Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I gave this presentation at Social Media Cafe Manchester back in November and Salford University in December. Its a nice easy to follow over view of what a ARG is and leads nicely on to transmedia. It seems a lot of people don’t have a clue about Alternative reality games and get them confused with Argumentative gaming.
For ages now I have been seeking a better way to do certain presentations. I tend to spend a lot of time in Inkscape mapping out ideas but I don’t really want to put slides on different layers.
I bought a copy of dan roam’s the back of a napkin a while ago and I’ve been influenced by the idea of using white boards, mood boards, etc to explain ideas. The problem is that once you put the effort in to putting down the idea on to the canvas, you then have to re-adapt it to a presentation with Open Office. Its why I kind of like the idea of the unlimited canvas.
Prezi was talked about and overused to death a while ago, now you hardly see it. I blogged about it a while ago and decided that there must be a better more open way to do the same.
I have been thinking maybe some enterprising group of people could take the SVG specification and build a tool which generates these exact same presentations. So first up you can use scripts on every element including the viewpoint attribute. There seems to be a load of things you can do with the Canvas coordinate system. SVG 1.1 has the ability to embed certain multimedia but SVG Foreign Object could be used to place a browser or a complete video within a SVG.
You could imagine a specially made tool which worked like Prezi but wouldn’t need to be propitery and locked in. They could even create and sell a player and editor backed with its online space, so the business model isn’t totally shattered. Even if a rival tried to create the same, OpenPrezi as I’m coining it would be first to the market and have a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. Even a track record might go down well. So in my mind, there’s no way I will be using Prezi till its a lot more open. I’m sure even I could with a bit of time construct something using the SVG methods I mentioned. I’m not questioning the method or even the concept, it actually reminds me of mood boards. Its the implementation which winds me up.
Well my questions have been answered by some enterprising group of people.
Jessyink is the answer…
JessyInk, an open-source extension to the open-source SVG editor InkScape.
Perfect, so once I’ve created my master piece, its hopefully going to take a few more moments to turn it into something presentable. I’m not the only person to realise the power of this setup. Prezi vs JessyInk
The first time I heard about Prezi, I started looking for a possible equivalent in SVG, and I discovered that JessyInk was a pretty good candidate: it combines a Javascript library that deals with enabling simple navigation through a SVG document according to some conventions, with an extension to the fantastic InkScape SVG editor to make it possible to integrate effects, transitions and views from the editor itself.
But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I got confirmation that JessyInk now provides the tools needed to build Prezi-like effects, and so, when I was invited to talk on “W3C and the Social Web” at the 10th anniversary of the W3C Italian office I decided to give it a try to build my presentation.
The resulting “slides” were OK, but they clearly remain much more “slide-based” than what I would have done with Prezi.
A big reason for that is that JessyInk still uses slide as the basic unit for its operations – slides are based on Inkscape layers across which you can have transitions. This doesn’t encourage working on a completely 2D-based presentation, even though it allows fairly easily to zoom in and out in a particular slide.
So it looks like JessyInk might have a bright future in front of it. The presentations are not quite as free flowing as Prezi, but to be fair its a good compromise. Open source comes up with the goods, and what a true test of the power of Open source! Fantastic, where do I start!
What was waiting for me in my inbox today…
To: Ian Forrester
We are pleased to accept the following proposal for XTech 2007.
- Pipelines: Plumbing for the next web
It has been scheduled for 16:45 on 16 May 2007.
Please confirm that you have received this acceptance and can deliver the presentation.
Thank you,
Edd Dumbill
So my presentation at BarCampLondon2 will be a very early draft for whats to come in May.
So after my nightmare trip to Birmingham. I did get the conference about 1 hour late, but in time for Tom Reynolds good presentation which cause a nice stir. The room was full of journalism academics and they asked a lot of tricky questions of Tom. Anyway as usual, I recorded the presentation and the questions which
followed (i did do it at the lowest quality sorry). Tom has also added a post about his presentation.
