Any new updates as far as posts will be done on Feedgrids.com from now on. We will be including a blog on the site as well. I am trying to consolidate my online presence to one website, I am getting way to busy and not able to manage all the various websites.

See you on Feedgrids.com!

I will be speaking at TexFlex this Friday November 13th. If you were ever interested in Adobe Flex, Flash, application development etc. this is the event for you. Check out the line-up!

My presentation will be on “Working with Designers”

• I will discuss the differences between traditional designers and UI designers
• How to find the right designer for your project
• How to best communicate with designers
• And talk about ways to improve the Designer/Developer/Business relationships and work flows.

See you there!

A study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies found that business focused on a customer experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10 to 1 margin from 2000 to 2005. (Source: Peer Insight LLC)

Companies that align site content and function with user needs see increased click-through rates, reduced bounce rates and higher conversion rates. Comapnies that change menu structures to math the way users think improve metrics like number of product views, total number of orders and conversion rates by double-digit percentages. (Source: Forrester Research)

Spending 10 percent of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83 percent (Source: Nielsen Norman Group)

Being at the right place at the right time is only a small piece of the puzzle. I do not believe that success only comes from hard work, luck and opportunity. Those things help, but only after you found, and realized your true gift.

I believe people are born with gifts, its all a matter of realizing what those are. Only a few of us discover the hidden potential, and that is why we only have the few geniuses in the world at any given time. Those geniuses happened to realize what they had and acted on it just by pure interest, and passion, not because they felt forced to succeed in it. Most successful people are successful in something they love doing and were doing way before they became successful the outcome was only a bonus.

I strongly disagree with the fact that anyone can do anything, if it’s not in your DNA to have passion, or interest in something why would you try to succeed in it? Why would you want to? You would never have those opportunities, or luck because you wouldn’t surround yourself with them.

To reference the book by Malcolm Gladwell Outliers: the story of Success. It is true that people like Bill gates might have succeeded in the technology realm because they were exposed to a computer early on when most people didn’t, but so did other students in his classroom. His true passion that was buried within him became apparent. The other students just didn’t have that interest. We can’t force people to do something they don’t have a care for.

I do not believe Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs at some point said “I will build this new operating system to be rich and famous”, they had a passion for computers and that passion led them to success, and opportunities in a newly emerging untapped industry.

There are many students out there with the same passion and determination to succeed in their fields, but there will always be the ones that do better with less effort. If you have it you have it. I see that all the time in my own field of design. I saw it all through my college education, people that were never meant to be designers tried and tried and never got far enough in skill or creativity compared to others that just had the gift.

Those people were a bit unique because even though they had no gift for design they had passion and determination, but that again, only proves my theory, that hard work and passion is not enough to make you successful.

So, I do agree that circumstances might play a role in the upbringing of an individual, the people you surround yourself with, the opportunities, luck and hard work, but I believe that all those things only play a small part in uncovering your own genius and not creating it!

Another good example is child proteges! 5 year old’s with brilliant piano skills or Math skills. Those kids just have it!

Please feel free to argue and share your thoughts…

My first year at Adobe MAX and it was awesome! Great vibe from everyone, great excitement, and overall great atmosphere. I didn’t know what to expect, I had no idea Adobe goes all out like that, thank you so much for doing all this for the fans and users!

The staff was very informative, and ready to help you out when you had questions or got lost on your way to the next lab. The sessions were very casual and informative, even though a couple seemed somewhat basic, I was hoping to get more in depth in some of the labs for Catalyst for example, but being such a new product, having introductory sessions makes sense. I did learn some neat tricks that I didn’t know though, so in the end I was satisfied.

Some of the coolest stuff was during Sneak Peeks, some will make it to the market some will not. The Adobe Rome project really stole the show though, unbelievable what can be accomplished with actionscript, 200k lines of code to be exact, still once you see what it can do you will be surprised it only took that 200k. Think Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks combined, with a slick and minimalist UI design that removes any unused clutter from the workspace, and you have Adobe ROME. I really can’t see this project ever making it out to market though since it would really cut into Adobe’s profits Buying ROME would mean no need to buy the full suite anymore. Anyways, below is a video of it in action!

Dan Goldman also showed a very cool “content aware” spot healing brush that just makes removing things from photos so quick and easy its unbelievable, that tool I am sure is being shipped with CS5. Photoshop has a history of updating their favorite cloning and healing brushes in every version of Photoshop. My wife will be so excited when this comes out, it will make her post photography work so much faster. Check out my HD video below.

Another cool sneak was the smart paste in Dreamweaver, being able to just copy and paste flash files, spread sheets, images, and videos straight into your html files, WTF!? Video below.

Also, on the next video Chewbacca displays some awesome physics in flash, wow!

Here is a link to the Adobe Max photo stream on flickr, enjoy!

It is almost time for Adobe Max! (I need to start packing at some point). I figured I can share my schedule of sessions and labs for the next 3 days, and also give the first time goers like me some info on what to look for and how to prep, courtesy of Jonathan Campos

Monday

• General Session
• Flash Catalyst 101: Hands on Lab
• Introducing Flash Catalyst Beta 2 and What’s Ahead for Flash Catalyst
• Structuring UI Design Comps for Use in Flash Catalyst
• Meet the Teams

Tuesday

• Photoshop CS4: The Essentials of Image Enhancements for Web and Flash Designers
• General Session
• How to Visually Design and Prototype Websites
• Advanced Interaction Design and Designing for Data in Flash Catalyst
• Sneak Peeks and 2009 Max Awards
• Max Bash!!!!

