So here's to Apple getting the discussion moving on this, which I expect will pick up dramatically if we see Reader filter down to those 100 million+ mobile devices they've sold and where isolating the content on their mini-screens will become a real priority.

If you've got any other resources or discussions in the area of hyphenation on the Web and designing for multi-screen size layouts, share away!

We're in Montreal this week.

Lee Dale — 2010-05-26 05:46:00.0

In addition to our Kipu demo at Sproutup Toronto this week, we're in Montreal for WebCom and Make Web Not War. Reach out if you'd like to talk design, or join us me as the panel moderator from 11:30a to 12:15p at Make Web Not War as we discuss the value of social media & community for developers.

This talk will include panelists:

Joey DeVilla, Microsoft Canada
Jeremy Wright, 76 Design
Com Mirza, The Lemonade Boy

Hope to see you there!

Kipu question: What's the minimum amount of time you'll spend on a task?

Lee Dale — 2010-04-30 05:00:00.0

A one question survey on the minimum interval of time you'll spend on any given task.

Please fill out the google survey, s'il vous plais.

We'll be presenting at these upcoming events in April, May and June.

Lee Dale — 2010-04-22 08:26:00.0

We're pleased to be speaking at these upcoming events throughout April, May and June. Collectively, they offer a variety of topics, whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or freelancer. Take a look!

DesignGuru Talks: Online Identity.

Friday, April 23, 2:00p at the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, 4th Floor, Alterna Boardroom.

We'll be discussing a variety of issues around how individuals and organizations can maintain a harmonious identity across varied platforms on the Web.

Participants include:
Qasim Virjee - Design Guru's Principal
Behrouz Hariri - Graphic Designer
Jaime Woo - Social Media Strategist/Consultant
Lee Dale - Culture, Inspiration & Community, Say Yeah!

The event will be held in the Alterna Boardroom at the Centre for Social Innovation from 2:00p to 4:00p. The event will also be recorded for a future episode of designguru.tv. There is no charge for this event.

More details here.

Sproutup, May Edition.

Currently scheduled for May 27. Location TBD.

This evening event will include a long-form presentation geared towards entrepreneurs along with a handful of product demos. We're pleased to be demoing Kipu to the Sprouter community. There is no charge for this event.

Watch the TO Events calendar for the latest details.

NXNEi

Monday, June 14th to Wednesday June 16th at the Hyatt Regency, 370 King Street West

We'll be joining the value billing panel, Time To Abolish The Hourly at the inaugural NXNE Interactive. This discussion will centre around digital services pricing and alternatives to time based billing such as value billing. A suitable discussion for any creative.

Additionally, there are a ton of other fantastic speakers at NXNEi, including the always inspirational Ze Frank. Not to be missed!

There are a number of ticketing options beginning at $149 for the 2 day presentations package.

A full list of ticketing options can be found here.

Looking for a panelist or speaker for your event?

Hey, we're always happy share one of our slide decks in person or join a lively discussion, so don't be afraid to ask.

Kipu question: How important is it when you're tracking time to be able to define multiple roles per person so that you may bill each of their roles at a different rate?

Lee Dale — 2010-04-12 21:40:00.0

A one question survey about supporting multiple billing rates per person so you can variably bill clients based on the type of task you completed.

Please fill out the Google survey, s'il vous plais.

It's about time! A presentation on time tracking and work life balance.

Lee Dale — 2010-03-11 00:16:00.0

Here's our slide deck from IgniteTO on how finding daily patterns in where we spend our time can help us win back our lives. The Ignite format is 20 slides in 5 minutes, so you have 15 seconds with each slide before it automatically transitions. Here I've loaded the slide deck in a format that let's you transition with a click so you can spent as much time with each slide so you don't have to experience the Ignite stress. I've also included a more polished script than the largely ad libbed one that was done live. But I promise I did get these points in within my 5 minutes limit. And I only said, "I'll just wait for the next slide..." once.

