best of northtemple

case study

UIs that lie & the users who believe them

Interfaces are one of the principal sources from which a person learns about his or her work. That understanding gets turned into diagrams, charts, and maps that, whether accurate or not, come to define the work that person does each day.

posted by davidlindes on Monday, Feb 01, 2010

On iPads, Grandmas and
Game-changing

The darndest thing happened in the last five days and I was fortunate to be privy to it. Apple has gotten people excited about computing.

But this time, it’s not nerds or geeks and certainly not IT industry analysts. It’s everyone else.

I had a curious set of three conversations this week. One with a grandma, one with a technophobe and the third with a self-proclaimed luddite.

Grandma

My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”

I was utterly flabbergasted. She NEVER talks about computers or technology. She tolerates them at best. Her attitude is typical of most baby boomers I’ve talked to regarding computers. She wants to benefit from them but is frustrated by the wall she must climb in order to do so. She’s learned how to use email and a couple of other things on the Internet and that’s about it.

Her bringing up the iPad was amazing for two reasons. First, someone in her office (she works with other ‘boomers) found out about it within hours of the keynote and shared it with her. That Apple news warranted attention from baby boomers at all is significant. That she then held her interest long enough to tell me at the end of the day is equally significant.

After learning a little more information about it, she has decided that she wants an iPad. It actually borders on technolust.

Technophobe

A good friend of mine is an attorney and reluctantly uses technology for his work. In age, he’s somewhere between my generation and the baby boomers. He recently lost his phone in the snow and then found out his company was moving to AT&T. He replaced his lost phone with a blackberry and when our group of friends caught wind of that, we informed him he could have gotten an iPhone. So on our recommendation, he decided to take the Blackberry back and give the iPhone a try.

I had never once seen him exhibit any excitement over technology but the next time I saw him, he could barely contain his enthusiasm for his new phone.

Fast forward to last Wednesday evening. I told him about the new iPad and his eyes grew wide. He blurted out “Wait, are you talking about an iPhone but with a bigger screen? A regular sized computer THIS easy to use? $15 a month for internet anywhere? When can I buy one?”

He had been won over completely by the user experience of the iPhone. It was amazing to watch and fascinating to see him project his good experience and excitement to the iPad.

Luddite

The third conversation came from a completely unexpected source. I have a good friend and neighbor who works remodeling houses and who reluctantly agreed to have me design a website for his company after being pressured by his family. I don’t know anyone else who hates computers more. He has refused to get an email address. He doesn’t use his mobile phone to do anything other than make a call. And he often mocks me anytime I even mention computers. I want to make it perfectly clear that I’m not exaggerating his attitude. At all.

He stopped by my house the day of the keynote to talk about his new website and when he walked in I happened to have some iPad photos open on my laptop. He asked me what they were about and I casually described the new Apple “tablet” that had just been released. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it considering his historical lack of interest in computers. He asked me a couple of questions and then we discussed his site.

Three days later, he called me and the following exchange ensued. “Dude, I think I want to get one of those Apple tablets for my business.” “Really?” I said. “Yeah, I went and looked at them and they seem really easy to use. I think it would work great for showing potential customers my work and for doing bids on.” I was completely speechless.

The Point

After Apple released the iPhone and when the serious rumors started about the “tablet” a year or so ago I had hoped that this was where Apple was going. I’ve long felt that computers were too hard to use, that the filesystem should NEVER be seen by the user. That human-computer interaction should favor the “human” side.

As the Apple guys stood on stage and described the iPad, I knew I was seeing computer history being made. This new approach to computing and experience is as much a game changer as the ORIGINAL Mac. Heck, it may even be more so.

But honestly, before having these three conversations, I figured Apple’s vision would be realized in ten to fifteen years. Now I’m thinking five or less.

One More Thing

When the date for the announcement was set, I started hoping that Apple would release something like iWork for the “tablet.” I doubted they would so soon but the hope was there. As I figured, if they did, they’d be sending a clear message that this was the future of computing, not just for gaming, watching videos and reading books.

Somehow that message has been lost on people (so many iWork comments end with “meh”), but I consider the release of mobile iWork to be the biggest sign of things to come and the strongest message Apple sent regarding their vision for the future.

