Nicole Kenney, one of my favorite illustrators and a fellow ND alum recently had the above piece published in Smith Magazine. You can check it out here.

The One-Inch Grid

I’m a terrible present wrapper. My cuts are always off line and i always have way too much paper on the ends of my package and not enough in the middle where i need the paper to meet. I’ve watched a long string of very good present wrappers ply their trade with no noticeable improvement in my own ability. Innovations in wrapping paper design that make it easier for me to cut the shape I want to cut are a christmas wrapping god-send for someone like me.

How do you improve on wrapping paper? It’s cheap, it’s easy to cut and fold, it’s easy to rip into and it’s easy to dispose of. Pretty perfect, all things considered.

Here’s how you improve wrapping paper: grid out the back side in one-inch squares for easier cutting.

Incremental improvement is the way to add value to a product that has already been universally accepted. You’d probably have a hard time getting people to try a product like “spray on wrapping paper,” for example. It’s too extreme. No one would use it, and the product would fail. That doesn’t mean that wrapping paper is perfectly designed and can not be improved. What it does mean is that improvement needs to be applied in a way that clearly adds value to the product without scaring away people like my mother who have been using said product for decades.

Merry Christmas.

A Very Key Term Before we Begin

Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ is a free application from Blacktree software that is available here. At it’s very basic level, it’s a launcher that allows you to open applications with intuitive keystrokes (and by intuitive…i mean “typing P-H-O-T-O…etc until Photoshop is selected and then hitting Enter to activate it”).

QS has become such an essential part of my computer use that I, frankly, struggle when I’m forced to use a Mac that doesn’t have it installed, so I strongly recommend it to any mac users who haven’t tried it out.

I am in no way connected to Blacktree, I don’t create or support any development plug-ins for Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ. The following tutorial merely explains how this Designer figured out how to use available plug-ins to extend QS’s functionality to my iTunes library.

We begin.

This post (attempts) to explain how I use Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ (QS) to control what songs I want to play in iTunes on the fly, without switching applications and without interrupting my workflow.

Why I do this

I use QS to do this because I feel like I’m more productive with music playing and I know that I’m more productive when I don’t switch between applications. Cmd+Tab from Photoshop to iTunes to select a song usually results in a stop at Gmail, maybe a glance at Twitterrific, RSS feeds, iChat, and before I know it…20 minutes have passed (or more). QS makes song selection an intuitive part of my work flow so I can listen to what I want without breaking stride. Best of all, downloading, installing and setting this up is extremely easy. Even a designer can do it. (Insert obnoxious developer laughter here).

Party Shuffle is your Boyfriend, Girlfriend, Best Friend…Party Shuffle is Where I Want You to Touch.

I feel like Party Shuffle is poorly named. “Music Stream” would be more appropriate, if it didn’t imply an internet broadcast. Perhaps “Bottomless Playlist?”

At any rate, It allows you to set a continuous run of music that’s drawn either from your library, or from specific playlists. I have Party Shuffle set up to draw tunes from a Smart Playlist that I edit to filter out everything i don’t want to randomly listen too “Artist is not Dane Cook” for example. (I have nothing but love for Dane Cook, just not when I’m designing a website).

I listen to music in Party Shuffle. All of my playlists, or any of my tracks, or group of tracks can be easily moved into party shuffle by selecting all the tracks, Ctrl+clicking on one of them and selecting “Add to Party Shuffle” or “Play Next in Part Shuffle.” You can see the beauty of this: Playlist functionality…Never-ending flow of music. When we add Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ into the mix we’ll be able to use both of these commands on the fly while working in other applications.

The Process: 4 Easy Steps to Seamless Tunes

• Install Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ (ignore if already installed)
• Install the iTunes Module
• Create a Trigger
• Make it part of your Workflow

Step 1: Install Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ (ignore if already installed)

• Go here.
• Click on the Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ tab and click “download.”
• Once it downloads, open the Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ drive in Finder and drag the QS application to your applications folder. Double click to activate it and run through the setup process.
• If you wish…under QS preferences click the “Start at Login” check box and the “show icon in menu bar” checkbox. (QS defaults as a dock icon. I hate dock icons.) You can access the QS preference by either clicking the menu bar icon and selecting “preferences” or by summoning QS with Ctrl+space and clicking on the arrow in the upper right corner of the application window.

Step 2: Install the iTunes Module

• Open Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ preferences by clicking on the menu bar icon or by summoning QS and clicking on the down arrow
• Click on plug-ins in the upper right of the preferences window
• Click on “Recommended Plug-ins” It should look like this:

• Scroll down to “iTunes Module” and click the check box. The plug-in should automatically install and QS will relaunch. To make sure all is well open the preferences page again, go to “installed plug-ins” and make sure the iTunes is there. All good? Cool. Almost done…just have to set up one more thing.

