Category : Design

Over the past year and a half, KA+A has been in league with Indiana's leading minds in the local agriculture and culinary worlds to bring back a revitalized Taste of Indiana, Dig-IN. (Read more about our re-branding process here.)

Set to premiere this August 29th, Dig-IN will take place at the White River State Park, featuring a rockstar lineup of Chefs (Neal Brown, Chris Eley, Greg Hardesty, Regina Mehallick, Eli Anderson, Scott Wise and many more) who are paired up with local producers to masterfully create an all-local dish. In addition, there will be over 20 local wineries and breweries brought together for you by the Indiana Wine Grape Council and Brewers of Indiana Guild. All…

Luke W's post on the They Make Apps approach to CAPTCHA got me thinking, so I spent 30 minutes brainstorming other techniques that might work. Check out my sketches below.

I had the opportunity to be the final speaker at the 2010 Indianapolis Startup Weekend event on Sunday afternoon. For the uninitiated, I've included a bit of background from the Startup Weekend website below.

I'll admit it – I'm a recovering design process deliverables junkie. Historically, the generation of process maps, usability audits, wireframes, site diagrams, application flows, mental models, task-level scenarios, user stories, standards documentation, conceptual frameworks, content audits, navigation maps, and countless other examples of design ephemera, were so central to the work that we created for clients that we began to view them as the work we were creating for our clients. In reality, as important as many of those deliverables may be, they are just means to an end. The end – is a finished product that customers want to purchase and use and a solution that meets or exceeds…

Todd Henry, the founder of Accidental Creative, interviewed Kristian for his regular podcast. The interview covered everything from staying inspired and dealing with clients to getting moving on what’s important. You can listen to it here

Over the past few years Indianapolis has quietly been growing into a bonafide  startup hub – boasting an impressive array of tech startups, service providers, funding sources, and industry events and organizations. It's gotten so robust in fact, that it's becoming difficult to keep track of everything thats going on. As many of you all know, the gang at KA+A has been working on a really cool project for the past couple of weeks that we're calling the "Indy Startup Genome Project". In short, we're attempting to map the entire Indianapolis startup ecosystem.

We've started by pulling together a list of all the tech-oriented startup in Indy. Currently it's an incomplete list. If you are a founder of an Indianapolis-based startup or you are aware of one that is not our list…

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is "What have you been reading lately." With increasing frequency, folks are beginning to inquire about what Podcasts I listen to as well. So I thought I'd share a list of my favorite podcasts with our readers. These picks run the gamut from design, to technology, to entrepreneurialism. Some of them are not updated as regularly as I'd like, but they are all thought provoking, interesting, and inspiring. You can find them all on iTunes.

	The Accidental Creative The Accidental Creative podcast addresses how to thrive in the create-on-demand world by instilling practical, everyday practices that help you stay prolific, brilliant and healthy in your life



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In all likelihood you probably read the first five (or perhaps only two) words of the first paragraph before skipping down to here. Many of you can probably recite the first line off by heart, but most likely all of you know what the text's name and primary usage is. Used as placeholder…

"Customers, although they might be able to articulate the problems with an interaction, are not often capable of visualizing the solutions to those problems. Design is a specialized skill, just like programming. Programmers would never ask users to help them code; design problems should be treated no differently." Alan Cooper About Face 3, The Essentials of Interaction Design

Typographic literacy is on the decline, and subsequently a whole host of errors are now accepted as ‘the norm’. Below is an exploration of some of the biggest typographic faux pas, and the ways each should be corrected.

Double Spacing This convention harks back to the days of monospaced typewriters where it was common practice to insert a double space to distinguish the beginning of a sentence from the surrounding single word spaces. When using proportional fonts this really isn’t necessary, and is, to be brutally honest, just plain ugly.

‘Dumb’ Quotes Typewriters are also responsible for the introduction of ‘straight quotes’, non-specific quote marks designed as a space-saving measure for…