All of the Above: Design, Code, and Learning

Episode 34: None of the Above | The Hiatus Episode

This isn't a goodbye, this is a "see you later" as we blastoff into the sunset, sailing through the atmosphere with reckless abandon.

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Sunset by Nick Slater

Nick Slater is an amazing illustrator that you should definitely follow. He is prolific, has an identifiable aesthetic, and is always delivering high quality work. I remembered seeing this illustration a month ago, and it instantly popped in my head when trying to come up with something as we "sunset" our podcast. Also, Professor Blastoff.

• Sketch 3 Workshop
• Sean's UX Newsletter
• Sean's Blog
• @spjpgrd

• Sam's Travel Blog: Bearded Traveler
• Sam's Solo Episode
• @SamBantner

• Minus 'Rithmetic
• @BryanMBrush

How did you enjoy this episode? It was short, and sweet, and we might not make any more — but rating it on iTunes is forever. 

Episode 33: Vector v. Raster, with Sean Doran

Ever hear the words "vector" and "raster," when talking about graphics, but wondered what that actually meant? In this quick episode, Sean goes over the technical differences between the two, when each image type should be used, and how to optimize them.

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Sketch 3 by Bohemian Coding

Adobe Illustrator CC

Inkscape

Affinity Designer

Pixelmator

Adobe Photoshop CC

Gulp.js

Grunt.js

ImageOptim

Alfred

Since I recently taught a 2 hour workshop on Sketch 3, I wrote a couple of emails to the attendees the week leading up to the class in preparation for what they’d be learning. In the workshop I was showing them how to use Sketch 3 as a tool, and how to take advantage of what it has to offer, while also highlighting what areas Sketch isn’t good at. I didn’t have time to give an introduction to design basics, so that’s what these emails were for.

Sketch 3: A-Z was a one-week workshop that gave attendees the principles for designing modern day websites, and how they could get up and running with Sketch 3 as a new design tool to see their ideas come to life.

Before I begin, a big thank you to Kevin Mack and Columbus Web Group for putting on these Weekend Workshops. They are free, open to the public, and are meant to offer accessible education that isn’t your traditional schooling route. The monthly free meetups make for great networking events, educational opportunities, and an all around fun time. I can’t recommend them enough.

Scooby Doo after a couple of Scooby snacks

With programs such as Sketch 3, Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, InkScape, we have what are called vector-based applications. So what I mean by vector-based is that it is based on points: tiny dots that have an X and Y coordinate. If you think back to grade school, you probably had graph paper and were told to put dots at certain (X,Y) coordinates. After all the dots were on the paper, you would connect the dots with a line in a certain order, and you’d end up with a drawing!

Sketch 3, and any design program that can handle vectors, takes that same graph paper concept, and steps it up a notch. Here's a lovely SVG just for you.

via Wikipedia

Since vectors are all based around geometry, and aren’t concerned about pixels — only the distance between all the points — vectors are infinitely scalable! Ever have an image that was clearly a bit too small, and then you decided to scale it up so that it was bigger? It got distorted and looked nasty, didn’t it?

A dramatic illustration of a vector graphic (left) and a raster graphic (right) being scaled up.

That’s because when you have a picture, or anything based on pixels, it’s called a raster graphic. You can make them smaller without concern, but once you enlarge them you get weird artifacts, noise, and muddiness as the computer tries to make up the difference.

That being said, Sketch 3 can also do some basic raster graphic editing, and I mean basic. Other programs, such as Adobe Photoshop or Pixelmator, should really be used if you’re wanting do image manipulation, photo retouching, and anything else that you can think of when you hear the word Photoshop being used as a verb.

If you are using any images for the web, there are some rather useful tools out there to help optimize them so they aren’t quite so large. But before I list those, you’ll need to know the different file types, as each tool can optimize certain types of image files.

An easy way to identify if a file is a vector graphic or raster graphic is by the file extension. There are too many to list, but good ole’ Wikipedia has our back again.

Vectors sound like the way to go, so why isn’t everything a vector? Infinite scalability sounds like a huge plus. Also, they are usually editable with any vector-based program, so what isn’t to like?

