Posts filed under 'Design'
I was in a discussion with a friend last weekend at her swank new office. Suddenly we came across a point in social networking and SurfUnion popped up in my mind. If I ever come out with an autobiography there’s sure going to be a chapter dedicated to SurfUnion — a designers forum of which I was a proud member and an architect. Unfortunately the founding of SurfUnion is more interesting and worth discussing than the way we managed it.
In late 2003, five of my close buddies had wanted to do something worthwhile. We were at best designers with creative skills but worked out of home; some of them like me on a paltry sum. On the night of October 2nd, we launched a ‘designers only’ forum hiring some space on Buttclencher’s server. We decided to call it ‘SurfUnion’ or a group of surfing designers. The name took the imagination of all the admins as we liked to call ourselves and later we were joined by many. One of them was a geeky guy nicknamed Bane and was located in Colombo. Five of us - myself, Kreativea (Aadesh), Buttclencher (Raunaq), RanTen (Ranajit Tendolkar) and FlashKid (Isaac) operated from Mumbai. Thus we had a majority stake in the decision making process while LimeIce (Gursimran) located in Delhi and Ryche (Fahd) in Kolkata completed the admin lineup. The fabulous tagline of ‘We put the Desi in Design’ was suggested by Ryche in one of our online sessions. During our tenure, we arranged competitions and meetups that helped bring varied talents face-to-face.
At its peak when SU (as it was fondly called) was running, we had anywhere between 700-750 members, some of them from beyond India as well. In my role as the most active member, I am proud to have accumulated so many good friends that have remained with me even today. A sad gaffe on our part and a lag in attention forced us to shut down SU forever. The decision of not relaunching it was the most difficult and a tough one to take for the admins. It was an emotional setback for many of its union members who had made SU their second home. Graphic-Forums.com was the only successful community at that point in time and we decided to model SU on GF but make it the first Indian designers community. I am proud to say that we were successful in doing so.
Back in the early 2000s, social networking had not yet evolved like today. As technology progresses and social media acquires a new meaning, has the time come to start a new chapter for the union members? will a new look SurfUnion help promote design awareness, cater to the emerging technologies and look beyond just photoshop battles, to apply the knowledge in forging a stronger Indian design community? The answers beckon us and so does the fervor which has been glowing in my heart for a long time. It’s time to rise and think, all ye Union members!
Technorati Tags: surfunion, community, forums, designer, india
June 30th, 2008
AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobe’s cross-operating system runtime environment that allows developers to leverage the current technologies like Flash, AJAX, Flex, HTML and JavaScript, and enable the deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. Prior to it’s release AIR was codenamed Apollo.
Applications developed using AIR provide a delightful way of presenting live data and one does not need to be connected to the internet all the time. From the visual standpoint, AIR technology offers the power to change the interface design thus bringing a coherence between function and looks. This also greatly enhances the UX of the product and supplements any deficiencies in the original structure. It seems unlikely that the increasing reach of AIR would make the internet browser applications redundant since a majority of the internet population still relies on the software for surfing pages. However as a reminder, the developers and designers must begin earnestly to move towards web standards and help to bring about a consistency in the way content and design is demonstrated online. Till such time get addicted to AIR like me.
Some interesting AIR applications that I came across on the internet:
• Twhirl - posting on Twitter was never so exciting. It’s got an amazing dashboard plus you can select from a list of themes.
• Google Analytics AIR - your website statistics report presented in a much friendlier form.
• ReadAIR - Subscribed RSS feeds from your Google Reader account.
• Shrink-O-Matic - Easy-to-use batch resizing of GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs.
• WebSnapShot - Instant screen captures in a variety of forms.
AIR Information:
• Adobe AIR: Developer FAQ
• Fresh AIR apps - Resource, tutorials and list of Adobe AIR apps.
• Adobe AIR - Browser vs. Desktop comparison chart
• Adobe Topic Center page on Rich Internet Application
• 6 Adobe AIR Apps to check out
Technorati Tags: adobe, AIR, RIA, Flex, Flash
June 23rd, 2008
In what I consider to be a breakthrough feat, Mozilla has released the
Persona extension that should revolutionize the skinning of browsers in the coming days. The extension uses the JSON feed to dynamically load the URLs remotely to skin the Firefox browser. Moreover, besides making the browser lightweight it does not require a restart anymore to see the theme in action. For all
Firefox fans.
Technorati Tags: firefox, mozilla, extension
December 18th, 2007
The official Google Blog carried the
announcement of their new project called Knol. The aim is to encourage writers to contribute articles of significant importance and share it with the internet community, in what seems to be a head-on challenge to
Wikipedia.
Technorati Tags: knol, google, knowledge, wikipedia
December 17th, 2007
I had promised to keep you guys posted from Hyderabad but some things did not work out as I had planned. The data card didn’t work and I was left (fuming) without an internet connection. To make my matters worse, my camera stopped working and I could not take pictures from the event.
Back to the story. The conference was being held in the spacious environs of the Indian School of Business (ISB) in the Khemka Auditorium. The scheduled start was 8:30 am but it got delayed and finally kicked-off nearly 2 hours later. When we reached the place early morning, the banners were not yet displayed and we were completely lost. The chief guest for the event was Ravi Pooviah, my long time idol and a professor from IDC-IIT. This year UMO (Usability Matters.org) was exploring the theme of health innovation and therefore the guests from medical to software industry were offered an opportunity to showcase their work in that field. Amongst the presentations Parmeshwar Raju’s lecture on Designing through a grid layout and Anirudha Joshi’s slides on devising User-experience metrics were found to be most interesting. I also enjoyed Shruti Agarwal’s discussion on SMOKEDOTE, which is an interactive game for smokers. The design of her slides was very creative indeed. Shruti’s a senior Visual Communications student at IDC-IIT.
The action for the next 2 days shifted to the Abridge Solutions’ training center where the Track I and II workshops were to be held. I had opted for Track I and Ravi Pooviah’s class on Information Visualization. It was the most fabulous experience for me and we were given in depth information on the basics of design and evolving concepts through the mind mapping exercise. On the sidelines, I had a long discussions with Ravi on the future of design and the education system in India which prevents raw talent to be recognized and instead considers the marks system to be the final judging factor. It’s a topic for another article from me so I will stop here. Overall, the experience of attending this event was good and looking forward to applying the knowledge at my work place soon.
Technorati Tags: IDC, IIT, ravi pooviah, UMO, usability
December 4th, 2007
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