View the deck on SlideShare.

Slide 1:
It's about time! How finding daily patterns in where we spend our time can help us win back our lives. This is not about time or task planning, rather it's about understanding where we?I've spent our time so we can make informed decisions about where we should be spending our time. All towards the end goal of empowering entrepreneurs and the creative industry towards a healthier live/work balance.

Slide 2:
Having worked in the creative services industries for far too many years for me to be comfortable admitting, with my first job in the creative industry working with these beasts, along with running 3 business in the past 10 years, I know a little about tracking time and a lot about having no live/work balance.

Slide 3:
Throughout those years there's been one thing that's plagued all of these jobs, whether it be film, interactive, interior design, or even construction. And that nasty piece of work that we all had to deal with: Timesheets.

What this means (other than spending countless hours trying to sort out what I'd been working on for the past week from random post it notes and a sieve like memory) is that I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. And, more specifically, time management.

Slide 4:
From paper printouts, to Excel, to countless timesheet apps, I've seen it all. And one thing is certain, none of them are terribly helpful. More than that, most of them are excruciatingly painful to use. And for something that we should be using on a daily basis, that makes our lives as entrepreneurs and creatives a little less entrepreneurial and creative.

Slide 5:
So we (that?s where I work) have set our minds to solving this problem. You know, time sheets sucking. This means finding out why timesheets suck, besides the obvious tedium, and sorting out how we can make them work for us (we?re a service provider too, designing apps for clients) and, more importantly, for you.

Slide 6:
In the end we built something. It?s pretty exciting and has been a ton of work but, alas, it?s no time machine. It?s just an app. But we?re not here to talk about the app, we?re here to talk about the thinking that went into the app. About how finding daily patterns in where we spend our time can help us win back our lives.

(Note: this image was sourced via a direct link from Google and I'm not sure how to credit it.)

Slide 7:
To help walk us through these insights on time, I?ve asked Kipu to join us. Not on stage. Just on the projector. Not only do we not have a time machine, we don?t have a mascot budget either. Right, back to time.

Slide 8:
We spend our entire life doing stuff. And do a pretty shoddy job of trying to understand what it is we're doing and what value it brings to our lives. Some of us keep diaries. Some of us do timesheets (though certainly no one wants to). At best, we?re left with a sense of our work life balance.

Slide 9:
We say we'll dedicate ourselves to the things we love, but this ends up happening only when we can find the time. In the end, we all mostly end up in the same old work pattern. Living to work instead of working to live.

No one wants this.

Slide 10:
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we can't all retire to a beautiful island in the sun, but we certainly can have a more positive work life balance if we have a better understanding of where we?re spending our time now.

Slide 11:
So we asked Kipu, just as you should ask yourselves, how much time did you spend this fall storing nuts for the winter. Like Kipu, you probably don't have an answer for that. Better yet, was that productive time? Was it wisely spent or mostly wasted? Could it have been better spent doing something else?

Slide 12:
Being stuck trying to answer these kinds of questions about projects isn't helpful to your clients. And it's not helpful to you. From a work point of view you've got billing to do. You can't be trying to piece together what you did last week from fading memories of torturous client calls, 1000s of emails, and assorted Photoshop crashes.

Slide 13:
Heck, you've got work to do, and the last thing you need is to be wracking your brain over what you've been doing all day. Or for days before because we all know not many of us do their timesheets every day. It's too painful to manage that. Damnit, you're a creative professional, not an accountant! (<-- veiled Star Trek reference)

Slide 14:
And that's the problem with time. In order to manage it, you need to have a handle on it. Understand how your day is unfolding and has unfolded. And this means being able to visualize your day. In the end, you need a new way to see your day that isn't decimal points and empty cell fields.

Slide 15:
You need your time to be structured, because you think in a structured way, from the morning commute to the 10:00a project meeting, from lunch to the phone call with NY. And that hour you lost on Twitter taking to that less than helpful social media expert.

