In the spirit of the holidays, we decided put together a list of our favorite things from 2012. As product junkies...
Read more…Intridea Blog: Technology, Design, Business
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World Usability Day - Bring It On
Nov 8th brings upon us World Usability Day, now eight years in the running. This year’s major theme is the Usability of Financial Systems...
Read more…Intrideans in the Wild: from DC to Germany in One Weekend
This weekend we had Intrideans at four different events we sponsored from DC to Germany, talking about user experience, design, Ruby on Rails, and tablets. Here's a quick rundown of our experience at the events.
MoDevTablet
The first event kicked off early Friday morning. We partnered with GoMoDev to support their MoDevTablet event, and Jurgen, our Managing Director of UX, Christine Nakatani, our Director of Business Development, and Maggie, one of our superbly talented Project Managers spent the day talking with tablet developers and designers.
Read more…The Tablet Frontier: MoDevTablet
Last April we sponsored the first MoDevUX event in Washington DC and helped facilitate some important conversations about user experience design and application development with hundreds of industry experts.
We had the opportunity to take the stage to share some of our insight gained from developing beautiful, modern mobile applications over the years. Our presentation garnered a lot of feedback and even landed us a story in InTheCapital, DC's leading online news source for tech and startups.
Read more…Open Source Backpack
As someone who deals with the digital presentation layer from day-to-day, being limited to the screen creatively can be…well…limiting.
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Improve Interface Development with Box Sizing
New to css layouts or a Ninja warrior we both share one common headache, The Box Model. The box-model is the way we calculate the width and heigh of an object. The W3C modal calculates the width and height by adding the padding and border to the width you specify ( width + padding + border / height + padding + border ). This is a pain when we want to specify a width to be 400px wide, we need to then subtract the difference of the padding and border to make a 400px wide box. If we had a border of 10px and a padding of 20px, the width would be 340px wide (400 - 20 - 40 = 340px).
Read more…Smashing Conf + Intridea
We’re excited to announce our involvement and sponsorship of Smashing Conference, taking place in beautiful Freiburg, Germany September 17-19th.
This event brings together web designers and developers for three days of intense workshops and engaging presentations from design experts around the world. We’re sponsoring the sold-out event and trekking to Germany for an epic “meeting of the minds.” (And some streusel. And beer. And sausages.)
Read more…Intridea.com Redesign
Creating a more beautiful web, one application at a time.
Our website has always been more than just a sales tool for displaying our services. As a web development and design company our website is our brand; it embodies the essence of who we are: our values, our culture, and our discipline.
We don't take a redesign lightly; when we approach the task of a redesign we begin with long, thoughtful discussions about our company, our image, where we're going, and what we want to communicate about ourselves to the rest of the world. Our website has to exemplify our passion for elegant and functional design, quality code, collaborative work, and our obsession with emerging technologies.
Read more…Literary Aestheticism: Our Designers' Reading Lists
They say you can tell a lot about a person just from their bookshelf. Here is an inside look at our design team's current reading lists!
Read more…The DNA of Web and Mobile Products
Last week we sponsored MoDevUX, a mobile conference in Washington, D.C. led by vanguards in the mobile development and design industry. In addition to learning about emerging trends from the diverse crowd of presenters and attendees we also shared a bit of our own "secret sauce".
Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technologies, shared the stage with Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to tackle the topic of "Development and Design: When the Two Must Act As One".
Through cultivating a culture of quality in both design and development we've gained insights on the formula for success among teams of developers and designers. MoDevUX was an opportunity for us to share those insights with the greater mobile design and development communities.
Read more…How To Make Your Own Symbol Font
With the advent of high resolution “retina” displays, keeping bitmap images sharp and crisp on the web has meant using larger and thus more bandwidth-hungry images. At the same time, more and more people are browsing on mobile devices where bandwidth is at a premium.
One solution to this problem is scalable vector graphics (SVG) since they scale infinitely while keeping the file size low. However, now that web fonts are widely supported, symbol fonts like Dingbats or WebDings provide another option for tack sharp symbols used in icons or buttons. Fonts are also very flexible. For example, using CSS you can easily change the size, color, add drop shadows or other text effects.
But what happens when symbol typefaces don’t have the symbols you need? Well, make your own of course! Today I am going to show you how make your own symbol font using some freely available software and tools, which you can then easily embed in a web page and use in your design comps.
Read more…Goin' West - Ted O'Meara at MWRC
Ted O'Meara departs today for Salt Lake City, Utah where he'll spend the next few days immersed in the ever-evolving community of Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. He's headed for destination: MountainWest RubyConf.
Ted came to Intridea two years ago as a designer and in just a short time he's proven to be a dextrous and pioneering leader. Not only has he become an accomplished project manager, he also plunged into the development world in an effort to become a more knowledgable and powerful designer. He did it. He crossed the streams.
Read more…What's the Real Future of Web and Mobile Design?
Rails. No, really.
The future of web and mobile design is in Rails, Sinatra, Django, and other RESTful web frameworks that can be used to leverage design power across multiple platforms, making it easier and faster (translate: more economical) to design for web, mobile and desktop.
Our UI/UX team was stationed up in NYC for the Future of Web Design conference last week and we were able to chat with some really awesome folks who had innovative and inspiring ideas about web design.
