David R. Moulton's Blog » Design

iQ: Very cool typeface

David — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:38:22 +0000

Take a look at how the new iQ font was created.

Watch a video on how iQ was created.
http://nl.toyota.be/cars/new_cars/iq/iq_font.aspx

Jing Project

David — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:33:28 +0000

Originally uploaded by moultonstudio

TechSmith launch Jing Pro this week and so far it has been well received. One of the things that was key to the successful launch was the new jingproject.com site, which was largely due to work done by my counter- part Nick and one of our amazing writers, Dan. I got to help a little on this one too… I took the essence of the Jing site and tried to build this bridge page on techsmith.com.

Camtasia Studio 6 launch!

David — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:00:27 +0000

This week we launched the new Camtasia Studio 6 and with it, a new site. I was heavily involved in the design and development of the site, though, as is always the case at TechSmith a lot of people pitched in to make sure that this is a successful site.

A quick video walk-through of the site that I will be adding sound and narration to soon.

Heat map results for the initial 5000 visits, via a CrazyEgg test.

Totally ripped off.

David — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:54:56 +0000

For several months now I have been trying to get the site that ripped off my design (compare to my archived portfolio site) to do one thing for me. Delete my Google Analytics tracking code from their site.

I am past the idea that the page layout or code is or ever was something that I could somehow protect. The Google Analytics code that I use to track my traffic and improve my site is different.

In short, I expect that you would delete that tracking code from your pages when you steal from someone else. However some hapless Germans are not this clever and as you can see… they shifted the imagery but if you look at the code… we its mine and its pretty lame that after several requests to have the tracking code deleted I have been ignored.

I have tried to contact Mode Wübbenhorst. Of course I have heard nothing. If you have any ideas, I am open to suggestions. The email listed on the site is giselawuebbenhorst@web.de and here is some of the WhoIs info.

I think that thing that bugs me the most is that I am reminded every time I look at my stats. I am not looking at a ton of traffic so the addition of the Mode Wübbenhorst traffic skews things.

An Event Apart was awesome. Awesome!

David — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:37:19 +0000

In case you did not catch that, An Event Apart was awesome! What a conference. What speakers. All amazing. I am still unpacking my notes and digesting all the tidbits. More to come as soon as possible.

Check out the Flickr pics.

Summary of the conference.
All speakers centered their conversations around Design, Code, User Experience or Inspiration. Most covered a couple.

Zeldman: “Have empathy.” Jeffery states that a great designer must have empathy for the audience and be a great communicator. “Know your audience and know yourself” he says.

Tools to test your site for free.

David — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:23:11 +0000

In July I decided to relaunch MoultonStudio.com. It was time. I have been at my new job for over a year, my desire to publish has been much stronger, and I finally settled on a design concept that I like*.

So after (re)launch, I went ahead and posted to a couple of CSS/design galleries. My hope was to generate some traffic so that I could see the strengths and weaknesses of the design and content. There have been a few surprises, and for revealing those, I am grateful to those that have taken the time to look at my site.

Google Analytics = time black hole.

Googles Analytics is a massively powerful tool. You can track just about anything, but there are a couple standouts in this application. These are just my favorites… deciding which are the most useful would be tough to call. I think it depends on what you want to know.

Content by Title

I like this because it lets me quickly understand what content visitors are looking at, the only drawback is if you have not made your title unique… I do and that had really helped me get a quick picture of my visitors experience.

Navigation Summary

I always have a tough time finding this in the UI, but the hunt is worth it. Being able to see how visitors are moving through the site lets me focus on improving that experience.

Map Overlay

Google calls this the “Geolocation visualization” and it is one of my first stops. Who is looking at your site? California? Sure. New York, why not? China… um wow.

CrazyEgg… very pretty

CrazyEgg is one of my favorite tools. Knowing where a user clicks is an amazing advantage. You can see what is working and what is not. I use CrazyEgg at work to test homepages and landing pages. Showing our stakeholders what is working (or not) in a beautiful, visual method pays off. People “get” this tools visual approach.

One of the surprises for me was revealed by CrazyEgg. This surprise was on my portfolio page. I could not believe how may people clicked on the URLs link. And that’s the thing about CrazyEgg. You set up the test thinking you understand how the page will work… and at the end you realize that people are interested in what they want, not always what you expect.

CrazyEggs visual tools make this tool something that will always be in my bag of tricks. The recent(ish) addition of the Confetti view is the most interesting to play with, though I wish I could save the data out as a self-contained SWF (hint).

Check out CrazyEgg and Google Analytics.

* This is harder than you might imagine, I am perhaps the worst client I’ve ever had.

My Wordle – A very cool tool

David — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:03:00 +0000

Today I was introduced to Wordle.net. This is an amazingly cool site/tool. It is also a major time suck (in a good way). I wish I could have had this during my early graphic design classes where we were constantly challenged to experiment with type —this could have been a source of massive inspiration. Check it out, and feel free to link to your saved version

Spell Check.

David — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:27:50 +0000

Almost all modern software can do spell check… rare is the app that does it really well. I would love to see two things done better. Make spell check “ON” all the time. This is especially true for Adobe Dreamweaver.I am awful at spelling and this is the one program that is rotten at spell check. Then I go and publish and my pages are full of errors. One part me being lazy, one part bad UI/function design. All bad.

The other thing that I would like is a way to have your personal dictionary accessible in every application from any computer you are using. Imagine, your own dictionary in the “cloud”. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that I only had to click “Add to Personal” once for Flickr, my lastname – Moulton, my friend Tomania or any of the countless other words, names or preferences that I have? I would be gleeful the day I could I log into myclouddictionary.com/davidrmoulton and the squiggly red lines all disappeared no matter what program I was using.

BTW is it website or web site?

Brainstorming… part 1

David — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:59:49 +0000

Today Nick and I discussed brainstorming. How to brainstorm. When to brainstorm. What to do about the “wet blanket”. We laughed. We plodded along. He mentioned bedinner, again. Another laugh. Back to the brainstorming thing talk. He says that this is a process that is done best with small(er) groups. I wonder what smaller means. One? Two? Maybe five? I’ll have to follow up. I like to think that the number is something you deal with by having a process/procedure in place depending on how many you want/have to include. Though I agree that to many will ruin it…

Sam Harrison talked about a general a five step process. I am looking for my notes, but I remember EXPLORE | BRAINSTORM | PAUSE… Basicly, if you go into a meeting (ugg) to cover the entire process you will fail. I agree. If you need a creative solution the lessons of Blink are pretty useless.

I think that you should be presented a problem, pointed to the supporting material and then discover as much about that problem as you can on your own. Research the issues, the market, the evolution of the past solution, the competition. Whatever you need. Get intimate with it. Now you are ready to actually start throwing out ideas…

I will follow up with part two later this week. In the meantime, I am looking for comments.