Back in June 2012, I was contacted by UX designer and visual note-taker extraordinaire, Mike Rohde. We’d been in touch before, to talk about “sketchnotes” and spreading ideas around. Along with 14 others, Mike asked me if I would like to provide some artwork for an upcoming book: the Sketchnote Handbook.
Are bears Catholic? Does the Pope… ? Well, yeah – you get the idea. I was only too happy to produce some illustrations and that book has now been published.
After the customary post-Christmas somnolence, the first EBI Interfaces event of 2012 is here… and my apologies for the short notice!
WHERE: Courtyard Room, EBI (ask at reception if you’re not sure where it is)
WHEN: Wednesday Feb 22nd, 15h00
Seating is always a bit of a challenge in the Courtyard Room, so please arrive promptly to make sure you get a seat.
This is a relevant article on the BBC about our perception of colour. There was also an episode last night on BBC 2 about it, but I missed it. You can watch it here on iPlayer though. Although it’s quite obvious that each of us will see colours differently as a result of many colluding factors including the distribution of cone photoreceptors on our retina plus signal processing in the visual cortex, it’s worth considering that combined with different monitors, printers and related colour profiles that we have yet another layer of complexity in dealing with colour and how we present it to users. There is also a slightly more technical piece about perception of colour when multiple wavelengths are present here.
The grey tiles on the left look blue, and the grey tiles on the right look yellow
Nice site showing examples of what and what not to do when creating web pages, particularly those with plenty of text with respect to readability.
An example with bad contrast....
An example with good contrast...
The Ampersand web typography conference is taking place in Brighton on Friday 17 June 2011. Tickets £125 + VAT.
Ampersand is an affordable one-day event for knowledgable web designers & type enthusiasts, featuring:
Vincent Connare, creator of Comic Sans; David Berlow, type designer & cofounder of The Font Bureau; Tim Brown, type manager for Typekit & maker of Nice Web Type; John Daggett, Firefox developer & editor of the CSS3 Fonts Module; Mark Porter, former creative director of guardian.co.uk; Jon Tan, web designer at Analog & cofounder of Fontdeck; plus special guest.
The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) is organising a two-day conference on 25-26 March 2011 at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, with support from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Oxford e-Social Science project.
When: 25-26 March 2011
Where: Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Cost: Free register here
Details: Conference programme
HTML tables
It’s interesting how many HTML tables there are on bioinformatics websites. It’s equally interesting (in a way) to see how bad they can look. I can literally count in one hand the number of times I’ve actually seen a nice looking table. So…I was very happy to stop by this post on designing HTML tables.
Have a gander, I found the post to be fairly well written and puts into action a lot of design concepts.
Colour
The next post I wanted to bring attention to focuses on color wheels. The post is entitled Color wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works.
The post actually brings up some really great points Bang Wong made on his visit to the campus last year. He also has a recent publication in Nature Methods regarding the use of colour.
I hope you find this all interesting and useful!
A rather marvellous presentation about presentations, from Jesse Desjardins:
Hat-tip to Robert Slowley for point out that one.
Hi all,
I’ve just started a blog detailing some of the stuff I’m doing in an aid to keep users more informed about the features of our tools and upcoming enhancements. A recent post, which I think would be useful for a lot of people on this list and at the EBI in general describes how we present ontologies to users, both to browse, and search.
Moreover, an important project in the world of standards is MIBBI, which is a portal containing all the different checklists (i.e. MIAME, MIAPE, etc.). Part of this project involves making checklist creation easier for users, so if the user selects a number of concepts they wish to represent (e.g. Study Design, Organism, Mass Spectrometry analysis), they would get an instantly usable checklist to populate with information via Excel, some XML viewer or even ISAcreator!
The blog article for the MICheckout is here, and the application itself is online here.
Pascal Raabe (#jazzpazz), a graphic designer and student based in Bristol, has released a really nice poster explaining user centred design.
You can download it for free in PDF of JPG format, and you can order a high quality, A1 sized printed copy in return for a donation towards Pascal’s studies.
