Aarron Walter

Mark Boulton recently spoke via Skype to my User-Centered Interface Design class at The Art Institute of Atlanta on the principles of design as they apply to the web, and his experience in the industry. Mark has made a name for himself in the web industry as a typographer, designer, and a skilled writer on these topics. He’s perhaps best known for his insightful, self-published series of articles entitled 5 Simple Steps, which explores core design topics such as the grid, and typography, and will soon be spun into a PDF book of the same name. Perhaps you have seen some of his other articles on A List Part and Vitamin. Mark brings together two traits in his work that rarely mingle, brilliant design talent, and humility that seems to keep him learning and sharing his wealth of knowledge.

Mark recently spoke at South by Southwest in two panels, one with Khoi Vinh about grid systems, and the other with Richard Rutter about web typography. I recommend keeping an eye on the SXSW podcast page for the release of these lectures, as they were some of the best of the year, in my humble opinion.

Mark mentioned two important books when he spoke to my class that have guided him in his design work. For understanding grid systems, he recommends Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller - Brockmann, and for understanding typography he recommends the appropriately named Typography by Emil Ruder. Here’s Mark’s lecture podcast presented February 28, 2007.

Mark Boulton’s podcast lecture on designing for the web

Designer, business owner, and Art Institute of Atlanta alumnus Jen Gordon spoke to my User-Centered Interface Design class Wednesday February 14 about her design process, and what it is like to run a small web design company. Jen’s a smart designer, and she shared a number of her secrets for working with clients, finding design inspiration, trusting her instincts, and researching projects. You can listen to her lecture in this podcast: Jen Gordon Guest Lecture Podcast.

Michael Hagel, a former student turned friend, has recently organized an Adobe User Group that will have its first meeting to meet and greet all interested in taking part on Thursday January 11 at 7PM at Deardorff Communications. For more information visit the official site. Michael has some excellent guest speakers lined up for the first few events, and is a wealth of knowledge himself with Flash and mobile platforms.

Adobe has recently introduced Labs.Adobe.com where they introduce valuable tools and get feedback from users about their initial releases of some of their products. I recently wrote about their handy Spry Framework, which looks like the easiest to learn JavaScript framework on the market. They have also released one of the best color palette generation utilities I have seen to date entitled kuler. Kuler takes cues from many other popular color palette utilities, and in many ways ups the ante. It emulates the community sharing of palettes seen at Colour Lovers (by the way, they have a new site), offers all of the palette options for analogous, monochromatic, complimentary, and triadic systems seen on Color Scheme Generator 2, and allows you to mix and copy RGB, Hex and CMYK values like Color Mixers. Kuler displays swatches in large areas on a dark background allowing you to see them much better than its competitors. It’s a beautiful system, and a great asset to any designer operating in any medium.

As a bonus, they also offer some useful links to color theory resources in the links section.

I’m usually averse to blogging about things that are already hot topics of everyone else’s blog, but I think all of my students who read this blog should take a look at this recent post on Ajaxian. A web designer took a screen shot after adding content to a page or modifying the CSS, revealing and interesting look at the evolution of the web page development process. The screen shots are rolled into an animated Gif to show the design through time.