Pemaquid Communications

Rob says: I’ve been giving Jordan some required reading during her internship. Here’s a book report.

The Design of Everyday Things sounds like a subject we shouldn’t need to read a book about. Especially the people who are trying to do the designing.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (also known as The Psychology of Everyday Things) talks about how poorly some things are designed.

Have you ever had trouble figuring out how to open a door? Or do you constantly turn on the wrong light switch even though you use it every day? Do you have a coffee maker, or stereo, or alarm clock that has so many buttons you don’t even know where to start? Maybe you’ve even… had trouble finding something on a Web site?

These are all failed attempts at usability.

The kicker: People usually blame themselves when they can’t figure out how to use somehting, but when things like this happen, it’s not because you’re stupid; it’s because the device or object was poorly designed.

In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman talks about all the things about human nature that aid or detract from the ability to come up with the perfect design. Everything from the user’s “conceptual map” in their head doesn’t match the physical layout, or the designer’s conceptual map, to the subtle signals we have become used to, such as, a door with a vertical handle is to be pulled out and a door with a horizontal handle is to be pushed.

As long as designers don’t ignore what people already know, and the amount they are capable of remembering they won’t have a problem. As the book goes on he goes on to explain how new technology is making some design problems, like buttons with too many functions, obsolete. He describes the various issues with everyday designs with real examples that he has come across, making it an interesting and funny read.

To anyone who is interested in learning more about Usability and Design in a book that isn’t painful to read, like a lot of the informational books out there, pick up a copy.

On Tuesday our coworking gang at 28 Maple Street held our first-ever Jelly and it was a huge success! The place was abuzz with activity – and more importantly, creativity. At any given time, about a dozen coworkers were collaborating in the conference room or lounging on the sofas.

Below is a rundown on the people who made our Jelly “Jell”:

Nick Hall (@tripdragon) – showed how he creates custom brushes and textures in Photoshop.

Our new coworking partner, Sarah Robbins (@brightworkllc) showed us how she uses Protoshare to make quick mockups for her projects.

Big, big thank you to Casey Rosenthal (@caseyrosenthal), for getting a more powerful wifi broadcaster in place to handle all the traffic. Internet service was screaming and flawless throughout the day. Casey also arranged to make sure we had plenty of coffee from our friends at Bard Coffee (@bardcoffee, @bardtogo).

Dave Weinberg (@daveweinberg, @AIGAMaine) created one of his patented cellphoneSketchpads. Dave and I also compared notes on working with local ad agencies with Web designer Katie Benedict (nope, not on Twitter… yet).

Progmatica members Justin Henry (@jhenry) and Russ Jones (@codeofficer) swooped in. Among other things, we hacked around the inner workings of the Django framework SQL. You guys are super geeks! (and I say that with admiration).

Arielle Walrath (@ariellebw) and her husband came by and, I think, got a little Web design work in.

Jason Thaxter (@thaxter) was wrangling with Flash action scripting for some online videos he’s working on for WGBH.

Good news! It looks like Jason, Tiffany Rad (@tiffanyrad) and Keith Sirois (@sirois) will be joining us on a more regular basis, starting in August.

Suddenly realizing it’s strange that Casey, and not Pemaquid’s intern Jordan Warren (@jmwarren19) who fetched the coffee for our event. We kept Jordan out of trouble by having her browser-test two new site launches.

While we’re on the subject of coffee (it happens a lot), I want to thank: Bard Coffee for being a friend and cutting us a break on the java; our landlord Portland Pie (@portlandpie) for the wicked good pizza they provided for lunch (Dave Weinberg is right; you must try the Nor-easter); our neighbors at Blush (@blushimagery) who provided an extra table as more people started to arrive, and Steve Darnley (@stevedarnley) of Tugboat Creative (@tugboatcreative) for offering his conference room for overflow.

And finally, thanks to Pemaquid’s Creative Services Coordinator Sheila Reiser (nah, not Twittering) for organizing the recycling of trash and generally ensuring our carbon footprint is minimal.

We missed you: Jeff Norris (@thumbtech – hope you’re enjoying your vacation) Mikey Hougland (@lamikey), Alex Steed (@alexsteed), Fred Abaroa (@costavidafred), Sarah Wallace (@sarah_wallace – glad you’re feeling bettah!) and Frank McMahon (@franklinmcmahon).

Things went so extraodinarily well that we’ll probably do this on a monthly basis on the third Tuesday of each month. At last word, Space Gallery (@space538) is planning on continuing their Jelly every first Tuesday, so hopefully we’ll make Portland a two-Jelly town! Amazing for a city this size, which tells me there’s a lot going on here under the hood.

How was your Maple Jelly? Let us know in the comments.

I’m very excited to announce that we have a new coworking partner at the 28 Maple Street mashup.

Sarah Robbins is a Web designer who operates as Brightwork LLC. Currently Sarah is managing improvements to Yacht.com.

Her faithful companion is Alibi the besenji. They’ve both settled right in and are a great fit with the rest of us mad hatters.

