Baltimore City Teaching Residency – Apply by 4/14

Baltimore City Teaching Residency provides an accelerated pathway into teaching for those who are not yet certified as educators.

BCTR Residents come from all academic backgrounds and commit to become highly-effective teachers for Baltimore’s public schools.  Our 1-year program provides teacher training and certification while you work as a fulltime teacher, thus earning full salary and benefits throughout the 2014-15 school year.

Our training program includes:

·       6-week pre-service training (Summer 2014, 5 days per week, fulltime hours)

·       Weekly TNTP Academy training seminars (throughout the 2014-15 school year)

·       Expert coaching to ensure your success throughout your first year teaching

·       Extensive help and resources to secure your fulltime teaching position for the 2014-15 school year and beyond

We seek high-potential candidates with the dedication to become outstanding teachers in various subjects including math, science, Early Childhood Education and Special Education – Apply online to join the ranks of our elite educators.  Final deadline is April 14.

With more and more technology companies adopting remote working environments, having team members in different parts of the world is not uncommon any more.

Remote working comes with many benefits, but also unique challenges.

The biggest perk of working remotely is you are able to give all members the option to live and work where they are most productive. It’s often easier to stay focused without the day-to-day distractions of commuting to work and normal office interruptions.

But as we mentioned, many challenges persist.

Communication can be difficult.

Team-building can be very tough.

And working with time zones can throw you a curveball.

This can all be very tricky for design teams because we need to communicate regularly and extensively, share and pass files, brainstorm, and much more.

Any type of team needs to be on the same page, but this is especially true for design teams.

At Formstack, we’ve been a remote company for over a year now. We have team members from all departments working remotely across the country, and we also have a member of our development team in Poland.

As a company, we’ve learned quite a lot about remote working, and we want to share our insights with you.

Communication

Communicating is central to any design team.

When you work in the same office as your teammates, you can take a short walk or simply look across the room to talk with someone. It’s easy to bounce ideas around or steal 5 minutes of time to brainstorm.

As great as all the communication technologies are these days, you can’t beat face-to-face communication.

In a remote team scenario, impromptu discussions don’t happen as easily. You have to make an extra effort for these kinds of discussions.

Dealing with Facial Expressions and Tone of Voice

Text-based communication like instant messaging (IM) and email does a very poor job of conveying tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. Yet, all of these things are essential components of good communication.

We know, for example, that a significant amount of communication is done through nonverbal cues.

We help solve this communication barrier quite simply by using video chats and gathering the team together from time to time.

Particularly, we use Google Hangouts for regular meetings and the new video feature on HipChat for quick chats.

We’ve seen designs can often come out underdeveloped when you remove face-to-face communication, but an open door policy with video communication software like Google Hangouts, or even just voice calls, is a good solution for this.

The Importance of Planning

Planning is already a critical process in a traditional design team whose members are in a single geographical location.

But then add the remote/distributed team factor into the mix, and planning becomes even more crucial and demanding.

As a development-design team, we’re always working both ahead and behind the rest of the development team.

What that means is we lay the groundwork for how designs will both look and function within the Formstack app. But once the rest of the development team hooks up all their functionality and does testing, it’s once again our turn to put the finishing touches on design.

It’s important for us to plan and understand timelines of not only our own team, but the entire development unit of our company.

We have to constantly communicate not only about the projects we’re working on that will go into development later, but also revisiting design work that has come back through the development cycle for us to finish.

Workflow

We have a couple of suggestions regarding workflow.

Utilize Time Zone Differences to Your Advantage

We mentioned earlier that Formstack has a developer residing in Poland.

Instead of this distance being a pain point for us, we actually benefit from this geographical difference because he gets to have a 6-hour head start every single workday.

Thus, we are able to jump right in and do design work on features that he has already completed while we were still sleeping.

The time zone difference is still tough, though — our Polish teammate does have to flex his hours a bit so he can have a window of time to work and communicate with the rest of our team.

Create a Style Library

Another workflow tip that’s helped our design team is the creation of a style library. We’ve built documentation around the uniform styles we want to remain consistent within our app. It has been an extremely useful tool as a remote team.

Our style library contains the snippets of code we need for easy implementation of common elements such as buttons, menus, utility classes, etc.

The library helps us design and build quicker without added communication around these standard elements.

You can build your own style library, whether you’re working as an in-app developer, front-end developer, or web/graphic designer. If you’re working mainly with graphics, your library might be as simple as a document containing consistent colors, icons, backgrounds, etc.

The goal of the style library is to maintain consistency within the product and to cut down any communication barriers.

Essential Tools

There are also a number of useful tools our design team uses that allow us to make remote working possible.

We’ve mentioned a couple already, but here are some other apps we love using:

Project Management: Basecamp

Basecamp is the project management software we use to share wireframes, mockups, and completed files. We also use it heavily for leaving comments and communicating.

Prototyping: InVision

InVision is a web and mobile prototyping tool that we use to show the UX and user flow of designs.

Version Control/Code Repo: GitHub

For our code repository and versioning software, we use GitHub. We also use the commenting system in GitHub.

Task-tracking: DailyStat.us

This app helps us keep tabs on our teammates’ tasks. This allows us to show each other what we finished yesterday, what we’re working on today, and what we need help with.

Other Things to Keep in Mind

Again, we can’t stress enough how important frequent communication really is to the success of a distributed team.

Also, we want to say that, just like riding a bike, remote working takes practice and a bit of getting used to. Don’t get discouraged if after a couple of months things don’t seem to be working out.

After a while, for example, planning and communicating just became second nature to us.

