I have taken some new pictures for my Toy Comic Toolkit, some Stock Characters. I needed just some simple people shots where I could:

• Crop or extend the canvas
• Change the background colours
• Combine characters into simple cells

That is the update. It is a simple one, check it out I hope you like them.

I’m going to tell you a tiny part of the PowerPivot story which is how the product icon came to be.

A few weeks before the deadline for CTP2 I was asked to create a product icon for PowerPivot — sooner rather than later.

Here is what we thought… in the end :-)

• It needed to look like it could comfortably sit with the Office family of icons. (They changed them for Office 2010 but not too much.)
• We couldn’t really abandon the legacy imagery of SQL Analysis Services, nor would we want to.
• We wanted to portray the idea of the two windows that people would use with PowerPivot and Excel.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First we started with these sketches:

The top ones were done by my friend/co-worker Drew and the bottom ones were mine. I was a little more conservative than Drew.

From those sketches I came up with some initial concepts that we sent out to the SQL Analysis Services team to see which one they liked best. We were still trying to decide on a colour for the icon. At first people did not want to leave the familiar SQL yellow but a yellow icon is not very strong in a taskbar or grey menu, so I’m glad we could move forward with the green version.

This was the one that was chosen, which is good because it was the one I was hoping would be chosen. I liked this one because the two sides of the cube could represent the two screen that you would use for PowerPivot, one side would be the data and the other side is where you would do your analysis.

But we weren’t done yet; here is the final PowerPivot icon:

One morning, one of the designers I worked with at SQL UX, Peilin Nee came in and said she drove by a fast food chain that shall remain nameless and suggested that we try a different perspective on the cube. We changed the angle of view on the 3D cylinder and cube and knew we had a stronger design. There were fewer surfaces to show making the design simpler and easier to shrink to a small size. The edges were stronger and the icon was bolder. The last thing we had to tweak was the Pivot table symbol, which we moved from the right pane to the left one because the sharper perspective distorted the pivot arrow.

There you have it. In about 40 hours of work we went from sketches to concept to feedback to final version.

The images and icons in this post belong to Microsoft®.

If you want to find links to great articles check out PowerPivotor my link blog about about PowerPivot

Consistency is great.
Predictability is better.

Simple isn’t neccessarily easy
isn’t neccessarily good design.

Testing is vital and unreliable.

wireframes:

Sample sketches exploring alternate ways to access site level commands in SharePoint 2010. (via Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering : UX Design Tools & Techniques)

Veronica and Sadie are on the gondola in Banff, AB

This is a great presentation, definately the best concise explanation I have seen.

A group of Microsoft researchers has built a kind of multitouch for the conventional keyboard… It allows a keyboard to accept pressure-sensitivity data, from which it can infer user intentions. – Chris Dannen for Fast Company

I really love how this looks like it can be a simple inexpensive way to have new gestural interfaces enhance the work and play we do today.

Watching this video is like staring at the incoming tsunami. I’m excited and also terrified by the fact that in my career I will not only be designing experiences for kids like this but his kids.

I took this photo’s URL from Flickr and pasted it into the SeaDragon input box and I was done. The picture is from the Diablo Lake Overlook.

Microsoft Environmental practices video. The next step should be more vegetarian food choices at work.

Years ago I worked on an knowledge portal for a group of hospitals. These slides were the result of interviews with a number of group on what they need in a portal. These are fairly preliminary but it was a very useful exercise.

HealthCare Knowledge Portal Vision Slides

View more documents from brycej.

The link is to the Gallery of default anonymity: A work in progress.

According to the GSA, Recovery.gov will be rebuilt over the course of five months for a total of $9,516,324. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board then has the option to exercise options that can take the contract through 4 more years for a total of $17,948,518.

While I am shocked by the $9.5m in the first five months I’m certainly not shocked by $8.4 million to manage and maintain a government site for four years. I have done enough government work to know that warrenty commitments, change requests, uptime guarentees and managing a client in a bureaucratic culture costs a lot of money.

Sunlight Labs hits the nail on the head when they say:

The real problem is transparency. The real problem is that while many are outraged at the cost, you can’t presume that the government isn’t spending its money wisely unless you know both what Government is paying and what they’re paying for. We don’t know what they’re paying for, yet.

I hope that this gets rectified soon and that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, along with Smartronix works with our community to make sure of three things:

1. That people know what every dime of that $18MM is being spent on,
2. That Smartronix works with the community to make the process of building Recovery.gov open and transparent, and
3. That Smartronix works with the Sunlight Labs community to make the data published on Recovery.gov accessible and machine readable to developers.

That last point is a little self serving but I’m willing to let that slide.

My two cents on this whole thing is that facilitating this transparency should be mostly on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board plate. The public servants should serve the public. This transparency also needs to apply to the processes and commitments of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board as well as to the work of the vendor,Smartronix.

So let the people know what their government is doing in addition to letting them know how their tax money is being spent.

This looks really interesting. I need to find the time to check this out.

Saw this on Whidbey Island yesterday. If we hadn’t just had lunch I so would have stopped.

Cognitive Content

1. Present tense
2. Self reference
3. Similes
4. Senses
5. Future tense
6. Positive emotions
7. Negative emotions
8. Media, entertainment & celebrities
9. Insight

Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content

1. Abstract thought
2. Visual sensations
3. Affection
4. Cold sensations
5. Constructive behaviors
6. Oral fixation
7. Concreteness
8. Moral imperative
9. Order
10. Anxiety

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets.

Project Natal Demo on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (Sorry Canadians it’s Hulu)

Information Aesthetics introduced me to Google Fusion Tables

The McKinsey Quarterly publishes Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers with audio.

Kate Niederhoffer writes consistency, connectivity, and consequences

Then there is a post on the IxDA discussion list on SharePoint & Semantic Web events. A topic very near and dear to me that is massively ignored. After all good search is magic not work.  Maybe if we started calling sharepoint metadata a name like SRO (SharePoint Results Optimization) then people would care.

Now all I have to do is find the time to read these sometime today :-)