Widget Design
One of my projects this week at work is to design a couple widgets, specifically to be used on a touch screen monitor, iPod touch, and/or Zune. I didn’t take any web or motion graphics classes while at EMU, so most of what I learned was design for print. Right now, I’d say about 1/3 of the projects I do are for touch screens…anything from interactive video graphics to website design to icons for computer applications…meaning I spend a lot of time doing research.
In researching widget design today, I came across a really neat one (above) that has a lot of information about the impact of different papers, inks, etc. on the environment. It’s called theSustainable Graphic Design Widget. I can’t say I’ve ever spent a whole lot of time thinking about all that, until recently, as I was designing some stuff for a couple of our Chemical Engineering interns.
Anyway, back to widget design…I found this website, which has a lot of basic, yet useful information. Does anyone know of any other good websites by chance? Fortunately, I have a software architect to do all the back end stuff, so it’s basically the “look and feel” that I have to come up with.
by Jenna | 07.29.08 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
http://www.springwidgets.com has some interesting stuff…
http://agencycollective.com/projects.php?view=all&id=penn&pg=1
But, I think you have a lot of creative freedom, as long as buttons look and feel like buttons and the widgets aren’t too complicated. I did a bunch of research for widgets here, too, because I’m still thinking of making a site like http://bbc.co.uk
I think everything you learned in print design is applicable to the web now. So, do you have anything you’ve done at this place posted yet? It sounds pretty interesting…
http://www.springwidgets.com has some interesting stuff…
http://agencycollective.com/projects.php?view=all&id=penn&pg=1
But, I think you have a lot of creative freedom, as long as buttons look and feel like buttons and the widgets aren’t too complicated. I did a bunch of research for widgets here, too, because I’m still thinking of making a site like http://bbc.co.uk
I think everything you learned in print design is applicable to the web now. So, do you have anything you’ve done at this place posted yet? It sounds pretty interesting…
Thanks for posting this. I didn’t realize that widgets are just small webpages integrated with the rest of the computer (instead of in a browser). I’m glad you put this up, because it talked about how apple already did the hard part when it comes to making animations in your widgets, and it’s all in a javascript file I was able to put on my website.
now my portfolio has animated menus, and it was actually easy to do!
I wrote this semi-long comment, but then it needs approval for some reason and now I can’t repost, cause it says “you said this already.”
So uh… http://www.springwidgets.com and other widget-type sites are around if you start googling widgets, which I’m sure you have.
I researched this quite a bit for our site, as I was going to use them for the main page, but for your purposes, I would look at actual devices rather than a website.
Look at all the different interfaces cell phones have… or an iPod, or telephone… buttons people can touch, because that’s what people will actually be doing with your widgets.
Michael Jakab made an interface recently: http://www.agencycollective.com
Thanks for the links, Nick. There was some really neat stuff there.
I also found this website…it’s very similar to the site I posted above, but it has some specs for the Windows Vista gadgets instead of Macintosh widgets: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa974179.aspx
It’s funny how they tried to copy MAC with those “gadgets.” But, Vista is so unpopular that Microsoft has already moved onto the next generation of operating systems, and they’ve extended the tech support for XP through 2014! The tech guys here refuse to upgrade to Vista…
Still… I suppose more people have Vista than OSX… thanks for the link!