AIGA – Day negative 2

aiga_design_conference_2005.gifToday was the volunteer orientation with only 2 days to get everything ready for Thursday and the start of the conference. The Hynes convention center is rather large and will have no problem holding the 2,300 attendees. The conference is split between 2 floors with the living room and market place on the 1st floor and the main conference hall is on the 3rd floor. The AIGA staff are really worried about getting people back and forth from the focus sessions since people will probably get lost trying to find there way around. Most of the focus session rooms on the 1st floor are not that big and might fill up quicker then the ones on the 3rd floor which are larger rooms. If you are planning to go to one of the events on the 1st floor be sure to get there as early as possible or you might be locked out. The layout of the building can also be circular and so getting turned around might be a problem as well. Be sure to take a tour of the building when you get there so you know where most of the rooms are.

Dorothy gave a long over view of the events going on at the conference and made it sound twice more exciting then it looks on paper. I was hoping to meet more people from Boston in the volunteer staff but I guess I underestimated how far people will come from to volunteer, the answer being just about everywhere but Alaska and Hawaii.

If you are an AIGA member with little cash to spare and can still make it to Boston I suggest trying to get the living room pass for $350. They are broadcasting everything on the main stage and then showing other cool stuff in between. You miss out on the focus sessions but you get almost the whole conference experience for half the price. Not to mention that the living room has nice couches while the main stage has crappy chairs. And yes the entire building will have wifi.

If you have any general questions I will be happy to answer them from what I’ve learned so far. Anything specific really should be directed to the official AIGA Design Conference site. At the conference look for people in the non breathing plastic white jackets that all AIGA staff will be wearing.

aigadc2005, AIGA, boston

AIGA Design Conference and Jason Kottke

Excuse me while I freak out, but I think I deserve it. Beyond actually finding a job the one thing I’m excited about is the AIGA Design Conference here in Boston that I’ve volunteered to help run. With all my large event experience I begged and pleaded to be give tons of responsibility. As every one who runs large scale events knows there is no larger responsibility then being able to properly coil cords or know the correct way to gaffer tape down wires.

Well AIGA was listening because I seem to be on the main stage almost the entire conference and I’m more excited then ever. When not placing water on the stage for Milton Glaser I also get to play with the A/V equipment and I get to do that for over 10 hours 3 days in a row (They’ve promised breaks). Looking at the list of over 60 volunteers it also seems that I am the lone backstage guru and I hope to make a huge difference… and then get elected AIGA president (that’s how it works right?).

So I’m all aglow and excited about a week of so much work I’m going to pass out when I read that Jason Kottke is also going to be at the AIGA Design Conference. Gasp! While I promise not to scream like a 12 year old girl (and my current Degrassi addiction is not upholding that claim) I just might if I meet Jason in the halls. He’s going as a… well, a professional blogger and while I too will be talking all about behind the scenes at AIGA Design Conference 2005 Jason will have some sort of laptop to blog with while I will have to do my blogging from home (at like 11pm when i get home most days). That is unless Jason feels like sharing (He’s so afraid of me right now). Hope to see you there Jason!

On more serious note, I’m interested in AIGA’s invitation to Kottke. As a designer just out of college I had gotten the impression that AIGA is not very big in the field in web design. It just seems like a sea of print designers. I have yet to figure out if AIGA does pay attention to web designers or if by inviting Kottke they are hoping to use his stardom to help give more focus to web design. Either way unless AIGA convinces me there is a lot for a web designer to gain by being a dues paying member I will not be returning for another year since I am currently poor.

aigadc2005, AIGA, kottke, boston

7 Eleven not 24 hours?

The offending 7 eleven I’ve come here from a land of 24 hours. A place where diners provided food and some of their best service after 2am. A kingdom where convenience stores never close yet always seemed to have the same employees working there.So last night I’m walking to the local 7 Eleven at 11:30 and what do I find? They closed at 11:30? A 7 Eleven? Do they all do that in Boston? I must say I was rather comforted by the fact that I could go to 7 Eleven when ever I want. Native New Jerseyans know the inverse proportion of how late it is and how much ice cream you want.

I’ll continue to hope last night was a fluke and the man behind the counter simply had to go to the bathroom and that all the lights need to be turned off to hide the super secret door that the public is not meant to know about.

Update: It turns out the hours are till 12am on weekdays (they totally closed at 11:30 on day) and till 2 or 3am on the weekends. I have a feeling most other 7 Elevens in Boston work that way and yet some many listings have them as a 24 hour store. Bah!