Slide 16:
But that's not all. Time isn't just about work. It's about getting things done and having control over your life whether you're at work, rest or play. And we don't really have that control. Worse yet, we know we don't have it but we haven't even got a handle on how much we've lost control. We simply have no measure. And we should.

Slide 17:
As entrepreneurs and creatives, this means finding ways to prioritize time off, to make sure we're resting, learning, eating, dancing, or spending time with family. Really, what you need is a diary of what you missed and missed out on. And you need to get mad enough about missing time for you the same as if you've missed an important client deadline or missed an appointment with a busy colleague.

Slide 18:
Instead, control slips away because we spend all our tortured brainpower tracking our work day on systems we can?t wait to get away from. The rest just happens when it happens, if it happens. And this is made all the worse for the creative, the entrepreneur. You're dedicated. Fastidious. You want to sacrifice to reach your professional goals. But you can't have a healthy work-life balance when you?re only fighting for your clients, their projects, and only worried about gathering more nuts.

Slide 19:
But you need to prioritize rest. And you need to prioritize play. And, dammit, you deserve it. So you need to find a way to track those times when lunch became dinner, the gym became making another coffee at the office just to make it through the evening, and Sunday night with a good book became inbox 0 with your Macbook.

Slide 20:
That shouldn't be your life. And you need a reminder of that. Just like Kipu is reminded every day. Here are my nuts, here's my lunch, here's my time for me. So do the same for yourself and be happy Kipu.

That's the Ignite presentation. More from Kipu coming soon. And you can see more presentations on Slideshare.

The importance of infrastructure: Haiti and beyond.

Lee Dale — 2010-02-10 02:41:00.0

In the wake of the earthquake and ongoing disaster relief in Haiti there has been a lot of discussion around the political state of Haiti. Setting these political issues aside, let's look at the disaster itself and, more specifically, how Haiti's infrastructure has played a roll in multiplying the level of destruction and, as a result, greatly increased the requirement for aid and subsequent rebuilding efforts.

First, let's clarify what I mean by infrastructure. I'm talking about the fundamental tenets of a healthy nation: education, employment, government, communications (phone and Web access), roads and buildings. The reality of the situation is the disaster in Haiti was compounded by a dearth of infrastructure. Concrete buildings are not supposed to completely collapse in the face of a natural disaster. This can be traced back to all of the above issues, all of which are in the purview of organizations such as the Web Foundation; organizations focused on empowering local people and economies through holistic planning, while working with on the ground organizations to build lasting infrastructure that local individuals can manage and thrive under.

Now, with massive amounts of aid being piled into Haiti, how this aid (and the most certainly required future aid) is applied to ongoing infrastructure development will determine whether or not Haiti can avoid a disaster of this magnitude in the future and, more importantly, become a healthy nation.

With this in mind, we need to be thinking more holistically, not just in Haiti but beyond; reacting less and, instead, focusing on long term planning. This is why we've put our support behind the Web Foundation because it truly has the power to change people's lives and local economies, ultimately increasing standards of living, health, and safety. This isn't a sales pitch for the Web Foundation; it's a call to engage in more holistic giving, based around empowerment rather than relief.

By all means, support Haiti now as we are at this Thursday's HaiHaiTO event, because the requirement for disaster relief is ongoing, and the Canadian government is stepping up with each donation we make. But let's remember it's holistic reengineering of infrastructure, not reactionary rebuilding, that is required to ensure this level of disaster is avoided in the future.

Support Now

HaiHaiTO Haiti support evening on Feb 11 at the Courthouse on Adelaide, 7:00p to late, with support for the following groups:
Canadian Red Cross
Pierspective Entraide Humanitaire
Toronto Haiti Action Committee

Purchase HaiHaiTO tickets here.

You may also donate your Air Miles to the Red Cross.

Ongoing Support

For Haiti: Haiti Partners

For other locales, including South America, Africa, and more: Web Foundation