Life & Research Notes

Last week we quietly deployed the new Taco Lab website, and we posted a revision today. If you remember anything about the old old placeholder page (think giant Helvetica text and a horrible hand drawn taco guy), you’ll agree this new version is overall an improvement.

Our key design imperative with the new site is to balance clarity of vision, sincerity of our business (we’ve been working together for almost a year now!), and a sense of play and humor that we feel fundamentally distinguishes Taco Lab from other design and technology firms. We are also seeking to show the wide variety of mediums and technologies we work in, and to provide some sense for the types of services we offer.

So please check out the site. We already have a laundry list of improvements we’d like to make over the next few weeks, and any additional ideas or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, as we’re just ramping up full time now, we have some spare cycles to throw at cool projects, so any hookups or suggestions would be most welcome.

The past couple weeks I’ve had a few nice paper prototyping sessions. It’s fun to create little modular UI components and then rearrange them, almost like a game.

I’m drawing inspiration from a couple nice references people have shown me. Jess pointed me to this Vimeo design (which I would include here, except it’s all rights reserved). It’s a really nice, clean style, and I know I like Vimeo’s feel, so I’ve been looking through this whole series.

And then I really like the mock interaction approach in this one (via Deeplinking):

We’re now making some screencasts of clickthroughs on top of the paper. Hopefully we’ll get a few up online soon. They’re a lot rougher/messier than these, but watching the mouse click and interact with the paper UI is really satisfying. It’s a fast process to create this stuff, and users pretty much get it right away, so it seems like a nice way to get feedback quickly.

Via reas. It’s pretty clear that the iPhone is a wide open field for new interesting work. This guy ported John Resig’s processing.js to the iPhone, running with SpiderMonkey and OpenGL. It’s hot.

And the next iPhone rolling out in a couple weeks will be faster, with an app marketplace, the sdk, and supposedly GPS. It seems like we’re about to see a ton of innovation here. Nice to see these graphics layers taking shape.

A zen moment of modern performance art from choreographer Pina Bausch. Perfect surreal start to the week. Thanks mudd up.

I love this admin interface for the 37signals unified billing and monitoring system, Queen Bee.

When Huned saw it his reaction was, “oh, it’s like top for your business,” which is a great description. This concept of live business data streams is a big part of the new Swivel business product we’re taking into beta shortly. We’re excited to bring these paradigms to a wider audience of people and teams who don’t have the resources to roll their own solutions.

Just a quick note that I’ll be attending CHI 2008 this April, participating in the Social Data Analysis workshop organized by Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jeff Heer, and Maneesh Agrawala. I finally remembered to register today. If anyone reading this will be there, or knows anyone interesting there I should meet up with, drop me a line.

I’ve finally upgraded myself to flickr pro, and I’m in the process of dumping in years worth of photos. Flickr isn’t exactly cutting edge these days, and it’s clunky for stuff like quickly setting permissions, deleting, rotating, etc. But I have friends and family on it, and despite flaws and the yahooness I find it a friendly feeling interface.

Still, it takes awhile, even cutting corners with bulk tagging and titles, so for the next couple months I’ll be semi-regularly pushing these little bits and pieces of my past up into the web. There are some good memories captured in there, and some that evoke feelings that are still raw, but it feels healthily therapeutic to go through it all together. It’s a fitting way to start the new year.