brightperegrine

Checklist Design
List of design elements and best practices to follow with each one. Pretty big, but doesn't get everything.

Component Gallery
List of design components and examples in big design systems. Smaller scale elements than Checklist Design.

The Ideal Line Length and Line Height in Web Design
Finally, a coherent explainer of what makes lines of text look good and bad!

Pros of attending a design talk about search: yay I now have a much better idea of what I am doing

Cons of attending a design talk about search: just realized my previous work needs improvement and should go through another round of revision... again.

I have a 2017 15-inch Macbook Pro. Last year, the keycap for the F key stopped attaching to the underlying butterfly switch. This was annoying, but workable. I put the F keycap back onto the butterfly switch and kept typing. As long as I didn't tilt the laptop at the wrong angle, the key would mostly stay in place.

Yesterday, the E keycap broke off.

Today, I went in to an Apple store to fix it, and they said that they'd have to replace the entire top case of the laptop, for a total of $700. This is a completely ridiculous price, far less than what a halfway decent external keyboard costs. I had one of those too, but stopped using it because some of the keys were broken, and I didn't want to pay for a replacement. I decided to leave the broken keycaps as they were on my laptop, and just buckle down and replace the split Kinesis Freestyle 2 I had.

Apparently, the butterfly switch keyboards have been a known problem that have been in production from 2015 to 2019, two years after I bought this Macbook. There's a program to get these butterfly switch keyboards replaced for free, but it only covers until 4 years after the sale, which meant that this stopped applying to my Macbook in 2021. Yuck.

Another demonstration of why we need right to repair. Ew.

For the last month or so, I've been doing UX design for Ourchive, a group making open source software to create fan media archive websites. It's been interesting working with this group, which is very small and in an early stage of design immaturity.

Fan media archives have a lot of constraints. In Ourchive's case, they want a responsive website that holds a lot of information. Based on how things work at Archive of Our Own (Ao3), a much larger fan archive, most users will probably be accessing it on their phone. At the same time, design of the site is expected to be modular, because Ourchive is making software to create many different small fan archives, not just a single one. This is a huge information architecture problem.

Things done so far:

• Heuristic evaluation of the current site issues
• Card sort! Got real data from real people about how they group different types of fanfiction metadata together. Might be worth running further stuff for visual art and videos, but that's for later
• Wireframes of what the browsing to reading flow should look like, mobile and desktop

There's a lot more work to be done in terms of visual design, but I'm probably not going to get around to it in this design round. Ourchive is meant to be a modular software package, where every site is expected to customize its own appearance. It's fairly similar to Dreamwidth in that sense. When it comes to the flagship example site, they're still deciding on what the identity should be for that, and anything I design now may end up premature.

Honestly, I'm not the biggest visual design person anyways, so this isn't the worst thing in the world. Let someone else deal with the exact corner rounding that each button should have.

Reason for this project

Personally speaking, Ourchive is a bit of an ideological project for me. I grew up reading fanfiction, and I've come to admire the DIY ethos that was behind fan hosting projects like Ao3 or Dreamwidth. As they say, constraints breed creativity, and fan projects deal with a lot of constraints. I've mentioned the ones in play for Ourchive above. There's been a lot of thoughtful conversations on how to hold many different types of content online for different audiences, and I feel that the tools that these fan projects have created for personal content curation and existing without corporate approval are worth learning from.

I won't lie that I'm a little scared to put Ourchive on my portfolio in order to get hired, but I think it's worth doing so. Fanfiction has a (somewhat deserved) reputation of being a bastion of low quality porn writing, which an employer might take exception to, but I feel that the skills I'm using still stand up regardless of the context they are used for. I'm designing for an online library. What books people put in there are irrelevant to me.

Today I started on the Advent of Annotations event, based off of the original challenge here. I'm a fairly new designer starting off in learning accessibility standards, so I expect that this is going to be a learning process. (This is my way of saying that I'm looking at the answers first and then figuring out why they're placed that way.) I'm adjusting the challenge rules to work better for what I want to get out of this, as seen below:

• Build each image in Figma as a midfi mockup with placeholder fonts and greyscale colors
• Create another version of the midfi mockup at 200% text zoom
• Create another version of the midfi mockup with frame width at 320 px
• Annotate all three versions
• Use the Include Accessibility Plugin as well as the provided CVS Annotations Kit

Dreamwidth image hosting is a pain, so instead of updating with screenshots along the way, I'll probably link the whole completed Figma file at the end.

Presentation day. Bleh.

Thanksgiving break. Oops missed entry.

In hindsight, Thanksgiving was not good for the group project. We left with different ideas of what to do, and then spent half a week cooking on all these separate ideas. RIP.

A lot of the lessons this week focused on how to work with a client and make sure things get done, in preparation for the upcoming client partner projects. A lot of interesting stuff! When I was in university, I dreaded partner anythings because I always felt that they ended really badly with no results to show. Listening to these lessons, I can see where we failed to do a lot of things in those university lessons that were recommended here. Cautiously hopeful that this project will turn out better.

A lot of this week's lessons were about project management and groupwork. Interesting seeing what is recommended on a professional level. Easy to hear, hard to do.

Right now, the group project I'm working on is doing prototypes and usability test plans simultaneously. Usability testing is a really finicky thing. As far as I've figured out, you want to prompt users by telling them them the motivation/circumstances that the features are intended to be used for, and let them choose for themselves to use the features. You shouldn't tell them how to use the features directly.

There was this one video shown in class which said that "luck" in networking is made by being outgoing and showing up to more circumstances. I don't agree with the video entirely, but one thing that popped up was a challenge that every week, you should try to speak with one new person and with one old contact you haven't talked to in a while. I can be pretty bad at keeping up with people I meet sometimes, so that's definitely something to work on. Going to see whether this challenge is something I can do myself, at least for the second half of it.

Learned how to run a card sort with Optimal Workshop this week and do usability tests on a prototype! It turns out that there is a far more formal process for doing this than I thought (theme of my GA education). I also found that I can get more people to do usability tests than I expected if I hustle and essentially throw myself into the void asking for people to do my tests for me. Good to know!

Too much going on this week to really sit down and say much else. Knackered from last minute high fidelity mockup builds in Figma.