Step 3: Creating a Trigger

If we just use QS as normal (Ctrl+Space and then typing what we’re looking for), we’ll search the whole hard drive including all applications and files. To jump right to iTunes, we need to create a specific trigger that will bypass everything but the iTunes library. Here’s how to set this up:

• Once again, go to the QS preferences
• Click on “Triggers.” iTunes should be one of the choices in the left-hand menu. Click on it.
• On the right is a list of all of the potential commands that QS can be set up to activate with a keystroke of your choice. (”Keyboard Shortcuts” to us Adobephiles, QS calls them “Triggers.”).
• Scroll down to “Search iTunes” in the list of commands and click the check box next to it.
• You’re going to need a key combination to call up this command, so click on the word “none” in the right hand column. A drawer should slide out to the left of the QS window. Everything should look like this:

• Click in the Hot Keys field and select a key command combination that will be quick and easy to remember. I use Creative Suite all the live long day, so I set my key combination up as “Cmd+Shift+X.” If this has over-written any mission critical key commands, it hasn’t affected me yet, but feel free to use whatever you wish here.
• Close out QS
• That’s it. Really.

Step 4: Make it part of your workflow

Now, whenever you hit your Trigger, no matter what you’re doing anywhere on your Mac, not only will you summon Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ, you’ll be searching ONLY your iTunes library. Here’s how it works: 

• You’re listening to music in Party Shuffle while working in another application and you get the sudden urge to listen to Mysterious Ways
• Hit your Trigger (Cmd+Shift+X if you’re like me)
• Start typing “Mysterious Ways”
• When the song comes up in the window hit Tab to move into the Actions field
• Select “Play Next in Party Shuffle”
• Hit Enter
• Go back to work. Mysterious Ways will automatically be queued up next in Party Shuffle and will start playing as soon as the current song is finished.

Trust me, that process took way longer to read then it will take to execute. Especially when it becomes second nature.

Notes

• You’ll probably want to make “Play Next in Party Shuffle” the default action once a song or album is selected. To do this, hit your Trigger, type a song title, tab over to the actions field and press the down arrow key to show the list of possible actions to perform. Ctrl+click on “Play Next in Party Shuffle” and select “Make Default.” (Naturally, you can make any of the commands listed your default).
• When QS is activated it’s constantly running in the background scanning and rescanning and cataloging your hard drive looking for changes to files and applications. As such, it has to “learn” where tracks are as they are added to your iTunes library, so it probably won’t catch the new Mylie Cyrus single you just bought from Amazon that you’re hoping no one will know you own. It usually takes 15-20 minutes for the newest tracks to be noted and selectable. Patience, in this regard, is a virtue.
• You can add whole albums to Party Shuffle with this process also. It’s done in exactly the same way: by typing the name of the album in the selection field once QS has been summoned with your Trigger keys. Additionally, you can use the right arrow key to drill down into the selected album in the selector window and tell QS to play specific tracks from it. This comes in really handy if you know you want to listen to a particular track on Ten by Pearl Jam, but you’re blanking on the title for whatever reason.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. If you decide to try this out, find it helpful, have questions, want to scream at me for totally confusing the crap out of you…please leave a comment and let me know.

-oAk-

I just finished reading this great article about the perils of redesigning major websites. The author illustrates the “Kubler-Ross hatefest” that a redesign invariably incites. To wit…

Denial: Why on earth did you change it? The site was fine the way it was.

Anger: My twelve-year-old could have done better!, F***  you, I’ll never use this site again.

Bargaining: At least give us the option to use the old version.

Depression: I used to love this site. Now I can’t bring myself to use it. I miss [feature X]

Acceptance: Actually, I’ve been using it for two weeks now and it’s not that bad.

I think most of the nd.edu redesign team would concur with the validity of these stages.

The best part of the article however was the following story about a redesign experience from the eBay design team:

…the classic eBay redesign story, which I assumed to be apocryphal but have been assured by insiders is true.

In a nutshell, a meaningless background was removed from a seller page. Pandemonium. After strong resistance the background was reinstated, to everyone’s satisfaction. In fact, the rebellious users were so placated that they failed to notice the designers slowly adjusting the background’s hex values over the next few months. The background got lighter and lighter until one day “pop!” it was gone.

More then likely, this is how we should have approached the dark blue background on nd.edu. Instead of digging the trenches and settling in with our provisions to fight a long protracted battle, we should have just started with plain white and slowly added a slightly darker value every day until we eventually hit our desired blue, with no one being the wiser.

I love this site, because I am painfully aware how easy it is to get carried away with a design and throw in a bunch of superfluous elements that don’t need to be there. This site is hot largely because this is what a plumbing and heating company’s homepage should look like and this is the content it should include. No more. No less. The service number’s even in the upper right hand corner in big yellow digits, just waiting to comfort my red, swollen, tear filled eyes after an hour and a half of bailing water out of my basement at three in the morning. 

I am in no way surprised that this site was put together by Astuteo, a design studio out of Wisconsin the homepage of which I discovered last month. (It’s currently the front-runner in the much coveted “Inspiration for oAk’s Impending Homepage Redesign” awards).

It’s easy to design cool, informative, beautiful sites for rock bands and amusement parks (and University Sustainability Initiatives). You really gotta take your hat off to designers who can roll up the metaphorical sleeves and make a site this sharp for a plumbing and heating firm.

It’s impossible to hit this homepage and NOT think “Professional Operation.” Well done.