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 of these tastings are included in the $15 ticket price.

Dig-IN also will feature a stellar lineup of speakers, discussing everything from nutrition to gardening, from cooking locally to a farm-to-fork panel that traces the journey from field to tabletop. Urban gardening sessions with Laura Henderson and Growing Places Indy, delicious sweets for sale prepared by Indiana Artisans, Food for Thought exhibit by the Humanities Council, a Pedal and Park program, and musical performance by Jookabox, jascha. and Kate Lamont will be occuring throughout the event.

Check out Dig-IN’s newly launched website for more information, and follow on Twitter to make sure you are up on all the latest. Tickets can be purchased at Marsh Supermarkets, or online. Be sure to reserve your spot in advance – tickets are limited!

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.

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking (oh no, the buzzwords are attacking!), unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in indianapolis, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, indianapolis, DC and more.

The participants that attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing the same desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.

By all accounts the weekend was a success and the groups produced three strong concepts:

Zankit
http://www.zankit.com

GoBizSpeak
http://www.gobizspeak.com

NinjaButton
http://twitter.com/ninjabutton

You can view my presentation on “Designing A Startup” on SlideShare.

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 the clients expectations.

So before I start a holy war about the importance of research, process, and planning in User Experience Design (UX), let me be clear – all of the steps and deliverables mentioned above are, in many scenarios, important and useful elements of the design process. But as time has gone by, and we’ve continued to refine our own approach to design, we’ve begun to realize that by over-emphasizing their importance we’re doing a disservice to our clients and ourselves. Sometimes, some (and very rarely all) of, these deliverables are critical to delivering a winning design solution. But trotting them out in front of clients in an often vain attempt to either impress them, overwhelm them, or justify your fees often has the inverse effect.

In a brilliant post, titled “An Open Letter To The Design Community“, Marty Cagan at the Silicon Valley Product Group details some common traps that designers often fall prey to. In particular he extolls the virtues of getting to the real product, via Hi-Fidelity prototypes, as quickly as possible.

“Please people, if you want to succeed at your company, just remember this rule: the only thing that works to explain your design to execs and stakeholders are prototypes, the higher the fidelity the better.  Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.  Some execs will want to know how you got from here to there, and that’s okay, so long as you start with them understanding where “there” is.”

Do yourself a favor and keep the sausage making within the design team.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin. In short, it’s about getting to the point. You can’t cut corners or entirely abandon the development of design support materials, but you can get much smarter about determining what design deliverables are essential to the projects success and which ones are only part of your process because you feel they have to be. I can promise you, at least in our experience, that most clients don’t care and aren’t nearly as impressed by many of the process-oriented deliverables that we, as designers, have come to hold sacred.

We’ve discovered a much more liberating way to engage our clients, do away with a ton of busy work, and deliver better design solutions in the bargin.

I’m not suggesting that you can go from a back of the napkin sketch to a fully functional product design without going through the painstaking process of researching user needs, mapping complex interactions, and creating comprehensive design specifications. What I am saying is that, that’s the stuff in the kitchen that you darn well better know how to execute on and that getting to something worthy of presentation in the dining room is where your focus should be. The faster you can get to a “real world” manifestation of the final product the happier your client will be and the sooner you’ll be able to begin the process of refining the design solution.

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, please go here and submit it. There are lots of really great young companies here in Indy, but for the time being we are predominantly focusing on technology and technology-enabled businesses in the web space (software, web-apps, etc.). For the time being, we’re not focusing on advanced manufacturing, life sciences, or service-based businesses – but that will come.

Once we’ve got a good handle on startup landscape in Indianapolis, we’ll begin to flesh out the other side(s) of the coin… infrastructure, support services, funding, etc. We’ve begun to detail some of that already, but its a work in progress. We’re using a really cool application called Mindmeister to create a mind map of the ecosystem. You can check out a truncated view below, or click through to see the whole thing. One the infrastructure and services tip we are really looking for businesses that specialize in working with and for startups. We’re really looking for businesses and organizations that are focused on the Indy startup space. Indianapolis is achieving critical mass in the startup infrastructure space and that is what we want to highlight.

If you have a startup or a technology/web-based startup to recommend or would like to ask a question, hit me up on Twitter @kristianindy and let me know about it. But take a look at the mind map we’ve set-up first so that you can get an idea of what we’re looking for.

Note: Regarding “stages” (e.g. seed, growth, established, etc.) These are pretty fluid terms, but you can use the following brief descriptions for context.

Early/Seed Stage – Building the product and proving the concept

Growth Stage – Growing the business and becoming self-sustaining

Established – Profitable, stable, managed growth

Once the mapping process is completed, we’ll publish the entire Indy Startup Genome Project online for public consumption.

Warning: This is a work in progress. There will be errors and omissions. If you find an error or omission, let us know in the comments.