Don’t get me wrong, they’re great for logos, iconography, and illustrations. It’s just that the more points you have in a document, the more complex calculations are being processed, and the more colors being utilized, the more work your computer has to do.

This is a nice photo of you.

Imagine a nice photograph of you. The photo makes way more sense to be a rasterized image, as there’s a finite amount of information that the camera took in and converted into the pixels that resemble your face.

Now, going in and converting something as complex as a photograph into vector shapes is possible… but…

To make that vectorized version have the same level of detail as the original photograph can be painstaking work to do by hand (also called rotoscoping when applied to video), and usually there is a limit.

There are also programs that let you put a photo in, and out pops a vectorized version of that photo. It’s a cool effect, but it’s not exactly practical for everything.

So vector and raster graphics both have their place. And right now is truly an exciting time in web & app design for vector graphics. Here’s the link to a Columbus Web Group talk that Eric Katz gave on SVGs. It has tons of useful resources, tips, and demonstrations of how to leverage SVGs in front-end development.

In the presentation, Eric (@ericnkatz) brings up some nice tools to optimize SVGs, such as SVGCleaner and SVGO GUI. You can also implement image optimization within the build process using build task managers like Gulp and Grunt.

There are online image optimizers like:

• Kraken.io is awesome because it can also do SVGs

• TinyPNG

• ImageOptimizer

For rasterized images, I personally use ImageOptim. Every image you see on the All of the Above website has been optimized through ImageOptim. I’ve even set up a global keyboard shortcut on my computer to send any amount of image files I have selected straight into ImageOptim. 

I'm using Alfred as a Spotlight replacement

System Preferences

Shortcuts are your best friend

This is very meta. These files are this episode's artwork.

I care about bandwidth. You should too.

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope you loved it, but we're curious to know what you thought.

Episode 32: The Web Design Equation

Feeling overwhelmed with your web design project? Too many things to keep track of? Today Sean shares the system he uses to manage projects — keeping him focused on solving problems instead of worrying about what he’s missing.

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Pattern Lab

Sketch 3 by Bohemian Coding

Sketch Toolbox

Sketch Mirror by Bohemian Coding

Whether it’s designing a website, a mobile app, or something in between, there are five parts to the design equation: Constants, Variables, Constraints, Maximums, and Minimums. When confronted with a large project, it’s helpful to identify what bucket each element of the screen falls into. From there, it’s easier to iterate and refine towards a final solutions. So let’s explore these in a little more detail.

But before we can explore those ideas in more detail, there’s one methodology that will help you out immensely: Atomic Design

Unlike print design, designing digital products, e.g., websites, apps, lend themselves to so many variables that are outside of your control that it can get overwhelming.

Atomic Design is a concept that Brad Frost first presented in 2013, and has been refining ever since — even creating Pattern Lab, a tool to help implement this approach to front-end web development. It breaks down the web page into 5 different building blocks:

1. Atoms
2. Molecules
3. Organisms
4. Templates
5. Pages

The idea behind Atomic Design is to create reusable patterns through combining atoms, molecules, and organisms to create templates. With these templates, they can be translated into specific pages. The deeper dive into what each group is, and how it’s defined can be found on Pattern Lab’s about page. For a basic overview:

These are the single solitary building blocks of a web page. These would be your headers (h1’s and h2’s) , buttons, and input fields. Just single entities that live by themselves.

Take one atom, and combine it with another atom. There’s your molecule. It can have more than two atoms, but the goal is that the molecule performs one function, and it performs it well. Take a block quote with a citation at the end of it. That would be combining the block quote atom with the citation atom to create that molecule.

Organisms are combinations of molecules and/or atoms. The best example of an organism would be a header. You have navigation (atom), a logo (atom), a search box, input text, and a search button (all together a molecule). This fits right in with what an organism should be.

This would be a fully composed layout of what kinds of information should be displayed on the page, but not actually filled in with information. T

Now, if you are to take a look at your Facebook Profile, you can see everything that I just mentioned, but filled out with content that makes it a real page.

Now that you know what atomic design is, and how it helps you to identify and design reusable patterns, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

When working in an agile environment, it sometimes feels as if the only constant is change itself. But within a project, there are things that become staples and will never change, or at least they hopefully won’t change for an extended period of time.