It’s amazing to watch all of this unfold.

posted by foster on Monday, Feb 01, 2010

case study

Accessibility to the Face

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” -Jack Handey

posted by foster on Tuesday, Mar 24, 2009

Accessibility on NorthTemple

UPDATE: Since this article was first written, Jason has implemented a very useful archive for Northtemple, including everything tagged with “accessibility”.

ORIGINAL POST: We have a lot of traffic coming to North Temple to read Aaron’s Accessibility Checklist (the one he vowed he’d never write). While you’re here you might check out some older accessibility posts (still working on that archive, right Jason?):

Plus a collection of short quotes and links:

(By the way, and totally unrelated to accessibility, Microsoft’s Live search helped me find all this stuff with their site search where Google failed… What’s up with that?)

posted by ted on Friday, Jun 20, 2008

case study

The Accessibility Checklist
I Vowed I’d Never Write

Update: The below checklist is now available in German.

I have said on numerous occasions that there is no simple checklist that, when followed, will give you an accessible site without fail. There are simply too many variables. But, what do you do when you want to create accessible pages and you have dozens or even hundreds of developers who (like most of their peers) have little to no experience with accessibility? What do you do when it just simply isn’t practical to have someone review all of your pages? In short, how do you insure that a very large organization creates pages that can be accessed by the largest audience possible without drastically increasing your budget? This is one of the questions we have been (and continue to) struggle with.

posted by cannona on Friday, Jun 06, 2008

The Most Important Skill

About a week ago, the following question was asked by one of our designers: “What is the one skill that can make the most positive impacts in your profession?” If you leave out the obvious answers, such as invisibility or flight, the question is not so easy to answer. A great designer must master several skills in order to be truly effective. After realizing that I didn’t have a good answer, I decided to explore the question a bit further.

What are Skills?

Skills are really only one part of the picture. There are also things that you must know, and there are things that you must be. Skills are actionable, they are the things that you can do. Knowing lots of stuff is not a skill, and simply being a “nice person” is not a skill (there are things that you do in order to know lots of stuff, and things you can do to be a nicer person). Things that you know and your personal attributes are important factors. You can’t have skill in anything if you don’t know how to do it, or if you do not have the attributes required to execute a particular skill.

What Does a Designer Need to Do?

Great designers must perform many different tasks throughout the course a design project. Great designers need to be generalists. They need to have the right attributes, broad knowledge, and good skills in all the areas that they might be required to work. In general, the work that designers are expected to do falls into one of the following three categories.

  1. Understanding
  2. Identifying
  3. Crafting

For each of these sections, I’ve identified what needs to be done, and which skills a designer must execute in order to be effective.

Understanding

The designer must be able to understand or discover the problems and/or opportunities that they are asked to address.

This can be done by:

  1. Listening to those who will be affected, and to those who best understand.
  2. Empathizing with those whose needs you are trying to meet.
  3. Analyzing the data and facts associated with the issue.
  4. If there are no facts, no data, and nobody to listen to, the designer must creatively find ways to build facts and identify the stakeholders.

Identifying

The designer must be able to identify and must also be able to demonstrate realistic ways to address the problem or engage the opportunity.

This can be done by:

Crafting

This can be done by:

  1. Executing the chosen solution in the proper and most perfect way possible according to the available budget and time constraints.
  2. Coordinating and directing the work of others who might be assisting you in the final production.
  3. Evaluating the production work according to the highest standards of your craft.
  4. Presenting the final production ready work with simplicity and clarity.
  5. Educate others about decisions leading to the final design.

What are the Skills?

The above outline is by no means a comprehensive list. Perhaps it is even too simple, but it does provide a basic outline of some of the general things that a designer must do. From this outline, we can extract the following list of skills (the things a designer must do) in order to understand, identify, and craft excellent solutions.

The designer must:

In the case of web site or interaction design, there are few specific skills which come in very handy:

Which skill is most important?

Of all the skills above, I don’t know that you could identify one as being more important than another. The most important skill might be whichever skill you are currently the weakest at, or it might be the skill where you have the most potential or opportunity to excel.

There is one other skill which has not been listed, which is perhaps more important than any other. This sometimes forgotten skill is required before any of the above can ever be obtained. The one skill that I would identify as the most important, and the one that can make the most positive impact on your profession, is that of mastering your capacity and ability to learn.

