Si Jobling

This week’s Industry Insight by Creative Bloq focussed on Google’s patent for augmented reality glasses and what it could mean to design.

They asked me for my thoughts on the topic where I think about data, APIs and web applications:

“The concept of augmented reality has plenty of potential when it comes to design.

It brings all the information of the Internet to a relevant contextual situation so we have to think about the organisation and availability of data. If you’re creating a web app or service, is the information available through APIs? Can your data improve someone’s experience in an appropriate manner?

We laughed at the vision scenes of the Terminator, evaluating his environment in real time, but all this becomes a possibility with a Web of data accessible from a pair of glasses – or, maybe in the not-so-distant-future, contact lenses.”

See what other leading designers from around the world think in Industry Insight: Augmented Reality.

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It’s always an honour to be asked to contribute content to magazines, especially to be joined by some of the web industry’s biggest names.

Along with Sir Jeffrey Zeldman, Elliott “The Fro” Jay Stocks and Dan Mall, Creative BloQ asked us what our favourite design apps are for the iPad.

There are many obvious choices such as Keynote and Dropbox so I selectively picked two invaluable tools I use to help make my ideas a reality that others might not be aware of:

iMockups (£4.99)
A great app for quickly creating interactive low-fi wireframes void of detail

Gusto (£6.99)
A really useful code editor with FTP connectivity and basic site management.

You can read more on why I chose iMockups and Gusto along with the other 20 Best iPad Apps for Design.

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This month, .net magazine published by thought piece on No More Excuses.

There’s a lot of creativity in the web industry, so many people with brilliant ideas, but we’re all guilty of making excuses as to why we shouldn’t make that website we’ve been mulling over for too long.

My intention was to address five popular excuses with suggestions on how to combat them.

1. “It’s been done before!”
2. “I haven’t got the time!”
3. “There’s too much to do!”
4. “I don’t know where to start!”
5. “But nobody will use it!”

During my time as a web professional, there have been a number of tools and techniques I’ve adopted to aid me in creating the many side projects I’ve built. From project management techniques to online tools, from calling on the active community for help to reusing available resources openly shared and distributed.

Ordinarily, I would just publish the content here but I’d prefer it if you just picked up a copy from your local newsagents (or online) or download a digital copy from Zinio.

This article seemed like an ideal opportunity to gather all my thoughts and experience into a brief guide for others to take on with the intention of motivating others to cut out the excuses and start creating websites.

It was also my first official publication in the magazine. For years, I’ve considered writing for .net but, for one reason or another, I’ve put it off. What better motivation than to take inspiration from the topic and stop making excuses myself? Hopefully, this is the start of more frequent content. We’ll see. It bodes well that it made the cover.

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Before Christmas, I was honoured to be asked to write an article for a new website called 12 Devs of Xmas – a festive magazine for motivating the Web community to learn something new every day.

I decided to take a different angle and focus on the many faces of a typical Web professional, highlighting the broad range of skills required when working as a freelancer.

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