Constants can be items such as:

• Brand Logo
• Company or Product Name
• Color Palette
• Typography
• Existing Content

These are more or less the essentials to a basic website

Other than those basic fundamental parts of a web design, there are tons of other constants that are used within a website. With that being said, most constants will interact with variables. An example would be a button. Within that button there will be some string of text. That text is a variable.

Let’s continue with that button idea. The character length of the text that will be inside this button is unknown, so you should create guidelines as to what constraints there will be when writing text for this particular button. Taking a step back, the biggest variable is the dimensions of the canvas that your end product will be consumed at. With a website, that can mean anything from a 100x100px tiny screen to a 80 inch touchscreen television. If that isn’t daunting, I don’t know what is.

Luckily, there are some tried and true methodologies that have been created by some smart people to help manage the ever changing digital landscape. Such as Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, Mobile First by Luke Wrobelski, and Atomic Design by Brad Frost to name a few.

With native mobile apps, it’s a bit easier for iOS designers since there are only a handful of screen sizes, resolutions, and devices to really account for. And with the advent of Auto Layout, it helps apply the same fundamental ideas of Responsive Web Design to native apps. With this flexibility, it helps to design native iOS applications for devices that don’t yet exist, and accommodate for Multitasking on an iPad.

Designing for Android, Google has created something truly special with Material Design in attempt to make it easier to account for the huge variety in Android devices. And with Windows 10 around the corner, there are going to be some changes towards designing a Universal Windows Platform app.

If you’ve ever heard the quote “form follows function,” it’s not a lie. Well, at least not for things that are well designed. That’s why it’s so important to design with actual data as soon as you can. Not Lorem Ipsum.

The content of a web site drives everything. Everything that is implemented should be to elevate the content, help people complete whatever actions and needs they’ve set out, as well as balance it with the goals of the business.

These 18 Design Axioms that are put together by Involution Studios are a great set of principles to refer to, with this Axiom being my favorite.

When you have real content, it means:

• Less rework. The amount of time need to change what you’ve made is exponential relative to the number of changes and how complex the project you’re working on is.
• Less headaches when translating a design from mockup to code.

Sketch Data Populator is a plugin that compliments this idea of working with real information. With that, plus Mockaroo, you have yourself an inventory of data and a tool to leverage that data.

Sketch 3: A-Z was a one-week workshop that gave attendees the principles for designing modern day websites, and how they could get up and running with Sketch 3 as a new design tool to see their ideas come to life.

These are the limitations within the project. Some examples could be:

• Browser Compatibility
• Operating System Support
• Performance/Size/Speed
• Bandwidth Concern

Other than technology constraints, there are the design constraints for both minimum and maximum values.

When dealing with presentation of information, there are certain thresholds in place to help avoid things becoming a sprawling mess. When presenting a list of news articles, that entire organism could be made up of an image, a headline, a descriptor, and some metadata such as the author, time posted, and number of comments. During this process, there should be a content strategy in place, because if a news article had an headline that was 300 characters long — it would break the design. Establishing a maximum character limit would avoid that outlier from happening. For headlines that were longer than 60 characters, there could then be two headlines: one that will be seen on the actual article page, and the other be the shorter version that is displayed elsewhere on the website.

Using real data has been invaluable especially when it comes to user testing. If you’re working on an existing product, being able to test new designs with a real user with their real data yields an order of magnitude better insights and feedback. Something as simple as passing in a user ID, or having them authenticate their account and pulling a sampling of data allows users to react beyond the surface level of a design, and give profoundly better feedback about the viability and usability of a feature.

When dealing with the web, there’s a whole landscape of devices and screen sizes. Having someone use their watch to view the page you designed isn’t out of the realm of possibility with some Android Wear devices. With that in mind it’s important to know how your website will appear in such circumstances. That’s where a mobile first approach to design is beneficial, and in how it is coded — using media queries to extend the design beyond the smallest screen sizes and device capabilities. Not the other way around.

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope you loved it, but we're curious to know what you thought.

Episode 31: Flipped Classrooms, with Bryan M Brush

Bryan goes solo this episode and looks at a growing trend in instructional design known as the flipped classroom. He discusses not only its origins and advantages, but also its pitfalls. By the end of this brief episode you should be able to make sense of what exactly a flipped classroom is.