If you have comments about this article, please send them to john.dilworth [at] gmail.com or discuss them here

posted by john on Wednesday, Apr 30, 2008

The Temple and Professional Development

One of the perks of working in downtown Salt Lake City is easy access to the Salt Lake Temple. We’ve written before about the beauty and symbolic meaning of the temple grounds, but today I wasn’t there just to admire the flowers or ponder great religious thought. This morning before work, I parked beneath the Conference Center, crossed North Temple Street, and entered the Temple for some professional development and career planning. Seriously.

I had some specific career questions I wanted to ponder and was also craving some peace and quiet before a busy day of meetings and madness. I figured the Temple was the place to go, and I was not disappointed. While it would be inappropriate to share everything I saw or thought about this morning, it occurred to me that the temple (and perhaps experiences in other holy places) can teach us a lot about how to excel at our daily work, while keeping that work in its proper perspective.

You’ve probably got a long list of your own insights, but here’s mine from this morning:

There are names and titles you can take with you. Senior Interaction Designer, CSS Guru, and Employee of the Month are not among them. I was not expecting this to hit me as strongly as it did this morning, because I was also getting great vibes about my employment. I love my job. I want to excel at it, not least because I believe so strongly in the work I am supporting. But I love my family even more and want to excel at being a great father, husband, and disciple more than anything. Thankfully, these goals don’t have to be mutually exclusive. But it’s good to remember the pecking order when push comes to shove, as it often does in our hectic lives.

Where you sit is less important than doing the right work, the right way. While this is true in any temple, you get reminded of it more often in Salt Lake, because rather than staying in one room, you move through many rooms and are seated and re-seated multiple times. In the past I’ve sometimes been frustrated if I got separated from a friend or family member that I was hoping to share the experience with. But in my better moments, I realize that exactly where I sit, what my position is in relation to the room or to other people in the room is infinitely less important than the work I am doing. The same is true at the office; my job title, where my office is, or what my role is on a specific project is much less important than that I fulfill my responsibilities with exactness, go the extra mile, and focus on the worthy goals the project is supporting.

The Lord pays attention to detail, and rewards your close attention to detail. I am constantly amazed at the richness of the temple experience. Every time I go back with the right motives and attitude, I see something new. The Lord is a stickler for detail and progressive disclosure, and I’m sure he loves it every time a temple-goer or scripture-reader says, “Hey! When did that get in there? Why didn’t I notice that before?” I’m not advocating that key functionality be anything less than immediately discoverable, but a good site or application invites users to find new ways to use it. It’s not a flash-in-the-pan experience, but a deep one that starts good and becomes great over time.

If your attention wanders, stand up, move around, and admire something beautiful before you sit back down. Breaks are important, not just from your work but from your chair and office. There’s a lot of design inspiration outdoors; go drink it in.

Silence is golden. Frequent, quiet reflection is not a nice to have, it’s a necessity. Constant interruptibility may be a boon for your interrupt-prone co-workers, but it’s a recipe for fragmented thinking and limited productivity.

Silence is platinum when it occurs in a holy place and frame of mind. Go to your temple, church, synagogue, mosque, shrine, altar, or prayer room. Contemplate your life as a whole. Get perspective. Then ask for help with specific questions about your work, professional development, or whatever. It works. (See James chapter 1, verse 5.)

Finally, inspiration must be eaten fresh. When I exited the Temple, I should have written down all my thoughts and ideas. But I had an “important” meeting to get to, so I put it off. I can still remember a lot, but I’m sure some of the inspiration has gotten stale and I’ll miss something I was intended to remember.

I guess I’ll just have to go again soon—which isn’t such a bad thing anyway!

posted by ted on Tuesday, Oct 31, 2006

Typesetting Tip #7: Fractions & Math

Fractions such as: ½, ¼, ¾, and other math symbols should all be displayed properly using the appropriate HTML entity. While there is not an HTML solution for typesetting every possible fraction or mathematical equation, there are basic entities that cover the most commonly used fractions and math symbols.

  1. (½) one-half (½)
  2. (¼) one-fourth (¼)
  3. (¾) three-fourths (¾)
  4. (⁄) fraction slash (⁄)
  5. (×) times symbol (×)
  6. (÷) divide symbol (÷)

Basic Rules

If you must create fractions you should use the fraction slash (⁄) instead of the typical forward slash on the keyboard. Fractions could also be created by using a combination of <sup> and <sub> tags with the fraction slash, although there may be issues with line-height (some browsers seem to add line-height when the superscript and subscript tags are used).

Example: 114 (does not display properly on IE).