Read more…Intridea Client Homezada Launches Home Management Software
Last week Homezada officially released their home inventory software, a complete solution to the dispersed files, incomplete records, and scattered maintenance reports that plague homeowners everywhere.
Homezada's formula is "Everything about your home in one place" and they're serious about that; their software allows you to easily document all the possessions in your home, track the value of all of those items, track household improvements (making it easier to remember what you've done to improve your house when you decide to sell it), access an ongoing library of to-do maintenance items, and maintain checklists of seasonal cleaning, yardwork and maintenance projects. The system can remind you when it's time to update air filters, schedule furnace maintenance, and so on.
Read more…UX For Suits
This article focuses on the correlation of UX and brand equity to quantitative measures that we see in market value.
User experience (UX) is a catch-all term that we use in the software industry to describe the overall feeling that an end-user gets when using a product. The UX is the attitude that is triggered when using (and subsequently thinking about) a company and their products and services. Since your user's attitude affects their future behavior toward your brand or product, a good user experience is vital to product adoption, engagement and loyalty.
Read more…MobileUXCamp Debriefing
Earlier this month we brought our expertise in mobile development and design to MobileUXCamp in DC. As we facilitated discussions throughout the day we were able to interact with motivated, creative mobile enthusiasts. We talked about how mobile design standards have influenced web design; we talked about our UX process, and we even delved into consulting strategies.
Read more…Betascape Debriefing - Art Meets Tech
Several of our designers and developers spent this past weekend attending sessions on art and technology and talking to people about Intridea's methods at Betascape. The event pulled together artists and technologists from various industries and demonstrated what is happening on the bleeding edge of that intersection - from robotics to personal fabrication to data visualization.
The most popular session among the Intridea contingent was Kyle Fritz's talk, "Computers Suck, The Internet Rules: How to make networked stuff that interacts with the real world." Kyle touched on ways to virtually control your home stereo, locks, lights, and other household objects that can be remotely manipulated with just a simple working knowledge of electronics and a bit of hacking. It was a great example to our designers of how technology can be accessible and useful to them.
Read more…UI Kits For Heavy Lifting
UI Kits are commonly found in most designer's toolboxes. We use them to bootstrap visual elements of a product before diving into the harder work. They are not as common with developers though, and in the spirit of this weekend's Betascape event of joining Art *and* Technology, I'm here to advocate for UI kits as a simple bridge between the design world and the development world.
Typically, every project goes through three main phases: Discovery, Design and Development. Although each phase defines a distinct position in the process, they do intermix. Generally, development starts as early as the Discovery phase, design continues to happen throughout all phases, and new requirements from the client pop up long after the Discovery phase is complete. This three-phased process is natural and effective but could be kicked up a notch by integrating a UI kit to the discovery phase.
Read more…Betascape - Where Art and Technology Meet
This weekend we'll be supporting the innovation that happens when artists and technologists collide, through our sponsorship of Betascape 2011.
Last weekend, we sponsored and presented at MobileUXCamp in DC to discuss the ways in which mobile devices are reshaping our interactions with the web. This weekend we'll be in Baltimore, supporting the incredible work that happens when artists and technologists focus their combined talents.
Read more…Democratized Data and the Missing Interface
Inspired by their recent trip to the Wolfram Data Summit, Marc Garrett and Jurgen Altziebler share their thoughts on big data and the missing component.
The Wolfram Data Summit is an invitation-only gathering in Washington, DC which brings together the leaders of the world's largest data repositories. Professors, Chief Privacy Officers, Research Scientists, Chief Technology Officers, Data Architects, and Directors from leading organizations like UCSD, the U.S. Census Bureau, Thomson Reuters, Cornell, and Orbitz (among many others) come to present on the challenges and opportunities they face in the data community and to discuss their work.
Read more…Designing for High Resolution Displays: Thinking Beyond 72 DPI
It’s been nearly a year since the release of the iPhone 4, and much to the dismay of the tech community, it’s still the only product in the Apple lineup with a high pixel density ‘Retina’ display. While the much-hyped feature drew universal praise when the device was unveiled, some were wondering the following:
Read more…Development for Designers
Designers and developers have a symbiotic relationship. While they may have complementing skill-sets, there are plenty of advantages to reaching across the aisle, so to speak. This two-part series discusses how designers and developers can benefit from becoming more familiar with each others skills and I'll offer some advice on how to get familiar with the "other side."
In this first post I'm going to talk about the world of the programmer, and how as a designer, you can start to get comfortable in that world.
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Android Wallpaper Template for Photoshop
Looking for a robust Photoshop template to create & preview Android wallpapers? The search is over! Intridea is happy to provide a pixel-perfect PSD GUI that allows you to preview Android wallpaper images exactly as they'll appear on your device. This wallpaper template is based on the HTC Vision (a.k.a. G2) running stock Android 2.2 (Froyo). The template is setup to preview wallpapers of 960x800 in size.
Read more…iPad Wallpaper Template for Photoshop
Create iPad wallpapers with this Photoshop template! Easily preview your wallpaper in vertical & horizontal orientations, upon both the lock screen and homescreen of the device.
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