Working as a full time in house employee definitely has its benefits; camaraderie, stability, and the support of a team are alluring aspects for many designers. Yet, it also has many drawbacks. If you’re frustrated with the politics, tired of endless meetings, or you just want creative freedom and increased income, contract work can be an appealing option.
But how do you actually start freelancing?
Continue reading Moving from Corporate to ContractWe are pleased to present a few sections from Molly Wright Steenson’s brilliant book detailing the rich history of Digital Architecture. The book covers five influential architects who insisted on working to forward digital approaches, and proceeded to create the design path for a lot of modern digital design, including the origins of Information Architecture.
In Part 1 of these book excerpts Molly covers the history of how Information Architecture emerged as a practice and the beginnings of what we know of as IA today.
Continue reading Architectural Intelligence: Part 1As a native Texan in the Pacific Northwest, and a transplant Texan from Southern California, we are very aware of the significance of today’s date: Juneteenth. And we celebrate its significance and reflect on what it means to us. We’re left asking ourselves how we can be better allies. We know we haven’t done enough. We are educating ourselves on how to do more.
Boxes and Arrows has always been a platform for community. We are a Latinx owned, volunteer run publication, and we stand with the community in proclaiming loudly that Black Lives Matter. Over the past three weeks we have watched events unfold showing the effects of systemic racism and police brutality. It is difficult. It is emotional. We are deeply affected. We’ve huddled closely to our families, and marched beside members of our communities to send a clear message that change must happen now.
We believe in community. We believe that Black Lives Matter. We believe that the power of design in the hands of empathetic creatives can and must be used for good.
We are committed to making sure that Boxes and Arrows is a place to share ideas and make voices heard.
We continually seek diverse authors, who can share their voice, experience, values and cultural perspective, so that we may all learn from each other and in doing so show our support for each other. If you know (or are) an author whose voice can benefit our community by sharing your unique perspective, please encourage them to reach out to us, or send us a message and let us know to reach out to them.
We are bonded in our love for design. Let’s strengthen that bond in showing our love for each other.
Your sister and brother in design,
Amy & Frank
Publishers
Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash
To date, usability testing has been largely confined to usability labs. This ensures a controlled environment where users can interact with products or designs and researchers can field questions. The downside of this is not being able to get the context of use of what you are testing. But a recent project for a life science organization cemented the idea that taking user research out of the usability lab yields the best results.
Continue reading Taking Research out of the LabIf we want users to remain our users, we ought to entice them deeper into our design ecosystem.
Attempts to extend or expand users’ usage, frequently results in designs complicated by added features, and functions. My user experience research has informed digital and physical designs often with an emphasis on correcting the usability of such complexities. Users interact with the things we design at varying levels of usage maturity. Usage maturity is a measure of users’ comfort and familiarity with, and degree of use of a product, process, or place.
