Designing Interactive Products

My last day at Six Apart

I'm very sad to announce that today is my last day at Six Apart. I've been here for almost three-and-a-half years, starting as a front-end developer on LiveJournal, then lead designer for Movable Type and finally design director for TypePad. 

I will really miss coming to work every day with such an amazing group of funny, smart and talented people who really care about making great products and helping people express themselves. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone I've worked with for being so generous with their time and knowledge. 

I'll continue to blog on TypePad and look forward more amazing things from Six Apart.

And by "soon" I meant 521 days

Sorry, I'm back. Did I miss anything?

Yes, the title of the previous post on this blog was "Regular blogging to resume soon," and then I didn't post for a year and a half. But now I've moved this blog from Movable Type to TypePad and am gong to make this my home for everything design-related. Stay tuned.

Regular blogging to resume soon

I've been remiss in not posting here for a few days, but I've been busy with my son's first birthday, my 7th wedding anniversary, an upcoming kitchen remodel, not to mention the presidential race. I plan to start blogging regularly again this week.

Take the survey!

I highly recommend that anyone who's involved in making websites head on over to A List Apart and take the 2008 survey. It only takes about 5 minutes.

Blog It for iPhone

In addition to releasing a TypePad iPhone app, we at Six Apart also released a web app for the iPhone called Blog It.

Blog It was originally a Facebook app, but we knew it would be great to use it to update your blogs and/or your status on Facebook or Twitter from your iPhone. I contributed some visual and interaction design work and I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

Point your Mobile Safari browser to http://blogit.typepad.com and use it to update all your blogs at once.

Thank God for Google Alerts

I have a Google Alert for the phrase "designing for flow" which, as you might imagine, doesn't get used very often, so when I got an alert about it tonight I was intrigued. The summary of the article that was included in the Google Alert email was very familiar.

For some reason someone called Abbas Gandhi had posted my complete A List Apart article without attribution to a Blogger blog called "My Journey as a Designer." The odd thing is that it's one of only two posts on the blog and the first is just lorem ipsum. I'm actually kinda flattered that out of all the fantastic ALA articles published over the years this person chose to steal mine. I posted a comment calling attention to this fact, so I'm not sure if it will be removed by the time people read this, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Anyway, the moral of the story for all writer/designers is to create Google Alerts for a distinct phrase in each of your articles so you can catch people trying to pass of your writing as their own.

Feeling the flow

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about flow, the mental state of being completely absorbed in a task, and how that might apply to the design of websites. I'm finding it very interesting so I've decided to devote my blogging efforts on this site to that topic. I'll be adding more about designing for flow very soon.