Tyler Sticka

WordPress-Powered Portfolios: The Movie

If you didn’t grab a ticket to WordCamp in time, missed the live stream and/or found my presentation slides seriously lacking in the audio department, you’re in luck! The video of WordPress-Powered Portfolios has been published to WordPress.tv, or you can watch it below.

A technical problem resulted in the footage starting a few minutes into my presentation. All you missed was an introduction of who I am, and of my background as a cartoonist.

I apologize for having to look down at my notes so often; I didn’t expect to be holding the microphone! Other than that, enjoy.

Microsoft’s “infinite journal” concept is infinitely interesting

I’m intrigued and inspired by Microsoft’s Courier booklet prototype. As much as I love my iPhone, I’ve yet to see an Apple tablet rumor that excites me. It’s clear that we all like multi-touch, but how does it make the leap from design necessity in small devices to genuine usefulness? Any device more expensive than a smartphone but lacking in portability will need compelling use cases beyond mere novelty.

Multi-touch in a giant, spendy media player? Meh. Multi-touch in a field research and ideation tool? Bingo.

Many who attend my presentations will have seen my beloved Thinkpad X61 Tablet at my side, laser-etched with my logo. Ever since I gave Vista the boot and installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate, I’ve been enamored with this device.

But tablet PC lovers are truly the minority. Why? Tablets are most useful in only two scenarios:

1. Visual art and design for sketching, painting and otherwise mimicking organic techniques difficult to accomplish with a mouse.
2. Research and note-taking in the field, where the user is often required to stand or move while writing.

As huge and clunky as keyboards feel, typing is much faster than handwriting. As separated as mice feel from cursor movement, common actions like dragging and selection are much easier to manage when your fingers aren’t required to literally traverse the distance. For common PC actions at the core of Windows, Mac OS X and most Linux distributions, the keyboard and mouse are the best tools for the job.

The Courier prototype is beautiful because it acknowledges these faults and attempts to craft an experience catered to those two scenarios tablet owners enjoy already, with the added immediacy of multi-touch in addition to the typical stylus. While I question how intuitive some of the gestural interactions would be in use, the idea of a touchable infinite OneNote on crack is incredibly compelling.

In short, it’s a tablet prototype I can see a business, artist or researcher investing in. I just hope they (or a competitor) can deliver.

Graphic Storytelling in Old Media

I have no idea how this eluded me the past four months. Christopher Knaus (@gniP_gnoP on Twitter) devoted a portion of his notebook to swiftly sketching nifty visual notes of various WebVisions presentations.

Although Chris “found it hard to do visual notes for a presentation about cartoons,” I thought he did an excellent job capturing some of the key messages of my Graphic Storytelling presentation. Enjoy!

Why I Dig Netbooks

I believe netbooks, at least in their current state, are a temporary product category. As technology progresses and manufacturing costs decline, most laptops will gain solid-state hard drives and decline in weight—why wouldn’t they? The netbook’s other defining characteristic, their size, is not diminutive enough to impact a user’s way-of-life as dramatically as an iPod Touch (or equivalent device).

What keeps me enamored with these devices is the opportunity for simplicity. As we wait for Apple, Palm, Google and RIM to strike the right balance of openness and usefulness (while pleasing the carrier overlords), netbooks offer an open, mobile-conscious playground for purposeful and unique experiences.

These experiences can (and should) be more than application launchers augmenting long-established operating systems, solutions which are heavy-handed in execution and obtuse for an audience of mobile, web-centric users. While the original ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu Netbook Remix interfaces were steps in the right direction, Moblin and Jolicloud are far more exciting.

Moblin is an open source, Linux-based operating system founded by Intel and optimized for their nearly ubiquitous Atom processor. It’s interface is simple, attractive, immediate and shockingly fast. Read the rest of this entry

WordPress-Powered Portfolios: Slides & Snippets

I really dig WordPress, but not nearly as much as I enjoy spending time with my fellow geeks and colleagues in Portland’s bustling and vibrant open source and web community. It was a pleasure presenting this afternoon!

My presentation was meant to solve the problem of simply and easily associating imagery with pages and/or posts in order to build a killer portfolio theme. I hope designers, artists and hobbyists will use these tips as a springboard for pushing what we can do with this constantly-evolving platform.

Thanks to all in attendance! Here are the goods.

See the presentation and dig some PHP

WordPress-Powered Portfolios this Saturday

Wow, time flies! I last wrote about WordCamp Portland back in June, and already the event is upon us. This coming Saturday, I’ll be closing the first day of the sold-out shindig at WebTrends with my presentation, WordPress-Powered Portfolios. (Don’t panic, they’re streaming it.)

My presentation won’t revolve around the visual design of portfolio sites for two important reasons:

1. The principals of compelling interaction design are not exclusive to the WordPress platform.
2. I’m still way too new at this to represent myself as any sort of authority on the art of portfolio design.

What you will learn is whether or not WordPress is the right platform for your online presence and, if so, the surprisingly simple snippets of PHP you’ll need to get there.

As excited as I am to present, I’m even more excited to see the other wonderful speakers, including WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

I was surprised and delighted to hear that the premier sponsor of the event is Microsoft. I acknowledge their generous support by drafting and publishing this post in their intuitive Windows Live Writer application.

See? WordPress brings people together.

cufón vs sIFR (A Visual Comparison)

Type design for the web is a subject usually discussed amidst snickers and groans and only occasionally peppered with epiphanies not dissimilar to “why didn’t I think of that?” While only a speed bump along a path of monolithic obstacles we face as we forge the Next Big Thing, web type has become a symbol of every designer’s frustrations with this fantastic (and finicky) medium.

For eleven weeks early Winter months of 2008, I taught eighteen design students at the Art Institute of Portland how to stop worrying and learn to love web type. I covered the basic rules of readability, hierarchy and emotional impact. I evangelized the importance accessibility and web standards, how they allow us to design for different mediums as well as those with sensory impairments. I honestly and pragmatically demonstrated the technical limitations of HTML and CSS.

And then I showed how to get around them.

A favorite technique for myself and my students was the use of sIFR, though its quirky setup and reliance on Flash eventually made me re-evaluate its necessity. I returned to embracing native web fonts like Verdana and Georgia (thank goodness for Matthew Carter) with a smattering of @font-face here and there. Not until last week (while working with Elizabeth Miller at Studio D) did I encounter a need to try the latest JavaScript-powered web type solution, cufón.

There’s a lot to like about cufón. Its use of the canvas tag in most browsers and VML in Internet Explorer eliminates the need for any proprietary plugins. Setup is surprisingly swift; generate the JavaScript with the handy online form, call the Cufon.replace method and off you go!

But there was something else, too. I swore cufón looked better.

Only one way to find out! See the comparison and observations