When displaying dimensions (such as screen resolutions) or multiplication statments the times symbol should be used and not the letter X.

Example: Use (1024×768) not (1024X768)

posted by john on Monday, Oct 30, 2006

Typesetting Tip #6: The Ellipsis

The ellipsis is is used to indicate deleted or missing text. It is not to be confused with 3 periods.

  1. (…) the ellipsis (&hellip;)

Basic Rules

The ellipsis should be set using the HTML entity (&hellip;) and not substituted with three periods. If the ellipsis comes at the end of a sentence, it should be followed by the appropriate punctuation (….),(…,),(…?)and (…!).

The ellipsis (the 3 period version) is often used in email or chat to indicate that more text is to come. While useful and most often understood, this usage may not be appropriate in other applications.

posted by john on Thursday, Oct 26, 2006

Typesetting Tip #5: Brackets

There are 3 different types of brackets: parentheses, box brackets, and curly brackets. Here’s a brief overview of how each should be used.

  1. Parentheses ()
  2. Box brackets []
  3. Curly brackets or Braces {}

Basic Rules

Parentheses () are used to display optional or additional information in a sentence that could be removed without destroying the meaning of the main text.

Box brackets [] are used to enclose explanatory or missing material, especially in quoted text.

Curly brackets or braces are used to indicate a series of equal choices: “Select your favorite letter {a,b,c,z} and type it now”. They also have specialized usage in music notation and poetry. In computer programming, they typically represent the beginning and end of a sequence of statements.

posted by john on Wednesday, Oct 25, 2006

Typesetting Tip #4: Quotes & Primes

A couple days into my first design job, I was ridiculed by the senior staff because I had set some text using the standard straight up-and-down quotes available on the keyboard. The sure sign of an amateur typographer is the improper usage of quotes.

  1. (") programmer’s quotes (&quot;)
  2. (“ and ”) Curly open and close double typographer’s quotes (&ldquo; and &rdquo;)
  3. (‘ and ’) Curly open and close single typographer’s quotes (&lsquo; and &rsquo;)
  4. (« and ») Double angle quotation marks (&laquo; and &raquo;)
  5. (′ and ″) Prime and Double Prime (&prime; and &Prime;)

Basic Rules & Tips

The typewriter substituted upright, direction neutral quotation marks (") for opening and closing marks or typographic quotes (“ and ”, ‘ and ’) in order to save space on the limited keyboard. Proper quotations marks should always be used, and the improper usage should always be looked at as a mistake.

There is almost always a need for designers to manually convert straight quotes to curly quotes in most documents. Most word processors often have a setting for “smart quotes” which will insert the proper quotes in the context of a document, but these are often lost and are not converted to their HTML equivalents when the copy is pasted or imported into a web environment.

Another common mistake and misuse of the upright programmer quotes is their use as prime and double prime characters. These characters are used to indicate feet (′) and inches(″), minutes (′) and seconds(″), and even typographic points (12′ type).

The double angle quotation mark is also often misused as an arrow icon or indicator. The double angle quotations marks (« and ») are used extensively in European languages instead of quotes, although many are adopting the English quoting style.

(Read More Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark)

posted by john on Tuesday, Oct 24, 2006

Typesetting Tip #3: Emphasis

There are several basic ways to create emphasis on a page using typography. Listed below are some of them, and some basic rules that may help you decide when you should use each one.

  1. Type size
  2. Bold face type (and other type weights)
  3. Italic typeface
  4. Color
  5. Highlighting
  6. ALL CAPS
  7. Underline

Basic Rules

Type size is generally used to differentiate headlines and subheadlines. Setting the text on your page with a variety of meaningful headlines and subheadlines allows the page to be scanned quickly, helping users find the information that the are looking for. Pull quotes and even individual lines of text can be set at a larger type size to create emphasis.

Bold face type adds some graphic diversity to a page and is often used in headlines and sub-headlines. It can add visual punctuation to an element of text, where a simple change in size does not. Bold type can be used within a paragraph or sentence, but in this usage, it can be obtrusive and disrupt the normal flow of reading. For this reason bold can be used to emphasis important text in a paragraph that might not be read otherwise (such might be the case for safety or security warnings).

Italic text is the standard for creating emphasis withing running text. It allows a word, letter, or sentence to be emphasized without disrupting the normal flow of reading.

Color can be used for emphasis, but should be used cautiously. Under different circumstances color may not have the intended effect.