You can meet Sarah and Alibi at the coworking Jelly we’re hosting tomorrow.

Follow Sarah on Twitter: twitter.com/brightworkllc

www.facebook.com/pemaquid

113 fans and counting!

Since we’re having so much fun with it, we’ve decided to host a Jelly at our coworking space at 28 Maple Street.

It’ll happen Tuesday, July 21, from 10am – 4pm.

We’ve been working with the folks who brought Jelly to town, Chelsea Baker, Nat May and our friends at the Space Gallery (congrats on the new Web site, guys!), to try to hold Jellies bi-monthly. For now, we’re aiming for a Jelly @ Space on the first Tuesday of the month and one at our place on the third Tuesday.

So come on down! There’s plenty of bandwidth to share and we’ll keep the coffee hot.

We have a new Delicious account – delicious.com/pemaquid – that we created to compile helpful links for beginning Web designers, programmers and whoever else might be interested. There is all kinds of sites included and I did my very best to label them in an understandable way.

For the uninitiated, Delicious is a social bookmarking tool – it allows you to access links from anywhere and share them with anyone. You can also see which bookmarks are the most popular.

We’ll be adding to these links over time and because Delicious is a social bookmarking tool, feel free to add them to your Below are some of the links that caught my eye, either because they seemed really helpful, or because they seemed really cool.

If you know of any sites that you think would help out the friends of Pemaquid let us know and we will check them out and add them to our Delicious account.

http://www.w3schools.com/sitemap/sitemap_tutorials.asp – This one may be my favorite. It is tutorials for html, css, javascript, xml, ajax and a bunch of other things. It was the perfect place to start for someone who knew barely anything about the code.

http://www.useit.com/ – This is Jacob Neilson’s website, and anyone who knows anything about usability should know about him. He was the author of the textbook, Usability Engineering, we used in my GUI Design class at USM.

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ – This site lets you upload a picture and create a color palette from the colors in the picture. Do you really like how the colors in a painting, or the view as you look out your window look together? This site will give you the colors to use on a website.

http://www.1001freefonts.com/ – Looking for that perfect font for a logo or headings for a funky website? Here’s the place to look. 1001 fonts and they’re all free. Fun idea: write your next note to the office in one of the funnier ones.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/ – 53 CSS techniques you couldn’t live without! I think the title is self explanatory.

And there are many, many more (247 more to be exact). These are the ones that stuck out to me, being an html novice and easily amused by colors and fonts. I’m sure we have something that will help or amuse you too.

A Jelly coworking session was held yesterday at the Space Gallery between 10:00am and 4:00pm. There were roughly 15 people there at any time.

There was a lot happening:

Sarah Wallace (@sarah_wallace) and I brainstormed to develop the social media strategy of a Pemaquid Client.

Casey Rosenthal (@caseyrosenthal), one of our coworking partners at the 28 Maple Street space, helped me determine that Shopify was probably the best e-commerce option for a small business Client.

Alex Steed (@alexsteed) and I discussed ways to work together to develop the tech community in Portland, and we batted around an idea for an iPhone app.

Jordan Warren (@jmwarren19), Pemaquid’s intern, helped set up Google Apps for one of our Clients. She and I also learned an important lesson on spelling errors (but that’s another story).

I met videographer and prolific twitterer Chris Cavallari (@chriscavs) IRL.

Chelsea Baker (@charmquark) filled me in on her new job at Grace, Portland’s newest restaurant.

I got to know Mikey Hougland (@lamikey – photo below) a Web designer from Providence, Rhode Island who is looking to relocate to Portland. Like me, she uses Coda. We’re glad to have you, Mikey!

I have been able to play around with some fun things while at Pemaquid. I’ve been spending some time last week sprucing up the Pemaquid Fan Page on Facebook.

We are still playing around with is, learning all that it has to offer. I wish there was a better way to write in a description of the company, but there are other cool features, including discussion boards, the Wall, and video that will help us keep you all updated about what’s happening round the office at 28 Maple Street.

We have 73 fans as of today. We need to break 100 in order to get a vanity page URL (“http://facebook.com/pemaquid”). Like what you read here? Become a fan and help put us over the top!

We know the value of social networking for a business we wanted to keep up with the trends. There is also an ad manager but I haven’t even looked at the capabilities of that yet.

The other thing I have been playing around with is Google docs (http://docs.google.com). I never knew such a thing existed and it might be the best thing ever. Every student should know about this! You can create word processing documents, spreadsheets, even forms.

It’s all wicked easy to use and then you can email it to others, and let whoever you want have access to view it or edit it. You can make surveys and send it to people and Google docs automatically makes a spreadsheet and records the responses for you. In addition to all that, because it’s linked to your google account you can access it wherever you can access the internet.

No need to worry about having your own computer, or your flashdrive, or emailing it to yourself (which I think every college student has done at least once), it’s just there, whenever you need it. For someone like me, who is crazy about having everything organized this is the best thing ever.