nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers

Celso Gomes has a new site up called nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers.
In his words:

The concept of nibbles is simple: snack tutorials for hungry designers. The tutorials will teach a few steps at a time, so they will be short and easy to follow - the perfect creative snack.

There are a few tutorials on using Expression Blend and Silverlight already up, with content on Blend and WPF coming soon. New additions will be announced on the nibbles blog.

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Everybody Hates The London Olympics Logo

Not me though. If you've built a brand that everybody's suddenly talking about, can it be a bad thing? [Tip: look at the size of the thumb on your vertical scrollbar after you jump through that hyperlink.]

Although the use of a tangram-like style evokes images of broken glass or even an athlete doubled over in pain, it seems to spell out "2012", the year of the Olympics in question.

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Software Branding

I was pleased to see the updated Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines introduce a section on Software Branding. I firmly believe the secret sauce behind every successful software application is the emotional chord it strikes in the end user. Too often we, the sausage makers, focus too much on the technical aspects and too little on the emotional aspect of the software we build.

For something that is frequently overlooked or gotten wrong, this article on software branding is chock full of common sense. Although the examples use Windows artifacts, the guidelines apply very broadly to software we all create.

On another note, I am happy to see this idea dawn on folks across Microsoft. Now if we can strike the right balance between the whole technical v/s visceral v/s behavioral v/s reflective aspects, it'll portend good things to come. The innovations in the Shell in Windows Vista, and platforms such as WPF and WPF/E will surely help.

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