Of course you do, as all of us.

As a creative and graphic designer I’m always looking around for inspiration and one of the best way for me is to collect images that stimulate my creativity.
Of course if you just collect images without organizing them this method suddenly become just chaotic, losing its utility. So, the problem is how to organize this material?
You can create folders on your computer where to put your images… But there’s not a simple way to add tags, associate images to a specific project, find them…
You can use one of the powerful image managers available either online or as client App… but this way you need to download the image, add it to the App, organize them…, and anyway this method doesn’t allow an easy way to include organically your collection into a project or a presentation…

That’s why we decide to improve Licorize creating an easy way to get images from the web.

Licorize 2.0 makes collecting photos easier than never.
You can now open the webpage where you found interesting images, open the Licorize bookmarker window (available as plugin for Firefox, Chrome and Safari or as bookmarklet for all the others), click on any image you want to add to your collection and that’s all!

Images will be automatically added to your strip; the strip can be associated to a public or private project, you can add as many TAGS as you need; you can make a public or a private booklet viewable by everyone from everywhere….

Videos

As for images you can collect videos; in that case, if you are on a Vimeo or Youtube page and you use Licorize, it automatically detects the video and suggests you a Video strip type with the actual URL embedded. If the video is embedded on a generic page you can get it by clicking on it once the Licorize window is active; the strip switches automatically to the Video type and the game is done.
Here is a short video cast by Pietro explaining how to collect images and videos for a specific project:

If you already use Licorize than you just have to try this new feature (and all the other explained here: http://blog.licorize.com/2011/09/07/licorize-2-0-bookmark-presentations-rssflipboard-integration-maps-location-handling-and-more).

If you are not using Licorize…
What are you waiting for? Start today!

The Navigator, Buster Keaton

I found what my friend Pietro Polsinelli wrote in his article The blurring distinction between graphic design and software development really interesting; he takes the right point view of a modern approach to software development.

As a creative code developer and as member of Open Lab, I can say that this method of working keeps is quite different from the standard approach to development: it gives people a sort of three dimensional perception of what they are doing.

Usually a programmer draws the behavior and the workflow of the app he’s developing, constraining graphic designers to adapt their creativity to what exist. This approach penalizes usability, hampering possible “Wow” effects and increasing complexity. Vice-versa no graphic designer can create a usable and comfortable interface without knowing what’s possible on the code side. Neither developers nor graphic designers can finish their work without any marketing analysis and content editing.

As Pietro says, “among the hats one startup should include in its first team, there is indeed development and marketing, but also graphic and usability design […]” and all these roles should continuously involve each other, brain storming together on all sorts of problems.
This “cross-competence’s feedback method” increases our productivity and the interface’ smartness; we needed just three month from the idea to the product for both Patapage and BugsVoice (two of our new products); it completely changes the way of working both for both graphic designers and developers, expanding each other skills and flexibility.

Diagrams for the Living Interface

I am increasingly convinced that our skills should be less specific and instead embrace everything that surrounds what we do.
The evolution of the web in the recent years is a reflection of this change, from a system composed of millions of isolated pieces, to a system in which every element is trying to communicate intelligently with others, where there is no distinction between enjoyment and action.
Users have an increasingly participatory role and often become direct authors of contents; I’m thinking to the world of blogs, wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, and how these services are able to interact between them.

All this happens just because the distinction that previously existed between technology and creativity has been broken, invading every area of communication and radically changing our lives.

Today, a web designer must also deal with functional aspects of what she/he is doing, and must have programming skills, vice versa a developer must acquire user interface skills to optimize the usability of her/his application. This confluence of roles makes the difference between what works and what does not work for the end-user.

It doesn’t mean that a developer has to do the graphics himself … it would be a disaster! This means taking part and be aware of each other’s problems to address their skills in a more creative and responsible way, getting faster innovative solutions that respect user needs.

People are not looking for full featured complex applications… people are looking for something that fills their needs in the easier way. As we can learn from some successful web applications like Google itself or Tweetter or Flickr or WordPress and so on… we should not reveal the complexity of our application, we should instead exalt the smartness and the usability of it. And this is possible only if developers and GUI designers work together to code and interface interaction.

Those considerations can be applied not only to the web but to everything that needs user interaction in the real world; lets think at cars, phones, appliances, clothes, shoes, …

So you designers and you programmers participate and share your ideas! And also hope that Pietro (a developer) will never work alone on his application GUI!

Suggested readings:

• Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge
• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Alan Cooper

We are proud that Develer, a florentine software company, is organizing a software conference here in Florence and we will help them where possible!
The main conference’ topics are agile projects, open source and web 2.0.
We proposed to participate in the talks with an evolution of the Get visitors to read and remember your home page blog posts, which is an important topic for a startup which is attempting self-promotion. We will also give discounts on our products to all participants to Better Software – stay tuned.

The call for papers has just started, all details are here: http://www.bettersoftware.it/call-paper/