XenoAbe Design

I’ve seen so many awful restaurant sites when trying to find a place to go eat. Even scouring through the many sites of restaurants featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives I had a hard time finding just a handful of well-designed sites. I’m not sure who is putting these sites together but they fall victim to several follies and mistakes. So I figured that we need to take a look at what is important about a restaurant site that’s a little bit different from other sites.
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Well, it’s taken a while, but the redesign is finally up. What do you think? Leave your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

Now that the site design is up I hope to have posts more frequently. In fact, there’s one that should be up either tonight or tomorrow.

I took an Intellectual Property class my last semester of graduate school at Georgia Tech and, while the class was taught on a surface level, I learned a lot about trademarks and their legality from writing a paper on the use of collegiate trademarks by college sports fans. Something else also came out of that paper that was a bit unexpected. That is the idea that we can learn something from Intellectual Property and its governing when designing social media.
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First of all, I apologize for such a long layoff. The Master’s Project ended up eating all of my time for the past few months.

Anyway, what are these adaptive websites you speak of? A lot of people are using web statistics to change and adapt their websites. Google statistics has become virtually ubiqitous in today’s information superhighway. My Master’s project is on machine learning and my independent study is about using statistics to help Flash games adapt to players. These got me thinking about using statistics not just as a redesign tool for designers or developers, but to have the website itself adapt to the users.
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This %$#&*$ article is going to teach you a thing about talking #$@% around other people. Well, not really, but it might make you think about how to handle offensive content (of the text variety). A lot of designs don’t have to worry about this, but there’s two specific elements that when combined need to explore the idea of being able to gracefully handle offensive content. The amalgamation I’m speaking of is text entry and a social aspect. When these things combine it provides a method of a sharing of text with (possibly) large numbers of people. Normally, this is fine. But what if someone starts throwing out a slew of curse words and other highly offensive content and it is showing up on your feed or your page?

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XenoAbe Design is starting a mini-series of design challenges. This series will focus on the kitchen and what ways we can make it more efficient, stylish, and useful. Each part in the mini-series we will focus on an aspect within the kitchen and think of ways that we can redesign it. This mini-series serves three purposes here at XenoAbe Design: (a) it provides a way to challenge myself to design things outside of my academic requirements, (b) this particular mini-series forces me to stray into a realm of usability not associated with the web, and (c) bounce ideas off of my Interior Design degree-totin’ wife.

Let’s kick this thing off looking at the spice rack.

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Over the past few years technology has been caught up in a broadcast phenomenon. Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, XBox Live, and the list goes on. We like to tell people about us, what we are doing, and the things we like. Apparently, it seems like people care. These services have become enormously popular and, frankly, have become life-changing for many. They completely change how we often go about our day.

So that begs the question, what’s next? These services require some sort of input. Users have to actually log in and then type in the information that is subsequently broadcast. In its basic form, it is instant, short-form citizen journalism. Sure, these can be kind of fun and they allow us to be selective in the information we disseminate, but it just seems like so much of this can be automated. We are not talking about the uses of these services for sharing interesting sites and articles, but rather the integration of these services into other programs and the automation of status broadcasting.

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Some of these posts will be thoughts and advice on topics, while others will be updates on current projects. This post serves as much as a journal for my project as it does an introduction to the world of 3D design. I am currently working on a project for a class that involves 3D modeling and importing that into a 3D gaming engine. As designers, many of us stay in the 2D plane and leave the 3D worlds for game designers and designers working on cinematic projects. Here’s an introduction to this new axis.

Programs

To get started in the 3D world we have to choose what program we need to use. We are probably going to need to do some modeling at first, although you can probably find some pre-made models if that is all you need. There are three main choices for this , but Maya is the only one I have experience in.

1. Maya
2. 3D Studio Max (Windows only)
3. Blender (free)

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Supernovas explode onto the scene and outshine entire galaxies. However, they are often fleeting. For one to be eternal it would forever outshine all the other stars.
That’s the goal of XenoAbe Design.

XenoAbe Design has two purposes.

1. To house my own personal work and information for companies to find out who I am and what I’m all about.
2. To provide an informational and professional blog of the current state of the Design world.

The focus will be on User Experience/Interaction/Interface Design and Information Architecture. However, XD will occasionally stray into other realms such as programming practices, graphic design, and sundry other items that may happen to interest me and the XenoAbe Design audience.

Be sure to check out the ‘Justin’ and ‘Portfolio’ pages to find out more about this guy who calls himself XenoAbe.

I hope you enjoy the site and feel free to comment often to help improve the content and direction of XenoAbe Design.