What if architects had to work like web designers? It would be like this.

Bloghopping for some redesign ideas (of course my original understanding of blogging being under the tutelage of Walt, Rachelle, and Mark) I wanted to see what the design community is up to. Turns out that as I have let my career go away from graphic design to information architecture, to defining products and gathering requirements (whatever the hell I’m doing right now) designers have been making progress. And I am trying to rekindle some design magic. So between learning about the wicked worn look, finding out that there is a way to have some true typographic headlines using ever-improving variants of sIFR, learning that any blog brand that can be shortened using an X is cool (DxF), It’s time to get to work.

After goofing around in Blogger a bit I successfully syndicated the content of this glorious web effort. To make it work with my newsreader (NewsGator), I took the Atom feed created by Blogger and entered it into FeedBurner. Now I have this nice little XML Chicklet on my site for all of you who want to stay abreast of my infrequent Blog entries. This website is now a strung together set of cheap ASP solutions to that which is provided natively by MoveableType. I’m running on Blogger (Free), with commenting by Haloscan(Free), with feed by FeedBurner(Free), with website hosted by Catalog.com($35 per year…close enough to Free).

The one thing I may pay for is a small donation to Haloscan so that comments on my blog are actaully emailed to me. That way I won’t miss out when Walt says he can make my site do RSS, or when Mark says Happy Fathers Day.

HowToBeCreative— It’s always good to read other people’s work about the angst involved in the creative process. It saves me from having to spend time being creative in expressing the angst involved in my creative process.

I feel special, as a blogger user, I can’t publish an RSS feed (unless someone tells me otherwise) but I’ve now been invited to beta test Gmail. That rocks! If you’d like to send me an email at my fresh new Gmail account send it to krisrz@gmail.com.

Last night about 20 Designers from around Chicago met for the inaugural Chicago UX Special Interest Group meeting. Larry Marine from Intuitive Design and Research facilitated the session. A brave soul put up the site that she is in charge of redesigning and let the rest of us analyze it, hash it, and rehash it. It was certainly good to get back into the Chicago community of designers anfter an extended hiatus (having another kid will do that).

Hopefully the next gathering will allow for a bit more networking, because all I walked away with was the facilitator’s name.

Apple Tries to Patent the iPod Interface.

On Thursday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office made public patent application number 20040055446, covering “graphical user interface and methods of use thereof in a multimedia player.”…Apple lists three inventors: Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs (news – web sites), as well as Jeffrey L. Robbin and Timothy Wasko…Wasko, Apple’s visual interaction designer, came to Apple in 1997 from Next Software Inc. when Jobs returned to Apple from Next.

It’s nice to see the work that interaction designers do get a little love every once in a while. As with many of Apple’s products, it is not the technology that is so revolutionary, but the ease of use. This ease of use can, and should be patentable. He and his cohorts invented the equivalent of the hammer – the ideal object for embedding a metal fastener into a piece of wood. iPod is becoming the ideal way to navigate through lists of electronic media. Unfortunately, as with hammers and steering wheels, Apple may suffer from having invented a a tool that litigation cannot catch up to.

More on Tim Wasko:
Tim’s Patents (he did the Quicktime interfaces, and the iApps)
Look at the friends he has.
Nerds think he’s a nice guy.

More on my past patented user interfaces:
Kris’s Patents (the other Rzepkowski patent is my Dad’s who was making Cellular technology before the term Cel Phone was even coined.

Change is the norm. I’m convinced. After spending my first 3 weeks at my 3rd job in 4 years, I’ve come to realize that I thrive on change. Come to find out, I’m not alone. Walt, one of my former mates at TMP has decided to take a new position at SixApart. This, after Rachelle relocated from NY to take over my old position at TMP Chicago. And before that was Mark moving on to R/GA.

First, I have to congratulate Walt on going to a place that truly has a great deal of meaning for him. For a true blogging innovator, going to work for the company that builds what he so passionately advocates, uses, and tweaks is a stroke of pure genius. I can already foresee exciting things coming down the way for Walt and for the blog community on the whole as a result of his upcoming work.

As for Rachelle, I have no worse feeling than that of leaving her just as she was coming in. But, the best part of it all is that she is going to have the world’s best experience at TMP. She is going to be thrown into design situations she may have only had a taste of before. And she is going to grow her skills so fast in the upcoming years. I think it is a blessing in disguise for her to have the kind of responsibility she now has in the best office in the company. Good Luck Rachelle!

And Mark already knows that I’m in awe of what he must be creating. Moving from advertising to a real design firm puts him in the top flight of designers. Already, the rigor that he has been going through in Architecture and Interaction Design makes creating Career websites look like childsplay. Mark, you’ve done well. Congrats!

After watching these 3 changers, my only regret from the TMP years is that we were well on our way to building an all-star user-experience team. Unfortunately we all just got very impatient, and the economy soured at a bad time. Now hopefully we’ll keep in touch at our separate companies and use each other’s knowledge for the betterment of users everywhere.

I fell off into the life-change abyss over the last few weeks. On February 2, I resigned from my beloved job at TMP Worldwide for an amazing opportunity at Hudson Highland Group. I’m now working as the Director of User Experience within the Human Capital Solutions Group. It’s the challenge to help build a business that really drove me. It feels like a startup again, and I love it.

In between jobs, Tricia and I took the 2 kids for a family vacation to San Diego. What an experience!

The stories of bloggers getting fired because of their blogs are always entertaining. This firing of a Microsoft employee shows just how serious it is to take pictures of Mac G5’s on campus.