On Monday I gave a workshop at Web 2.0 Expo with all-new material about something I’ve had on my mind for a while now: designing for the trails of data we’re creating, from tweets to scrobbles to checkins. I had some lovely conversations with the people who attended, and there were lots of great questions, so thank you everyone who attended, you guys rocked!

The slides from the workshop are on SlideShare and SpeakerDeck, or you can download the PDF (13 MB). If you attended, you’ll find some bonus material I didn’t cover in the session, so enjoy!

Note: to all the attendees, apologies I couldn’t get the slides up sooner — lack of stable internet en-route to Sydney for Web Directions! As Danielle suggested, I’ll put slides up before I give a workshop next time!

Photo by Jeremy Keith

On Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at Web Directions @Media again. I spoke on “finding our 3/4 view” and the design tools we’ll need for the future. Influenced by my research into industrial design, architecture and animation, this was a pretty personal talk and an absolute killer to write. There are practical bits, but it’s also filled with open questions and personal experiments I agonised over how to include. You could say I was a little bit relieved to get off the stage and discover people actually liked it.

You can download the slides (zipped PDF with notes) or view it on Slideshare.

A silly number of books piled up around my desk while writing this talk, so for the extra-curious, I snapped a picture of the ‘further reading list’.

This post wouldn’t be complete without a huge thanks to my sister Monika. She got me thinking about this stuff in the first place and pointed me in the right direction when I started asking questions about industrial design.

When I moved to London in 2005 to work for Last.fm I thought my dream had come true just finding a job that combined my two loves: design and music. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

But there was all sorts of more. I count myself incredibly lucky that Felix, Martin and RJ decided to take a chance on me (I can never thank you three enough); that I got to work with a shit hot technology team (you guys are incredible, I hope you know that); that miraculously, I got to put my designs in front of millions of users (you have taught me so much); and that I had the opportunity to meet so many talented people along the way (you’ve been such an inspiration).

One acquisition, two redesigns, and eleven sketchbooks later, it’s just time for the next adventure.

My first order of work is to take some much needed time off. People talk about the power of time off, and I’m frankly, I’m terrified, but here we go. I’ll be doing a bit of travelling too: Austria; The US (Austin, and San Francisco); and Hong Kong. Lovely people of those places, I can’t wait to see you.

I’ll be back in London mid-April and looking for a new gig. This gives me butterflies too, but couldn’t have signed up for my next job without first knowing I was rested and able to give 100% again. If by then you need an interaction designer for your next adventure, I’d love to hear from you.

From now on, you can get in touch at: han @ thisdomain.com

Right then, I reckon it’s time for a drink.

Last week we launched spacelog.org — an accessible, linkable, searchable version of NASA’s (PDF) transcripts. We did two missions: Apollo 13 (that’s the dramatic one where they barely made it back alive) and Mercury 6 (the first manned earth orbit). With your help, we’re aiming to get more missions up soon!

I was lucky to work with a fantastic, talented group of people on this at something called /dev/fort, a week long holiday in a fort with no internet. You can read about the design process we used in my article for 24 Ways.

This is probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever made.

Tim planted the idea in my head a few weeks ago when we were brainstorming on a leaving gift for Matt. I’ve had an itch to make something physical for a while now, and this seemed like a fun weekend project. The theme for the deck came from Matt’s love of Raymond Chandler, 1920s aesthetics, and the colour orange.

For the process-curious: I drew the portraits with a tablet in Photoshop, using photos sourced from Flickr/Facebook as reference on another layer. I printed the card fronts on an ink jet using Epson matte paper (to make the blacks look nice and velvety). Then, with the windows open, and using a lightbox to correctly position things, I spray glued the fronts to the card backs (which I printed on orange heavyweight stock) — using a ‘permanent mount’ (glue on both sides). I trimmed all the cards by hand using an  X-Acto knife with a #11 blade — definitely the most reliable way. The box is an old chocolate tin I’d saved (I save everything) and spray painted black. The finishing touches were a label for the font (sealed with plastic film for durability) and a paper inlay to protect the edges of the cards from getting duffed up. The card back design and flourishes under the suit symbols are made with P22’s lovely Art Deco Extras and the typeface is Refrigerator Deluxe. This all involved a number of trips to Atlantis, my favourite art supply shop in the east end.

On Friday I had the delight of presenting at one of my favourite conferences, dConstruct.

I gave a talk on something I love: how music improvisation relates to design. It was a lot of fun! I even managed to get the rather badass Matthew Ogle and Jeremy Keith join me on stage for live improvisation (video).

Download the annotated slides (PDF); view on slideshare; or listen to the podcast.

Slides and audio of my presentation this summer are on the Web Directions site, but a while back I promised a more fully annotated PDF. You can download this now (15 MB).

Why the fully annotated version? When I speak at conferences I like to work off a loose point-form script that includes directions to myself like [greet people!] or [explain the story about the blah now] or [don’t forget to do that thing!]. So instead of that, you can now read a hopefully more sense-making annotated version.

My illustration for LCD Soundsystem, featured on Hype Machine’s Music Blog Zeitgeist. This felt like a lot of responsibility—they’re the sound of a generation. (The lettering on the Manhatten skyline was somewhat influenced by this).

I recently did some print work for my friend Darren Fung, a film composer, who needed to update his promo reel package.

Darren’s music is full of stories and dreams, so it seemed fitting to pair the wordmark (that I did for him a few years ago) with some emotive hand-rendered visuals. The end result was this red colourfield I painted as a sort of visual track to his sound.

The process behind the kind of music Darren creates is unique, so we thought it would be fun to let this unfold with the packaging of this personal promo piece. The visuals include some of the tools he uses in his job. It’s a visualisation of his artist’s mess; we all have one.

Customisability and cost efficiency were a requirement, so we opted for stickers (Darren can print himself) of the track listing and mailing label. Since the whole design is a bit ‘messy’ it only adds to the authenticity if the stickers go on a bit wonky!