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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 text by graphic designers and typesetters for the last 50 years (and possibly as far back as the 15th Century), Lorem Ipsum was chosen because it closely represents the ‘shape’ of modern text and can be dropped in place of real text for layout purposes. It is based on an excerpt of de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils), written by Cicero in 45 B.C. Its approximate translation is as follows:

“Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

I say ‘approximate translation’ because the standard Lorem Ipsum passage is full of grammatical errors and omissions, effectively rendering it as nonsense. Of course, because of its new intended purpose and the fall in Latin literacy this isn’t really a problem. Using Lorem Ipsum to fill in for a paragraph of text is by no means ideal but I suppose is acceptable. Using it to fill in for headlines, taglines or any copy that should inform a client of intended messaging is most definitely not.

There are plenty alternatives to Lorem Ipsum available online, but mostly all are comprised of random words to make up nonsense text. One example is the Malevole Text Generator, which generates paragraphs based on popular 80s TV show theme tunes. While this is certainly amusing, it is not really appropriate for, say, a mock-up of a law firm’s website.

Back in the days when QuarkXPress was the primary layout application for print designers, there existed a plug-in called Jabberwocky. Jabberwocky generated the same nonsense text as the majority of today’s online text generators, but it had one trick up its sleeve—the option for designers to specify nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., to generate custom paragraphs of text. That meant it was possible to generate copy that was specific to your target audience, e.g. by entering law-specific terminology to use in a layout for a law firm.

I suppose the redeeming factors of Lorem Ipsum are its wide recognition and the obliviousness of people to its original meaning. Reading the first couple of words is enough for most to understand it will be replaced with real text somewhere down the line. Bearing that in mind, would a web app based on Quark’s Jabberwocky be a good idea? I think it could work and would be a great side project. Until that day I suppose I’ll just keep using Lorem Ipsum.

Alan Cooper
About Face 3, The Essentials of Interaction Design

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 the keyboard, avoiding the need for separate opening and closing quote marks. Straight quotes are commonly used in place of proper quotation marks or ‘curly quotes’. Many designers will tell you that straight quotes are used to represent feet and inches, but in reality, feet and inches should be represented using primes. Straight quotes are obsolete and should not
be used.

Incorrect Hyphenation and Sentence Breaks

Hyphens are the most commonly used method of splitting sentences and indicating ranges of values. However, hyphens should only be used to split words across lines or to connect compound words (e.g. double-barreled). To indicate a break in thought in a sentence, an em dash with hairline spaces should be used (an en dash with a space before and after is also acceptable, but should be kerned appropriately).

Horizontal and Vertical Scaling

Well-designed typefaces have varying degrees of contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes. For example, in most sans-serif typefaces the vertical strokes are optically thicker than horizontals in order for them to look the same width. Distorting type through scaling upsets the balance of a typeface. With vertical scaling the vertical strokes can become too thick, disrupting the left-to-right flow of a piece of type, and smooth curves can appear to ‘peak’ in certain areas. With extreme horizontal scaling the horizontal strokes become thinner than the verticals. If it is really necessary to distort type, it should be no more than 1-2% wider before it becomes obviously noticeable. It is best practice to use a typeface family with the appropriate widths for your needs – many now have multiple widths ranging from Ultra Compressed to Extended.

Auto-Styling

Many design and layout applications permit ‘faked’ bold, italic and small caps. The apps use mathematical algorithms to stroke, slant and scale individual characters. Adding a stroke to make a bold weight loses some of the details that aid legibility, and simply skewing the typeface affects the overall weight and can cause some strokes to virtually disappear. Fake small caps are achieved by forcing lowercase characters to uppercase and scaling them down, making them feel narrower and lighter than the original lowercase. Commercial typefaces are designed with multiple weights, italics and variants, each with carefully considered optical corrections and custom-designed glyphs. For example, bold weights have greater contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes, italics generally utilize a single-storey lowercase ‘a’, and small caps have been width- and weight-corrected for optical balance. Again, the best solution is to choose a type family with the appropriate variants for your needs. Please, steer clear of auto-styling.

Widows, Orphans and Rivers

“An orphan has no past, a widow has no future.” An orphan is a single word line at the end of a paragraph. A widow is a single line of text at the top of a column. Both result in excessive white space which interrupts the balance of a set piece of text. A river is a line of white space that appears to run through a paragraph of text. Creative kerning and letter-spacing, or rewriting the text is the only effective solution to these issues.

Poor Kerning

Typefaces are generally spaced for text usage (small) and not for display purposes (large). Manual kerning is required to make display type look evenly spaced, a practice which is non-existent outside the design community, and one which many designers tend to overlook. It is also worth noting that the majority of typefaces are designed with tabular figures – numbers which sit within an equal space so they line up perfectly in tables. For text and display purposes, this needs a lot of manual correction. Some typefaces have sets of lining and old-style figures, but again these tend to be spaced for text use, unless there are size-specific variants.