Crafting a Stellar Portfolio

Whether you're in the middle of a job hunt, day-dreaming, or just the consientious type who wants to be fired up when the time comes, check out these expert tips on creating a stellar portfolio...

Europe's treasures at your fingertips

Europeana is an astounding mega-library of cultural artefacts from VanGogh paintings, and Newton's laws of motion to sheet music, letters and historical photographs.  What's really impressive is that these artifacts are nested in the knowledge and inspiring stories that surround them.

All in the public domain!

"Explore millions of items from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings, they’re all here."
"Found something you like? Download it, print it, use it, save it, share it, play with it, love it!"

They've done a beautiful job with the presentation of this treasure (for example, they hold regular digital exhibitions and update a blog which features items of daily relevance).
Surely, this is what the internet is all about. 

Check it out:  www.europeana.eu

Gaming for science

Supporting cancer research is undoubtedly important, but playing computer puzzle games is undoubtedly more fun.  The makers of Foldit have literally managed to combine the two by building a game around the problem of deciphering protein structures, and then letting this scientific challenge loose on the world.

Fold-It takes crowdsourcing and educational gaming up a serious notch. Not only do budding scientists (or the armchair variety like myself) get to learn about what it takes to fold a protein, they get to be part of serious research and discovery.  In fact, it has already worked.

In 2011, FoldIt players deciphered the crystal structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, marking the game's first major scientific discovery.  Overtime, players could conceivably make discoveries that contribute to treatments for AIDS, Alzheimer's, or to better biofuels.  No, mom, I really am saving the world.

Foldit is just one of many interesting jewels spawned at the University of Washington's Centre for Game Science, which "focuses on solving hard problems facing humanity today in a game based environment".  Now, that's what I'm talkin' about. They do this, primarily, by combining what computers do best with what humans do best (creative puzzle solving, for example, which is leveraged en masse with Foldit).   So go play their other games.  No guilt required.

Modern Art for Interface Designers

How can visual perspective be innovated to tell different stories?  When does a coin make a bad icon?  When does a bolt of lightening make a great artist?  Alan Blackwell of Cambridge University takes us on an insightful tour of some of the suprising lessons that link computer interface design and modern art...

UX London - 6 highlights

UX London saw the convergence of inspiring veterans and fresh new designers.  Concepts as diverse as Big Data, humility, abundance and the "Internet of Things" were ever-present, and  experience was described as an ecosystem of multiple events and touchpoints running across many devices, places and moments in time.

Here are just a few highlights from some of the UX leaders at companies like IDEO, Facebook and Intel who shared their insights at UX London...

The PBS Kids Lab

Best part of the job?  Playing educational games.
Take an online field trip to the the PBS Kids Lab on your lunch break today.   It's a great place to check out new developments in educational online games and mobile apps created by the long-time leaders in children's educational entertainment.

Get physical, situated and embodied with some of their delightfully web and mobile camera enabled experiments in augmented and virtual reality gaming for kids.  This big kid, for one, had a blast.

Visual Smarts - Science via Typography

Mumbai-based graphic designer, Kapil Bhagat has created a slew of divinely inspired posters in honor of Science Day in India.  They are a perfect demonstration of how much can be said with typography alone and with the simplist of lines.

Each poster is a visual puzzle based on a scientist and/or scientific concept and each is an absolute delight to unravel.

See all 8 clever posters

Elegant activism - Infographics at Bashir Watch

BashirWatch.org is an impeccably crafted site that succeeds in allowing users to explore difficult but important information in ways that add clarity and interest.  Bashir Watch is an organization promoting the prompt arrest of Omar Bashir, the Sudanese leader behind the genocide in Darfur.  There is a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court for multiple counts of human rights abuses but he remains free. 

The message of the site is utterly to the point, and they take care to present users with the facts that back it up. They balance clean text and carefully selected imagery in a deliberately restrained way that never overwhelms. Like an increasing number of sites today, they have opted for one scrolling page, which makes it easier to casually move through more information without the "commitment" of a click.

But what's most interesting for learning interface designers are their information visualizations, including an elegant interactive timeline, which can be explored in multiple ways, and an interactive travel map with hotspots to drill down to detail.  Check it out (and sign the petition).

Extreme Accessibility - How to save lives with eLearning

Far from the typical audience of corporate or university eLearning, Thare Machi Education designs lessons on topics like human trafficking and cholera for learners who are extremely poor, mostly illiterate, totally unfamiliar with technology and speak hundreds of different languages.  How's that for a brief?

Graceful interface scaffolding - Learning from Letter School

Letter School, an app by Dutch game maker, Boreaal, is one of the several apps on the market created to leverage touch-screen advantages for supporting preschoolers in learning to make letter shapes.  Like the others, kids use their finger to trace and write letters of the alphabet.  

The animations and sounds in Letter School are delightful, but what I found especially notable was the app's excellent design for gracefully fading scaffodling (akin to seemless contextual help)...