Well, apparently none of my postcards designs were selected for the Spring show. Since they probably won't see the light of day otherwise, I wanted to put them up here. If anyone would like to offer some constructive criticism, I'm certainly open to it.
Design 1
I know this one is a bit of an inside joke about chunks of the ceiling at ITP falling down first semester, but I thought it also showed a whimsical way to portray our program.
Design 2
This one was more focused on type. I actually like it the best.
Design 3
Since the producers requested a more human approach, I thought this use of the portraits shot earlier this semester combined with a pixelated visual would be compelling.
Design 4
I know the last one is kind of weak, but again, I was going for a more human touch to the design and I thought this looked kinda cool pixelated. (Is pixelated a word? Wordpress doesn't think so.)

This week we were challenged to think about how we could improve current user interfaces, and I was inspired by this article from Read/WriteWeb to consider what the future of the desktop might look like.  I decided to focus on the corporate desktop, both because that's where the majority of my experience comes from as well as where I see the biggest need for innovation. Here are a couple of my designs and some explanation behind them: Desktop as Dashboard What I liked about this design is that the desktop, usually just a mess of icons, becomes a dashboard of sorts. The right side is social. There are the usual icons at the top to connect to one's social media sites, underneath is the Skype window (which I believe will replace the office landline phone) and below that is a list of fellow employees on instant message for fast communications. On the left side there are a couple of features. There are the email messages in the inbox, which are color coded according to urgent it is to reply based on time. This should actually be reversed so that the most urgent (i.e. the most time has passed since the message was received and action was taken) should be on top. Below that are links to the most recently accessed documents so that they are easy to find and continue working on. Of course at the very top is a search tab inspired by Google. No longer do we need to organize files in directories. Instead, we can use tags and other keywords in order to find our documents more quickly. The Social Webtop This version of the webtop imagines that every worker's life resides in the cloud. That means that instead of using Microsoft Word or even Windows to organize a worker's life, one could use the tools already available online for organization and collaboration. The benefits here of course is that the PC is no longer essential for productivity. As long as there is an Internet connection, all of the information is available. I tried to boil down the webtop to its essentials for workers: messages, collaboration and project management. The value of this version is that companies like Dropbox, GMail, Basecamp and LinkedIn can offer secure, premium corporate versions of their programs to support a new way of working. And furthermore, it allows them to expand their business models beyond advertisements by creating a very valuable productivity tool for the changing world of work. Attention Webtop This one is a bit different, but the idea is to think about the painting easels of our youth. Use your fingers to drag the icon from the tray to the top corner to activate it. What I like most about this is its restrictions. Because of the size of the screen, it makes it more difficult to have too many windows open at once, therefore helping you to focus your attention. A post I read recently (but I'm unable to locate now) said that there are seven different ways to manipulate the iPhone screen by "touch," and that the reason is that most people can only remember about seven different motions before it gets too confusing. You can see there's no keyboard in this version, but I would expect a traditional computer keyboard to serve as the second part of this interface. Simple Webtop As with the above, I think this simple interface will help harness attention, which is increasingly difficult for most workers. With Firefox, you can have 30 different tabs open while also having five Word documents and two PowerPoint decks. The idea here is that once you click on one of the icons, all of the icons move to the left side of the page and the main window opens up to allow you to focus on only one thing at a time. An obvious critique of this design is about the jobs that require one to use multiple windows at once. It's fair enough, and this probably isn't ubiquitous. But again, I think this could solve many problems for cubicle workers. Personal Webtop Finally, I took a stab at what a simple personal desktop might look like. I like the simplicity and I think the icons speak for themselves. Of course the search bar at the top is essential for quickly pulling up specific documents. The yellow might be a bit much, but I did want it to be bright. CONCLUSION The one thing I think is missing on all of these designs is some sort of sync button so that the information can be transferred to your phone or home computer or even your TV interface. Perhaps that is an automatic feature built into the future webtop, though.  I'm sure there are a lot of companies working on this right now. I remember seeing a TED video of Bumptop, but that's more about icons and less about a new approach to the experience. If you are working on something like this, I'd love to hear about it or see a demo! NOTE: I downloaded the icons without keeping tabs on where they came from. Thank you to all of the designers and if you are reading this, please let me know so that I can give you proper credit. My apologies.

For 1',2',10' this week, our assignment was to create iPhone buttons to convey emotions for 22 words using only typography and colors. For me, this was an especially challenging assignment because I don't have any design experience. I started by doing some research into colors and psychology. Colors like black suggest stress or anger, so I used those on words like angry, nervous and scared. For autumn, I used a palate of browns and oranges. Probably my two favorite buttons are childish and happy because I was able to convey the words easily using simple typography and iconography. My least favorite buttons were my search and free buttons. The colors and type just don't seem to work. It's amazing what you can convey with just a font choice! I probably could have used more images or been more creative had I not constrained myself to the actual shape of current iPhone buttons. My reasoning was that if you use different shapes, then it makes difficult for the user to know what is a button and what isn't.  Anyway, it was a useful exercise and really helped me to see what types of considerations I need to make when designing for different screens. View my iPhone buttons.