FWA 2007. Which is your favorite? Be sure to explore the interviews for the background story on all the great sites, and their designers or design teams.

For a summary description of some of the years selections, Rob Ford’s latest article on Adobe Dev Connection.

One of my responsibilities on the Adobe Platform Design team is to develop best practices for AIR application design. I’ve got a whole lot to say about the matter and in the new year you can expect a series of posts detailing these practices. Now, after reading Ryan Stewart’s post about physically packaging AIR apps, I’ve got another area for design consideration - AIR app marketing.

I really do enjoy the idea of physically packaging AIR apps, but imagine that the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits. Establishing a physical distribution model is incredibly hard work requiring a sales force, product production processes, shipping, merchandising expertise, and, well, a whole slew of other practices I know less about that this: the web is easier. One of the great benefits of developing with AIR is that you can employ tried and true web marketing techniques in the support of your desktop application. With sound SEO practces, press releases, an intellgient product concept and execution, a great brand, and a meaningful web/desktop intergration strategy (which I’ll write more about in the future), you can establish a powerful presence in the market without busting the bank, and in a shorter period of time.

The concept of cross-aggregation comes up in the comments of this blog posting on Design Notes. I’ve noticed that when I explore new products/services that allow me to communicate, I find them more usable the easier they make it for me to be even minimally more productive, and more useful the better they integrate with other products/service I already use.

Here’s a great article by Richard F. Cecil in which he defines a visual language for RIA component states. If you need to document your RIA designs in the form of flow diagrams, you may find this article useful.

As an aside, it’s great to see Richard use concepts and terminology that map very closely to the structural model established for Thermo.

One of the guiding philosophies of my design team at Adobe, and one that is constantly revisited, is that the real thing is better than words. That is, in design communication, words are of the least value, whereas a working prototype is of the most. And static wireframes, and designed mock-ups, fill in the middle values.

Over the last two years this philosophy has driven me to become a better graphic and visual designer, to learn actionscript, and to , in general, write a lot less and design a lot more.

I’ve found this approach to design useful when working on small projects, where time is short, the design is of limited complexity, and I’m working with only one or two developers. For larger projects, much more written design communication is necessary. The nature of words are that they are easy to create, and to change. Visual designs, on the other hand, are not nearly as flexible or quickly created. Fundamentally, the larger the project, the more necessary a strong but flexible conceptual foundation. Words are simply the best way to quickly describe the design in total, and the easiest to change in response to feedback from customers and stakeholders.

I came across Felix Turner’s site when searching Word Press for photo plug-ins. I found it in his lightwieght and beautiful SimpleViewer. It’s an elegant Flash photo viewer, which thankfully integrates with both Lightroom and Word Press.

After finding SimpleViewer, I was drawn in to the other work and information on Felix’s site. All great stuff. Felix has a great intuitiion for motion, and a clean and efficient graphic design style.

I love this. Yahoo just released their new Flex component skin that matches the visual look of their UI components. This is one of the benefits of Flex that I love - custom skins, and the ability to swap out different looks, and feels. In the future, I can only hope that Adobe does an even better job at facilitating workflows that make it easy for designers to create custom Flex skins quickly and without much guesswork.

This great article by Jessica Helfand is a must read for those of you who design or build Rich Interactive Experiences (RIE). It’s about type, and why it always matters. Type (and theatre) are the foundations of experience design. Learn about their histories.

Here’s a great pullquote from the article:

There are those who believe typography, like beauty, rests in the eye of the beholder. And while it is not now nor has it ever been a science, there are certain typographic tenets that remain somewhat protected by, well, the vicissitudes of cultural civility. In general, we like to be able to read our typography.

Oh. Snap.

Jonathan Harris’ latest work documents his experience preparing for and engaging in an Inupiat whale hunt. His stated motivations for the trip and project are to experiment with a new interface for storytelling, subject himself to the same incessant automated data collection process that he usually writes computer programs to do, and optimally present such a rich experience on the internet.

His second motivation is downright novel. It’s difficult for most people to grasp the nature of algorithms, or of the power of processing. It’s also difficult for most people to realize the efficiency that technology brings to our everyday existence. Jonathan’s whalehunt makes the idea of automation tangible, to a certain degree.

Now, because my goal in the blog is to raise awareness of good and bad design practice, I can’t help but provide critique of Jonathan’s work.

The Good

• Original patterns for photo presentation. Showing number of photos as a difference along a timeline is not new, but integrating it with a “heartbeat” metaphor is unique. This brings a sense of drama to the photo presentation.
• When rolling over the heartbeat, both a red indicator and a change in background wave conditions help orient the user’s attention. These dual motions complement each other rather than conflict.
• Content is king. Numerous controls are layered over the content in graphically intelligent ways that make it easy to visually differentiate the two. Because he places the controls over the content, Harris has the option of taking the expeirence full-screen - and this making it a trully immersive experience.
• The photos are beautiful. I want to take it fullscreen!

The Bad

• All the controls refresh with every pulse of the heartbeat. This makes it virtually impossible to target controls - they disappear right out from under my cursor!
• When viewing the greater set of photos, rolling over each shows a photo thumbnail. These thumbnails are so small they provide no information other than color value, which is meaningless in the context of the Jonathan’s greater goals.

The Ugly

• From a visual design perspective, there’s not much to critique without running the risk of being nitpicky. The various control background patterns are consistent, it’s easy to parse the experience, the typography is solid.

Check out the rest of Harris’s work.

The FIG (Flex Interface Guidelines) is updated. Rob Adams, back with another chapter, Chapter 6, now with examples.

I consider chapter 6 of the FIG to be one of the most important because it is about motion, and motion is the most significant distinction between rich interactive experiences and simple, static, graphic designs. Motion introduces new opportunities, and challenges, to the designer. It can be used to communicate, provide guidance and focus, tell a story, make the screen seem more natural, and it can be beautiful. However, motion can also be used gratuitously or in a meaningless manner.

Check out Chapter 6 of the FIG, it’s definitely worth understanding motion and making it a part of your practice.