Popularized by 37Signals, highlighting is one way to add emphasis to a word or sentence. Even more than bold text, highlighting disrupts the normal flow of text on the page and can cause the content of your page to be read out of context.

Setting text in ALL CAPS is a convention left over from typewriter days where there were no other typographic options for setting text. Because readability is comprimised in ALL CAPS text, it should generally be avoided as a method for creating emphasis.

Underlined text adds emphasis to an element, but will also create confusion with hyperlinked text. Different styles of underlining that don’t appear the same as hyperlinks can be used to acheive an effect of emphasis.

(see also Typesetting Tip #1 and #2)

(Digg this article)

posted by john on Monday, Oct 23, 2006

Typesetting Tip #2: Hyphens and Dashes

There’s a difference between hyphens and dashes and the two should not be interchanged.

  1. (—) the em dash (&mdash;)
  2. (–) the en dash (&ndash;)
  3. (-) the hyphen

Basic Rules

The em dash is the standard typographical dash and is often “faked” with a hyphen or double hyphen. The em dash is used to indicate a strong break in or pause in a sentence—think of it as a super comma—and can be used in pairs like parentheses. The em dash can also used before a quotation when displayed on its own line.

I told you not to use the hyphen or double hyphen instead of the em and en dashes.

The en dash (half as wide) is used as a connector in expressions(3–4, 1971–72, etc.). It could be said that the en dash is short for “through.”

The hyphen is only used to create compound words and to hyphenate words. This is typically done by software where needed and is not manually set—especially in web applications where the hyphenation break may change dynamically with the column width of the page. Currently, dynamic hyphenation is not well supported (if supported at all) in modern web browsers.

(see also: Typesetting Tip #3: Emphasis)

(Digg this article)

posted by john on Friday, Oct 20, 2006

Typesetting Tip #1: Spaces

In HTML 4.0 and the browsers that fully support it, there are 6 varieties of spaces. These spaces are the en-spaces, em-spaces, thin-spaces, non-breaking spaces, zero width joiners, and zero width non-joiners.

NOTE: Most of these are not supported in IE 6 or 7.

  1. (   ) 3 en spaces (&ensp;) – not supported in IE
  2. (   ) 3 em spaces (&emsp;) – not supported in IE
  3. (   ) 3 thin spaces (&thinsp;) – not supported in IE
  4. (   ) 3 non breaking spaces (&nbsp;)
  5. (‍‍‍) 3 zero width joiners (&zwj;) – not supported in IE 6
  6. (‌‌‌) 3 zero width non-joiners (&zwnj;) – not supported in IE 6

Basic Rules

Don’t use spaces to control indentation. Indentation should be controlled by CSS.

If you need to control spaces between specific words in a body of text, you can use the em spaces, en spaces, or thin spaces.

Don’t use two spaces after a period— this is a left-over habit from typewriting. You should carefully review any text your are given for this problem. This was a common convention, and was learned by anyone who learned to type previous to 1995. If you are guilty of this, it is time to stop.

The non-breaking space is used to prevent to words from being separated by text-wrapping. This can be very handy for careful crafting of headlines and titles where it is important to keep two words together for readability and meaning.

The zero width joiner and zero width non-joiner are commonly used in for setting type in Persian or Arabic, but they could also come in handy in instances where you don’t want a visual space, but there is a need to retain two separate words.

Update: Joe Clark brings the following to my attention: “You can type as many spaces as you want after sentence-ending punctuation on the Web, as they are all reduced to a single space due to rules on whitespace collapse.

(Tip #2: Hyphens and Dashes and #3: Emphasis now available)

(Digg this article)

posted by john on Thursday, Oct 19, 2006

Madame, it took me my entire life.

Both SVN and r.bird wrote last week about the latest Hillman Curtis Artist Series with Paula Scher. SVN quoted the above title from a tale about Picasso who sketched a woman and charged her five thousand dollars.. Not because of how much time it took, but because of his entire life’s work that lead up to that perfect sketch.

Once I started work here at the church, I started to realize something similar. Just in the first month, I used skills I had developed over 10 years of experience in web development. Client relationships, XHTML/CSS, ajax, journalism, layout, project management, usability, user studies, even Ruby on Rails.

Today is my first year mark here, and it’s clear that all the experiences I’ve had in my short time in this industry have lead me to contribute in many unique ways here. Called? Elected? I just call it prepared.