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Educational Technology

Blended Learning

The Fresh Prince of Bel Air Theme Song (Full Song)

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Classes

The Rise of Any Time, Any Place, Any Path, Any Pace Learning: Afterschool and Summer as the New American Frontier for Innovative Learning

Twilight of the Lecture

From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side by Alison King

American Teachers Spend More Time In The Classroom Than World Peers, Says Report

Teachers Win Fight For More Planning Time

A New Understanding of the Digital Divide

Technology won’t fix America’s neediest schools. It makes bad education worse.

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope you loved it, but we're curious to know what you thought.

Episode 30: Memories, with Sam Bantner

Recorded in a car filled with mosquitos in Maine, Sam explains how externally storing our memories let's us remember more.

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Sam Bantner pulling out all the stops.

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Episode 29: Community, with Joe Darnell

We have Joe Darnell subbing in for Bryan this week to talk about community. We look at what a community is in both the on- and offline world, and how we can use algorithms to uncover these communities.

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A fellow podcaster, Joe Darnell has a vested interest in logo design and branding for online and print media. He's especially keen on attention to detail and productive workflows. Altogether, Joe has 15+ years of experience in graphic design, video editing, and audio production. Not too long ago, he was the creative director at one place, and then another. For now, Joe works alone, like Batman. For listeners of All of the Above, his TechTonic podcast is right up your alley.

You can find him on Twitter @_JoeDarnell

Khan Academy

Instapaper

Square Cash

We review movies and TV shows, aggregate movie and TV news, offer opinions and analysis, and most of all have good fun and great discussion.

A podcast best served fresh.

The Seismic Shifts in Technology Culture

Upper Echelon

Technology has expanded our sense of the word community. Previously we may only have thought of a community as a town or neighborhood. Such a definition is centered around mostly a shared geographical location. Today communities can refer to a group that shares similars interests, needs or responsbilities without any concern for distance or even time (Rosenberg, 2005).

And in turn it seems that we are seeing the idea of communities mentioned more and more in both education and workplace training. More specifically we are seeing the idea of communities of practice. For example you may see Nursing students getting together to study, have regular discussions, share experiences, and ask each other for help. That can then expand beyond just students to also include educators, practicitioners, and experts in the field joining in on the discussion, offering advice and wisdom, and serving as mentors.

The act of building and joining a community has also been shown to bring about increased motivation, engagement, and better performance academically as well as in the workplace (Mac, Ivan, Reuman, & Main, 1995). So I am interested to hear if you all have stories in which joining or building a community impacted you and your education.

Exploring the idea of Community

Steve Jobs: Making a dent in the universe

Be factual, fair about homescooling

THe #1 Homeschooling Community

Windows 3.1 User Interface

The best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over 9.9 million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

Front End Designer Playground

Hive mind

The world’s largest network of local groups.

The Flipped Classroom: Pro and Con

You can learn anything. For free. For everyone. Forever.

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow

Where learners connect

Show and tell for designers

4chan

Gamergate controversy

15 AOL Instant Messenger Things You Forgot You Were Obsessed With

Facebook News Feed Algorithm Now Considers Time Spent Looking At A Post

Girvan-Newman algorithm

The official homepage

The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam

Lisp (programming language)

COBOL: 10 Reasons the Old Language Is Still Kicking

What is skeuomorphism?

Museum Graphics

The future of the library: How they’ll evolve for the digital age

PBS Persuaders: Frank Lutz The Wordsmith

The Agony of Frank Luntz: What does it mean when America’s top political wordsmith loses faith in our ability to be persuaded?

Connect with many like-minded individuals in the Community who are eager for camaraderie and accountability.

Send Sean some money via Square Cash

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope you loved it, but we're curious to know what you thought.

Episode 28: Fitness

We explore how physical fitness can help you become more mentally fit, why it's important to design your life around fitness for a healthy lifestyle, and digital solutions to tracking your activity.

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Nike+ Running

Boozed? Widget for easy blood alcohol calculations

Regular exercise changes the brain to improve memory, thinking skills

How Exercise Can Help Us Learn

Revenge of the Nerds

What are the Roles of a Teacher?

