Where would you go for a lunch meeting here in Portland.

It must be yummy, reflect well on our fair city and quiet enough to have a conversation.

Here are the responses from my twitter friends.

skry… Navarre, Blue Hour, Portland City Grill

benry…. “I’d suggest Higgins Restaurant and Bar”

DevilGirlPDX…. “Highly recommend @BellyTimberPDX ! The menu is creative, but simple with a few items to raise eyebrows.”

nick …. ” Heathman, Thyphoon, Newport Bay on the waterfront, or even Henry’s.”  (Newport Bay on the waterfront has closed )

ranielle…. “I’m a fan of the Heathman Restaurant.”

joshuarr…. “Bridgeport Brewery (Pearl), BellyTImber (Hawthorne), ten-01 (pearl), Clyde Common (NW), or Whiffies. )”

chadmor…. “Clyde Common is pretty good for that pdx eclectic charm. Fats pub is good for neighborhood charm.”

What’s your suggestion?  The meeting is next Tuesday.

Thanks!

This is such a beautiful and effective site. I love the the subtlety of the navigation and social media links.
The colors are excellent.
My eyes moves around easily finding everything I would expect to find.

and who could deny the beauty and brillance of this?  check out the site to experience the roll over interaction.

This tour will be in Portland on Sunday. Maybe I’ll see you there.

I’ll be doing a little presentation at next week’s Show n’ Tell.  The theme for the night is “What are you doing to change the world?”. While I’m not sure I’m quite changing the world (yet) I am formulating approaches to my work that will contribute positively to the world and at the very least avoid causing harm.

In the presentation will be talking about Strategy.  It’s a word that is thrown around so much in business and in particular in the marketing/advertising/creative industries world, but what does it mean? What are the implications of creating and implementing one?  I will talk about the underling spirit of the term and introduce ways we can avoid doing harm when we create one.

I hope you will come on down.  This event is part of the very first, The New Communicators event.  Check it out. Come on out.

Thanks Substance

photo credit

Hey local weekly papers!

I have an idea and you may have it.

Seems like everyday there is a radio conversation, news report or article coming though my twitter stream talking about the demise or at least the changing face of the newspaper industry. It seems a big part of the problem is falling ad revenue. Well, I see one revenue stream you aren’t tapping into, Personal Announcements.

You remember right….something big has happened or is going to happen and you send some copy and a photo to your local paper to announce it to your community. This used to be a must do for engagements, weddings, births and deaths but these days it is a fading tradition. You should bring it back. I promise it will be a hit.

Do you this is a dumb idea? I mean with all the social media tools available people already have enough places to announce the milestones of their lives right?  Well, I  think the online social media movement is one of the reasons this is the perfect time to revive this particular way of communicating. We are way into sharing, you just need to divert some of the sharing energy to your papers.

Here is my list of reasons this is a good idea and will make your paper tons and tons of money so we can continue to get get in-depth reporting on issues that rarely make it to the main stream media.

• People love to tell everyone about their life. Heard of Facebook?

• Your 30 something readership are all doing the things that are good to announce.

• We like throwbacks. Innovation through reinvention is the darling of us Gen X and Y’ers

• The announcement thing just kinda fits with the whole handmade movement, especially around weddings and births. Have you visited many design and crafty blogs lately. We ladies are designing some beautiful weddings and our children look like they’ve been styled by a professionals.

• Digital photography. We take pictures and share pictures.

• …….and finally even though we love all the awesome online tools there is nothing as wonderful as seeing your name, photo or prose in old fashion black and white.

The Stranger and Mercury,  Seattle Weekly, Willamette Weekly.  I am so talking to you.  I can see this section now. It could be beautifully designed and if you like I could be the editor:)

rattle-n-roll

If I get in this will be my first presentation outside of work since high school. Kinda crazy. Hope I can do it:)

You can check out the full list of proposals here. If you participate in the voting (which you can) I hope you will vote for me and John from MilkMuny (because his presentation will be truly inspiring)

Ok, sorry for the slowed posting lately, I have a bunch of balls in the air right now, but they are all providing me with good writing ideas (if I can get around to it!)

Our first book, Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam, isn’t a UX specific book but a fun one that adds to the skills important for those of us out there practicing UX in all it’s many forms. I’ll be interested in hearing what parts of the book (method) are resonating and have practical application for other UX peeps.

If you are coming please RSVP or if you can’t make it this time join the Google Group to stay informed.

Here are the little sparks I took away and am thinking about:

*Expressing ideas vs. Expressing data

*Making a connection with someone or something that generates ideas is a good interaction, and could be called art.

*What types of things can we as designers do to develop your trust in the data?

*Try to merge the gap between useful and beautiful.

*Reduce the time it takes to understand.

*Clients don’t understand what they are paying for. Could data viz give them something to appreciate?

I also wanted to mention as I did last night, if you are into innovative ways to display a ton of information in a beautiful and useful way I would encourage you to spend sometime with State of the Salmon created by local agency Periscopic. I caught a presentation of it at PDX Show and Tell a while back. There did happen to be a woman from the agency there last night and she spoke up once I mentioned the site, she will hopefully be presenting at the next meeting.

This article was making it’s way around twitter today too.
Data Visualization Is Reinventing Online Storytelling

(image is from State of the Salmon)

We are getting UX Book Club going here in Portland. The first meeting is April 16th at 7pm.

So Join the Group, get the Book and RSVP.

As you can tell I am a little excited about this. There are so many books I want to read, but with all the stuff I do it’s hard to fit them in, so this is my opportunity to force myself to make time.

We tried to pick a fun first book. We are hoping to rotate between more theory stuff and practical stuff. I would also like to see us take a larger text and read it over time, covering just a couple chapters each time we meet.

What are your ideas?

I’m working hard to settle into my new design/ux community, you can’t just sit at home and make a happy career.

Yesterday I had drinks with the el presidente, as he calls himself, of a little web agency. It was pretty interesting to talk with him about how the work I do could be scaled down, to be implemented in really small projects. At first i was a bit stumped. How do you add Ux practices to a 5, 10 or 15K web project? Would there be enough value to make it worthwhile, can the practices be scaled down that much?

I think it can and why should big sites be the only ones to benifit from user centered design and strategic information architecture? I’m going to try and create some packages for smaller size jobs for him. If you have any ideas or thoughts let me know.