So the talk went pretty well (I think so anyway). The audience mainly consisted of a load of journalism lecturers with one or two from the blooging community. So obviously I felt incredibly qualified to be there…
Thankfully I think I entertained them a bit and gave them a few things to think about. After the talk there was a workshop session and a panel discussion which I also think went well.
The rest of the conference was good too but raised more questions that it answered. I recorded the end panel which is not the best quality because I was so far away and Vicky Taylor from BBC News. Good work Paul
The one to look out for is certainly Yahoo. This week they released there UI library into the public domain under a BSD licence and then showed off there design patterns which I sent around to our designers for consideration. I also got the chance to read through Tom Coates fantastic presentation at the Carson workshops future of web apps summit and to top everything off. Yahoo is now hiring semantic web developers? Yahoo is once again on a roll. No wonder why Tom Coates moved. Oh by the way, don't forget to check out Simons notes which are great when flicking through the pdf presentation offline.
Forgot to mention Jeremy Zawodny has taken the main points and broke it down into something which can be translated for product managers. Yahoo are certainly on a run!
My lecture notes from todays lecture at Ravensbourne College are now online for all to view and take apart. Enjoy!
So Ben Metcalfe asks the question Does presentation matter anymore?
This is exactly what me, Miles, Harry and Dave talked about one night over dinner. Honestly I think it does but as Ben identifies its moved around the chain now. If we take it that RSS has a huge audience and that its not changed a lot from its current form (aka no JS, CSS, Ajax, etc in RSS or ATOM) for a moment. The presentation shifts to feed promotion and the news reader style. For example Great News which I'm using for my desktop aggregator supports CSS and I can actually define a style sheet per feed if I want to. This was useful today when Google news was delivering me all the WorldService and ArabicTV stories, as I could use the brief stylesheet to show a lot of entries on one screen. While I use the readability stylesheet for reading Ben's blog and most of RSS content.
But it goes deeper than that, design isnt just about presentation. A designer should have a hand in the structured elements of the RSS feed, the useability of how its pushed and pulled around the internet and the accessability of the feed and its content. Its what I prefer to call the whole process the Flow of the content. Its part of what I do and I feel its part of the emerging role for new media designers. I mean is it too much to ask for a designer to build a client side XSL page for a RSS feed?
Just stepping away from the world of huge RSS audiences now. There something which smart designers understand well. The media, there designing for. web media isnt print media. Sounds obvious, but were talking about the vision for how the site should look and work being thrown out the window. I'm not talking about just browser quirks, screen resoultions and font size differents. I'm talking about the range of toolbars, extensions and the like which deconstruct the website beyond the control of the tightest web designer. Then if you go down the Greasemonkey path, you have something where you can actually share your deconstructions. Smart designers understand and embrace this and actually push for CSS driven sites to make this even easier. There are a few even testing the waters with Client side XSL transformations for all content with CSS for style.
I've included a screenshot of how I currently see BBC news story pages and how its meant to look. I custom built this simple script because it makes loading up bbc news stories from my RSS reader quicker and is easier to read for myself. Others would disagree, but then I would suggest you write your own greasemonkey script.
So back to the question, yes presentation does matter and the role of a designer is very important but like everything, roles shift with the times and media. Branding is another issue which I wont go into right now either…
I found this great little post about WIndows Longhorn/Vista's redline designs. Ryan suggests Redlines are a throw back to another generation of design, and I have to agree. Dactylx asks this question in the comments
I'm down with that idea, but then how do you as a designer communicate how the design should be rendered to a developer? What can we use to replace the redlines?
and Ryan replies with a slightly optimistic but good answer.
Here is the first step. Do not separate the teams. There should be no technical team and design team working separately (on different floors or on different continents). They should sit right next to each other and *understand* the problem just as great as the designers. Design is manifested in code, so if the coders don't understand, then the product is inevitable to fail.
I'm once again in total agreement, in my experience the best projects are always when everyone is involved in the problem. Not passed around like a rugby ball on a winters day.