Rob and others I’ve talked with share that feeling. We’re all from different backgrounds and each bring a unique set of skills to the table. There also seems to be a little something that led us here to do a few things at this specific moment.

Kindof a cool feeling. I’m certainly not one for the fate argument, but I’m sure I’m where I’m supposed to be. You ever get that feeling?

posted by jason on Tuesday, Sep 05, 2006

A Change in Perspective Can Reveal Simplicity

I recently ran across a diagram that showed the “orbit” of the planet Venus around the Earth. Sure, we all know that the planets go around the Sun, but for thousands of pre-Galileo years, the Earth was the center. It’s very simple to draw, explain, and show the orbit of the planets around the Sun, and we all understand the concept of heliocentricity without a problem. It’s simple, The Earth goes around the Sun, the planets go around the Sun, we’ve got it.

However, if you try to describe, or draw the orbit of the planets from a geocentric perspective, it can be quite difficult. There is a pattern, it does repeat, and it actually creates a nice design, but it is very complex to illustrate and explain.

So it goes with design, sometimes you need to change your perspective in order to visualize the solution in its most simple form. Sometimes you need to find ways to help your users change their perspective so that they can see the problem from your perspective. Sometimes your users are already visualizing the problem from the simplest perspective, and you change it, or redesign it to work from your perspective.

As designers it’s our job to visualize things from different perspectives, hunting down the simplest, and most elegant solution, and bringing that to our users.

posted by john on Thursday, Aug 31, 2006

Design and the Golden Rule

When I first got into software usability and design, I did it because I was tired of working as a technical writer, whose primary function was to describe how to work around software that didn’t work right. First as a usability engineer, now as an interaction designer, it’s become my job to prevent problems in the first place.

The more I do this kind of work, the more I realize it’s not just a business enterprise, it’s an ethical enterprise—not just to solve a business problem, but to “do no harm” along the way and ideally even to make using software a pleasurable experience.

When I worked at a software company in a previous job, I created a 99 second video collage of highlight clips from field studies and usability tests entitled “99 Seconds of User Pain” and showed it at an internal design event. It was a horrific barrage of puzzlement, expletives (tastefully edited of course), and even some tears and head-banging. The point was not to make fun of our users, but to show the depth of frustration we as a company were inflicting on them.

The video was a hit; the audience gasped and moaned and laughed at themselves—not at our poor users. People (even those working for large monolithic software companies) don’t generally want to hurt other people. They just don’t realize they are doing exactly that a lot of the time.

It’s our job as UX professionals to show developers the Golden Rule in action, and to keep them (and us) from breaking it. Not that users always know what they want—because they don’t. But they do know when they are in pain. It’s our ethical responsibility to relieve it, and even replace it with satisfaction or (heaven forbid) enjoyment.

posted by ted on Thursday, Aug 24, 2006

Project “Soul Searching”

In our jobs, working for the LDS Church, we work on projects that do not generate financial income. This is very different than the corporate world that I’m used to, but also a very good thing. The projects we work on do not generate income, but they do use financial resources of the Church, and the bar is set very high to use those resources in the most effective way possible. This environment requires an extra level of vigilance and “project soul searching” that may not happen (although it probably should) in the corporate world. In this quest for meaning, I’ve been bombarded with questions. The process of questioning doesn’t always get to the answer. In fact, if you’ve got all the answers, the chances are that you don’t really understand the problem. The purpose of questioning is to gain a better understanding of the problem, where your solution fits in, and what effect it will really have on your customers and end users.

Andy Rutledge makes some good points on this also in his article “Seek Understading, Not Answers”

posted by john on Wednesday, Aug 23, 2006

Welcome to NorthTemple.com

We are a group of designers in Salt Lake City, and NorthTemple is our shot at contributing back to the web design community, in return for so much we’ve received from it. Each of us rely on the web community every day, and this is our way of taking what we’re learning in some pretty unique circumstances and sharing it with this thing we call the internets.

NorthTemple.com is built as a “tumblelog”, a stream of consciousness type of blog where we’ll be posting at all hours and with content of all type—articles, quotes, links, photos, videos, and more.

The site is still very new. We’ll be introducing comments very shortly, as well as adding our designers to the site and launching some extended bios and archives of it all.

We hope you enjoy. Don’t forget to grab our atom feed to keep up with the log.

posted by jason on Friday, Aug 18, 2006