Rumor has it that Apple is requiring all staff to wear these Saturday. Might want to grab a pair of these if you are going to be in audible range of fanboys.

Image from my upcoming article.

Dunbar's number is a theoretical number of the amount of people we can maintain a viable social relationship with. It was first proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar. The number includes family and past colleagues you would consider catching up with again. In regards to social sites where you have hundreds of friends, at a certain point they become only names or voyeurs into your world. Face-to-face will always count over virtual relationships: “A touch is worth a 1000 words any day,” says Dunbar.

Via BrainPickings

Brilliant minimal house designed by architecture firm Elding Oscarson out of Sweden. Love the contrast of the modern building in a historical area. Just beautiful. 

"Townhouse in Landskrona. The narrow site is sandwiched between very old neighboring buildings. Three thin slabs are projected into the open volume, softly dividing its functions. The continuous interior space is opening up to the street, to an intimate garden, and to the sky. Completion September 2009"

I really like the next version in the evolution of Candy Script by Alejandro Paul. 

Here is some work I did for the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival that is happening this weekend (February 19-21). I came up with the overall branding for the festival and worked on the posters featuring the headline acts: Jeff Garlin, Roseanne, and John Waters. It was a bit of a challenge since the photos were all different resolutions and styles. I wanted to use large type and flat, yet bold colors so the art would stand out in the winter wonderland of Northern Michigan. 

Since the ArtPrize competition and venues are all over the city I wanted to see how their locations affected the voting of pieces. While you could gather some of this insight without visualizing it like this, it would be very difficult, and definitely not as nice looking.

Using SpatialKey I brought in ArtPrize data which consisted of 1263 entries. The data was a basic spreadsheet of the entries that I had to just save as a CSV file and the rest was geo-coded by the application. (Thanks to Joe Force & Vince Dudzinski for providing the data and asking me to visualize it in SpatialKey)

Once in SpatialKey I was able to cut, slice, and filter the information to answer some questions I had, like:

How are the art pieces distributed around town? I first rendered a heatmap (Screen 1: Heatmap) of the distribution of the ArtPrize pieces around Grand Rapids. Then I tried another visualization (Screen 2: Green Circles) to show the actual numbers of pieces in the various locations.

Where are the Top 25 located? Using the Top 25 currently listed on the site I marked those entries and filtered out the rest to show (Screen 3: Blue Circles) where they are located. They seem to be located more in the center of town and I found that 7 of the Top 25 are located in The B.O.B. That makes sense since it is hosting 156 of the entries (the most of any other location).

How many of the Top 25 are Michigan artists (vs artists outside of Michigan)? Taking the Top 25 I split up the visualization and found there are 12 Michigan artists (Screen 4: Orange Circles) and then there are 13 artists from outside of Michigan (Screen 5: Green Circles). I was surprised to find that none of the artists from outside of the US were in the Top 25. Maybe they were in bad venue locations?

Where are the pieces from artists outside the US located? In the last screen I turned the layer back on showing all of the entries (Grey Circles) and placed a layer of where the artists from outside the US (Blue Circles). I found that they are distributed fairly well throughout the competition, so the fact none of them are in the Top 25 doesn't have much to do with location.

There is a great discussion going on at Konigi: What's broken about wireframes and how can we fix them?

I was sucked into the conversation in the comments and I ended up adding my thoughts:

"Wireframing and building prototypes are exploring very raw ideas. They are early testing/validation of approaches to a solution (based off of whatever discovery you were able to do). Most of these ideas will be thrown away. This phase is about failing quickly to get to the solution. We have to put away the thoughts about reusing pieces. This is about idea generation. These sketches are meant to be explored with a UX team or or developers that understand this is an idea phase and not being presented as the solution. I think that the wireframes we build from these ideas in Fireworks or whatever tool should be more reference for an internal team to use in building a prototype.

Here are some of my favorite slides from a presentation I did last night about the creation of SpatialKey from a UX perspective.

Here's a small look at some of the improvements we are making in SpatialKey. This is the evolution of a "Filter Pod" from sketch to pixel-perfect comp.