Wednesday

• Down and Dirty Tricks in Photoshop with Corey Barker
• Design Websites that Grab People: Building Online Communities

Since this is my first time to MAX I made sure to take some tips from Jonathan Campos, so here they are:

DON’T MISS THE KEYNOTES OR THE SNEAKS!
These are the singular biggest and coolest reasons to come to the conference. From new technology to experimental technology these are by far the coolest things you will see. Monday and Tuesday morning are the keynotes and Tuesday night before the big Adobe bash are the Sneaks.

Also, note that the Sneaks are right after the Max Awards – a place to see some of the coolest pieces of software developed in the last year. So go see the cool software of last year and stay for the cool technology of the next year(s).

Bring your business cards
After the keynote and the sneaks the main reason for Max is to network. If you don’t leave with at least one good contact at the end Max you didn’t talk to enough people. This is the biggest collection of rockstars you will ever hope to have, talk to people, ask for their contact information, and make sure to follow up.

At night I highly recommend keeping your ears open for the places people are going and go out. When networking even the brightest stars like to dim their lights a bit over a pint and a shot – or in my case, some Jack Daniels. Even if you aren’t a drinker go out and chat people up. Some of my favorite memories are filled with discussions of code and theories when we are all 2 sheets to the wind.

I can tell you now, don’t plan to go to every single session that you put into your session schedule

Also, visit Adobe’s resource page for all your social media needs. http://max.adobe.com/resources/

So there you have it! See you at MAX!

In a previous post of mine I mentioned some work I did for the very awesome people over at slideroom.com

My role on the project was to redesign their existing application, and address some of the usability issues and complaints they were getting from some of their users. Working along with the marketing team and the development team we redesigned the whole UI and UX experience!

The new version is now live, and I can’t be more thrilled to see this puppy move! Watch the video below.

Watch the SlideRoom Video

The new website is up, there is still some kinks to work out but at least it’s up right?

We loved our 5 year old website however, we feel our site should always be directly reflective of where we are as a company, as designers, and developers. Much has changed in the past few years and our site had to reflect this new direction. UM used to be focused more towards print, branding, and web. But since then our focus has shifted to application design, and development.

The new site was designed and built with simplicity in mind. As it stands it’s a simple one pager even though I am sure it will expand at some point in the future with more information about each project etc. You will also notice that we have far less projects displaying on the site now. We decided to clean up the work and showcase work that is different enough in order for the visitor to get an idea of our broad spectrum of style and type of project. We will keep adding screenshots as new and unique projects keep coming up!

Things to come.
We will try to get more personal with this new design. You will notice updates that start to happen soon, like twitter updates from both me and Jonathan, new blog posts, flickr images etc.

Wait! Where is all the red!?
Yes, we chose to go with a less loud color blue this time around, the red just wasn’t working for us any longer, we got tired of it a bit, plus Jonathan likes blue, no… like really likes blue, check out his license plate next time you run into him, spells out the color Blue in Hex! Yes, his car is blue.

Feel free to give us feedback, thanks!

Below are 2 examples I just had to share! Enjoy, and feel free to respond to any of them if interested

I made sure to highlight the areas in each post that made me laugh, just to make sure you don’t miss them!

Wordpress Project – 125 sites

Reply to: job-kxzut-1336039150@craigslist.org

I have a serious of web sites I own all related to investor relations. I need someone that knows WordPress very well. Someone that can work with many themes and help launch about 125 domains live as individual WordPress sites.

Think of these as “microsites.” Some will be more generic. Others will be about a particular subject. Ultimately, I need to get all live with about ten different themes. Each with its own database, twitter account, syndication feeds, and a few other things. I am looking for someone who knows the shortcuts to copying a WordPress site, changing it up a bit to fit the new domain name, set it up with its own feeds, etc., then move on to the next one.

I am going to pay per set of five microsites as they are completed. Be reasonable, as this is not that hard a project.

Someone with a sense of style and ability to make a theme look good with a few simple plugins would be a much sought after commodity in doing this.

Website Design/Read This (Plano)

Reply to: job-9hmhf-1342910554@craigslist.org

I am looking for someone to work on a contract basis for 1 week to 6 weeks depending on how well you do.

You will be 1099 with no taxes withheld.

I need someone who is without a doubt experienced in the following:

designing and building websites HTML SEO Page Ranking Links search engine submission Familiar with top Google PR domains (PR4-PR7) that really will be available to get the following day!
Keyword Research Navigation Analysis.
Links
email contact management

I am not sure if there is someone out there that really knows these things or thinks they can fool me

I will not do business over the Internet. You must physically be able to meet in person and be able to work 40 hours per week Monday-Friday

Here is my issue. Why would you redesign just the homepage of the app and leave the rest the way it was, or at least most of it. I mean I want the new experience to follow through. And don’t give me wrong, I am not talking about changing the things people love about twitter, the way it works, the simplicity etc. But at least update the graphics to the new style!

For example, the first thing you see on the homepage is the big redesigned “sign up now” button, when you click it it takes you to the form, simple. But, look at the “create my account” button! What happened to the sweet looking new button from the homepage!!?!

Same thing with the background, changing on you! The process just doesn’t sit well with me. There are a few more around the site, but no need to get in to all that. I just wanted to vent!

Visit twitter