Web accessibility is a buzz word many developers bandy around without much in the way of explanation. It seems obvious that accessibility is important - after all, the more people who can access your website the better - but what other advantages does accessibility offer, and is it really as important as we techies seem to make out?
We’re working on a kinetic type project at the moment, and in researching examples came across the famous Abbott and Costello routine brought to life - it’s both beautiful and very, very funny.
City & Guilds have released their 2008 Happiness Index, the fifth annual survey of UK workers to determine the ‘happiest’ professions. Beauticians and hairdressers are the top two professions. This makes me want to get my hair done to see just how happy these hairdressers really are.
More interesting than the list of professions, though, is what the ‘happiest’ professions have in common. According to the Guild, the top 3 reasons for being happy at work are:
1. An interest in what you do for a living
2. Good relationships with colleagues
3. Having a work-life balance
There are 5 great tips on how to apply these to your own studio/organisation/workplace here. I’m sure we’ve got a way to go, but I was impressed by how well they matched up with our own values.
I saw a version of this recently on swissmiss and it made me think about why I am a designer, what motivates me and what I love about the job I do. What would yours look like?
A diagram to show why I am a designer
As part of the design teams continuing improvement (Kaizen) over the last year we have been keeping ‘visual diaries’.
A visual diary is simply a visual representation of your day. It can be as detailed or as abstract as you like but the goal is to encourage yourself to think in a visual way and keep your creative brain in great shape. Visual diaries are different to journals, somewhere to quickly scribble ideas when they strike or to stick something you’ve seen online or in a magazine for example. It is priceless when you’re in need of some instant inspiration.
So each day the designers at IE (aka The Samurai’s) have been drawing, painting, gluing, photographing, cutting, tearing and ‘graffing’ inside their books . The only rule has been that nothing can be copied. Each page must be something different, fresh and completed self-created. It’s all about visually describing yourself and the world around you which is unique for each of us.
The results have been fantastic and have already yielded results in our client work. The visual diaries remind us that our computers are just another tool available to us and that it’s the creative thinking and problem solving that will ultimately ensure the success of any project.
Sample pages from visual diaries
Sample pages from visual diaries
Sample pages from visual diaries