7 eleven, boston, new jersey,24 hours

LibraryThing – In Depth Review

Stack of BooksLibraryThing is a great new app that let you catalog you’re books. It’s in early beta and although it needs a lot of feature as far as search, design, and usability it’s a stellar start to what could be the next great website. It’s so easy to bash sites for what they don’t have and so I’m gonna make an extra effort to highlight why it’s so great.

First, as a designer and developer, I was glowing when I saw the “One-step sign up / sign in”. This is such a usable sign up form that it almost made me cry. Simplicity at it’s best. After you sign in you can go to the Add Books tab and start searching for books. Search results are listed in a side iframe which allows for dynamic loading of results. Wonderful use of AJAX as if you are unhappy with your search you can edit what is already in the search box. Clicking any link will add the book to your library and if you make a mistake you can just X it out directly after you add it. It’s some nice work of javascript. Back on the Catalog page you can view all your books. On the right you can edit the book and add tags (yes tags!) and comments as well as view the Library of Congress Card Data. All the text is searchable through a little javascript find link on the top right. Other features include exporting a CSV format which works with excel and (still being worked on) importing your library from Delicious Library. The free account only lest you index up to 200 books. The best part is that the pro account is a one time fee of $10, which if you have more then 200 books is a very worth while investment.

Okay, now for the downside. While it’s a wonderful site and I love it to death it still has some growing pains it needs to get through before it comes out of beta. One immediate downside is that you can not browse for books. This will hopefully be fixed in the future as for some searches like “Harry Potter” where hundreds of books are listed it’s hard to find the six published books you are looking for. On top of this when you do search for “Harry Potter” you can only view the first 10 or so entries. It shows how many entries are not displayed but gives no option of viewing them. Currently the search function is very particular and searches such as “harry potter and the azkaban” for the “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” returns no results while google doesn’t even blink. A hack (or feature) around this is to separate items with a comma. While “harry potter and the, azkaban” does result in a search for “harry potter and the” and separately “azkaban” it still returns results that are too general to find the book you are looking for. If you do find multiple books you own in one search it’s difficult to add them all with out constant use of the back button. Selection of a book refreshes the page and clears the search bar forcing you to retype your search. The hack around this is to (in FireFox) middle mouse click and open each book in a new tab for multiple selection. This does not seem much easier then using the back button but either way there should be a way for javascript to better handle it.

In the Catalog page there are also a number of usability issues. Top left is a Display list that shows what appears to be the multiple pages your library spans. In fact this a list to change how the books are displayed. In preferences you can edit what fields of information are shown and have multiple presets. This makes changing how you browse the books and is very useful. It’s not clear at all that the Display list has anything to do with the preferences until you mess around with it for a few minutes. One reason it is not clear is also because there is no way to jump to a page of your library. You can only display up to 50 books at a time and you only have the option of next or previous pages. The creator of the site, Tim Spalding, currently has over 400 books and how he pages to the end is beyond me. Not to mention that this sparse navigation is not repeated on the bottom of the page causing even more unneeded effort to get through your massive library.

Another short coming is the inability to add other user’s books to your own collection. How easy it would be to build up your library by finding a user with similar taste and just click all the books that you also own. With a little javascript it could make short work of quickly indexing your library. In this way the site is very focused on what you own and not on looking at what other people own. This is in fact slightly counter intuitive to the social aspect of the site. While books link to amazon (where Tim surly hope to get some amazon affiliate love) there is no current benefit to searching others libraries. You can’t add book to your own list with out searching for them. What the site really needs is a wish list of books. This would get people in the buying mind set and in fact might generate more money for the site, possibly even removing the need for the pro account. Other wise it makes little sense to click the books in your library that you own to buy them again from amazon.

Wow this is really long. While I have been rather harsh to LibraryThing only my love for it could develop this much passion (which is the new way to market of course). When it’s all said and done the site is in beta and is being actively developed. While it is interesting that some elements are done beautifully and some are badly designed or even missing there is every reason to believe that they will be addressed and quickly.

Visit my Library at STHayden!

Update: (11-01-05) Most of the problems listed above have since been fixed.

LibraryThing, library, catalog, ajax, Tim Spalding, Delicious Library, tagging

And across the street…

There is a Lewis Black bit where he predicts the end of the world has already come because there is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks. I was walking down Harvard Ave over by Coolidge Corner and noticed another CVS just down the street from the giant CVS on the corner. How is this possible? I know CVS is all over the place and Coolidge Corner is a happening place but no one needs that many pharmacies by them. If I was expecting this unfortunate event from any store I was expecting it from Dunkin Donuts, a Boston based chain which just so happens to be on every corner.

You got to love Boston but it’s still fun to poke at little inconsistencies.

Coolidge Corner with 2 CVSes

boston, cvs