Visuals and Contact Us

Like many, I am also looking for original visuals during presentations, demos and prototype development. There are many good (and reasonably not expensive) sources for these visuals.

If you are using Adobe CS2/3, it is easy to use Adobe Bridge and the stock photos.



For other images, I sometime use iStockPhoto as well.



But sometime, you just need something completely different.

There are many amazing independent photographers and artists who can provide you with unique visuals.

Some of them are using their Blogs or Websites, like Jon Hope to promote their work



while other are using services such as http://www.zhibit.org, where many artists have a platform to show their work (and get paid as well...).



A side note:
Sometime you would like to contact the photographer.
I think the "Contact Us/Me" page is a very important part of the branding.
Sometime you find a long list of links and phone numbers, sometime just an address, but some time you get more...

I really liked Jon Hope's contact page.


This visual gave me the feeling this person been places and is not just a name / URL.
(plus + he has some great work of art on his site).

E.T.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, photo, prototype, visuals, presentation

Adobe Flex Prototypes

I am working on some prototypes using Adobe Flex (again).

The applications I'm prototyping merge information from several systems and hopefully would have a cool UI...

Adobe Flex has a great 'out of the box' containers, controllers and other layout capabilities, which make it a great tool for building these type of applications.

As you can imagine, some custom containers are required to enhance the basic capabilities and experiences.

Many good people are creating these components and sharing/selling them.
For example, the Adobe Flex Exchange, Andrew Trice Blog and Quietly Scheming (as shown).



I am using the Flex Style Explorer to create and test CSS play with visuals ideas.

Back to Flex syntax now...

E.T.

Technorati Tags Adobe, Air, Flex, multimedia, photo
, prototype

Personal media and consolidation

Few days ago my wife, Nili, told me "we need to move our picture albums". Well, I thought, she will tell me where to put them and I will do the heavy lifting. This was not the case, apparently, we have over 6Gb of images in Yahoo! Photos and the service is shutting down soon.
We have so many new pictures and albums since Nili started Taking Photography Seriously.

As Yahoo! has two competing services (Photos and Flickr) it makes sense to merge/choose one. (Although I think they are targeting different audiences).

But it did make me think again about the constant conflict/tension between Consolidation and Alternatives trends. The "Web 2.0" is a great example for (re)creating alternatives with few to non differentiations (same concepts, same features, same look different mission statement). On the same look-and-feel, but different mission statement). On the other hand, consolidation trends, such as standardization activities in the open source arena.

While thinking of this, I saw this great futuristic movie with an interesting consolidation scenario.

"Echo Alert"

My comments:
1) What do you think will happen to personal media?
2) Interesting to see they vision the future in English...

E.T.