Mandatory School Vaccinations: The Role of Tort Law

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

How I Met Your Mother

Mae, All Get Out, Mike Mains & the Branches

Skully’s Music Diner, Columbus, OH

Beliefs, Values, and Attitudes

Freakonomics: Should We Really Behave Like Economists Say We Do?

Cognitive Dissonance

How Our Brains Stop Us Achieving Our Goals and How to Fight Back

Apple Watch Health & Fitness

Track, get motivated, and improve with the ultimate running app

Peter Drucker

Social Entrepreneurs Must Stop Throwing Starfish

Apple will support reproductive health tracking with HealthKit in iOS 9

An iPhone Widget for easy blood alcohol calculations.

The 10 Highest B.A.C.s Ever Recorded

ResearchKit

Apple Watch teardown reveals pulse oximeter, suggesting future measurement of blood oxygen

Swift. A modern programming language that is safe, fast, and interactive.

Confidence Fitness Slim Full Body Vibration Platform Fitness Machine, Black

Ab Shocker

Columbus Web Group’s Weekend Workshop — Sketch 3: A-Z

Columbus Web Group

How did you enjoy this episode? We hope you loved it, but we're curious to know what you thought.

Episode 27: WWDC 2015

After an interesting keynote for WWDC 2015, Bryan, Sam and Sean talk pick the one thing that interested them the most, and go deep into Apple News, Swift 2.0, and Apple Music.

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Audio Scrobbler

Beats Music

Clear

Digg

Flipboard

Getty Images

LinkedIn

Nuzzel

Rdio

Spotify

Clear

Getty Images Stream

iBooks Author

Apple’s WWDC 2015 — Catch-up

Apple’s new developer program may actually bring more extensions to Safari

Live from WWDC 2015, with special guest Phil Schiller

Apple News app brings ‘beautiful’ personalized content to iOS

Magazines, with Jacob Tender

Digg’s RSS Reader

Your personal magazine

iBooks Author

Apple News Publisher

iAd

Facebook Instant Articles

Apple’s News App Takes Aim at Facebook

Making a Podcast

News Publishing Guide

Facebook Instant Articles: Where are we now?

Not the Digg that you knew

By John Gruber

The super-easy way to see news from your friends

Swift 2.0

Swift 2.0 is being Open Sourced

What is a compiler?

The R Project for Statistical Computing

Go is an expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected programming language.

Swift Blog

Does Object Oriented Design have a place in web development?

A small place to discover languages in GitHub

Swift

Stocks and stocks and stocks

Clear for Mac & iOS

Apple Music

Apple’s biggest surprise at WWDC: Diversity

Steve Jobs - iPhone Introduction in 2007

Jimmy Iovine just revealed the real agenda for Apple Music

Music for everyone

Plays your music, any way you want

Probably merging into Apple Music

iTunes Match

Zane Lowe

Ebro Darden

The best decision Apple made yesterday was getting Julie Adenoma

The business of being superstar DJ Steve Aoki

A music recommendation service

All Songs +1: The Art Of Streaming

iTunes Ping

Drake’s awkward promotion of Connect

Drake

Rush

Céline Dion

Here’s the $825 vintage jacket Drake wore at WWDC — it was made just for Apple employees in the 1990s

Apple proves that Android is the new Windows

Apple’s ‘Move to iOS’ app lets Android users wirelessly migrate to iPhone

Cavs vs. Golden State Warriors — June 9, 2015

@DevinHallady

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Episode 26: Travel

This week we become your digital travel agents and discuss cosmopolitanism as a tool for education, the many, many, many design aspects of luggage, and the technologies we use on our journeys. Oh, and we talk about toothpaste too. So much toothpaste.

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Overcast

Transit

Waze

Car2Go

Ariadne GPS

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

Travel: Education: School: Education by Neith E. Headley

Official Website

The official Rick Santorum for President theme song. Also on SoundCloud

Episode 183 — Bugle Lady Special

Rick Perry has a Rap-Country Campaign Song

Episode 017: Maps, with Graham Welling

@TrevorPaxton — Sam’s friend in China

Trash Troubles Pile Up in China