We like to set scheduled meeting times throughout the week where we’re communicating over video for brainstorming.

We also like to do quick daily video chats sometimes just to say "Hi, how’s it going?"

The way we see it, we also have to maintain personal work relationships — that non-distributed design teams have traditionally benefited from — as well.

Are you part of a remote team? What helps you stay connected and battle the communication gap? Give your advice in the comments below.

Related Content

• How to Use Your iPad for Real Design Work
• 10 Ways to Be a More Productive Web Developer
• 7 Useful Git Tips for Beginners

About the Authors

Noah Coffey is a UX Developer at Formstack – an app that helps you design and build powerful online forms with no coding knowledge – where he creates and brings focus to the user experience of the application. Outside of work, Noah loves his time as a father, watching the Colts, and working with local charities and nonprofits. Connect with Noah on Twitter.

Aaron White is a UX Developer at Formstack where he works on streamlining the form-building process for users. Aaron is a proud father and veteran of the U.S. Army. He’s one of the company’s remote employees: Aaron works out of Bloomington, Indiana at a coworking space he founded called Cowork Btown. Connect with Aaron on Twitter.

The post How to Make Distributed Design Teams Work appeared first on Six Revisions.

The April edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, Photoshop extensions, game frameworks, educational resources, mobile frameworks, jQuery plugins, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Untrusted

Want to practice your JavaScript skills? Untrusted is an addictive video game that is played by tweaking and rewriting JavaScript code.

TypeGame

TypeGame lets you easily build mobile-friendly online games using a drag and drop builder. Combined with ActionScript 3.0, it lets you create powerful games in just minutes.

Typeform

Typeform is an easy way to set up forms that ask questions one at a time, much like a human conversation. It has a beautiful interface and is easy to set up.

Dropr

Dropr is an easy to set up portfolio for creatives. It’s responsive, looks the same (awesome) on every device, and it’s free.

GetTemplate

GetTemplate offers up responsive HTML5 and CSS3 templates for rapid web development. There are single-page templates, business templates, and more, with new ones added all the time.

Framework7

Framework7 is a full-featured HTML framework for building hybrid and web-based iOS7 apps with native features. It’s also great for prototyping functioning apps.

Nasty Icons

Nasty Icons is a set of edgy icons that can add some real interest to your designs. There are icons for plane crashes, vehicle fires, a head being stabbed in the eye, a stripper, a hangman, and much more.

Bootflat

Bootflat is an open source flat UI kit based on Bootstrap 3.1.1. It uses HTML5 and CSS3, is lightweight, and mobile first.

Fluidity

Fluidity takes the little bit of HTML that isn’t responsive right out of the box and fixes it. It’s only 115 bytes, and does things like make images and tables responsive.

UberVU Grid

UberVU Grid is a drag and drop library for 2D, resizable, responsive lists. It currently works as a horizontal grid, so you can configure the number of rows, while the columns will extend dynamically based on the items in the grid.

IxD Checklist

IxD Checklist is a handy checklist for making sure that your interaction designs are working as they should. It includes sections on affordance, feedback, simplicity, structure, and more.

Velositey

Velositey is a Photoshop extension for prototyping your designs in seconds. It makes it easy to set up the basics of your design, including layout and styles, based on an 1170px grid.

Really Good Emails

Need some HTML email design inspiration? Really Good Emails is a gallery of the best email designs out there, which you can browse based on type (alert, product sale, product update, etc.).

Badass Lady Creatives

Badass Lady Creatives is a site dedicated to featuring creative women from a variety of disciplines. It includes work from each to further inspire you.

Pixelcasts

Pixelcasts is a monthly video showing how real designers create things. It includes source downloads along with the videos, and every lesson you purchase is saved in your account for future reference.

Brick

Brick provides webfonts that actually look good. It’s completely open source, and fonts are served through Fastly’s industry-leading CDN.

Iconion

Iconion is an icon generator that lets you convert any icon font into PNG icons. You can add color, shadows, backgrounds, gradients, and more.

Mockuuups

Mockuuups is a set of four free hi-res iPhone 5S mockups. They have a fully adjustable background and display images.

MixItUp 2

MixItUp 2 is a jQuery plugin for animated filtering and sorting. It’s great for things like portfolios, galleries, and blogs.

Metalsmith

Metalsmith is a pluggable static site generator. All of the logic is handled by plugins that you simply chain together.

jQuery lightGallery

jQuery lightGallery is a lightweight lightbox gallery that works with both still images and video. It works with modern browsers, offers support for fade and slide effects, and you can put multiple sliders on a single page.

Triangly

Triangly lets you build a portfolio for your work just by adding your files to Dropbox, with no limits on how many projects you can include, and with the ability to present your images separately or in sets, among other features. It’s currently invitation only, but you can request an invite.

Jolly UI

Jolly UI is a set of over 200 hand-drawn vector UI elements to add personality to your projects. There’s a premium version for $29, and a free version that includes dozens of elements for web pages and apps.

JS Manners

Want to evaluate a 3rd party script before you use it on your website? JS Manners is a tool for scoring those scripts, including questions about performance, stability, footprint, flexibility, security, and compliance.

Slick

Slick is a fully responsive carousel that scales with its container. It uses CSS3 when available but works fine without it, among other features.

Comic Neue (free)

Comic Neue is a greatly improved typeface inspired by Comic Sans. It comes in a variety of weights and faces that even typophiles will appreciate.

Zona Pro ($10)

Zona Pro is a geometric sans-serif type family that includes eight styles plus matching italics. It’s inspired by geometric typefaces from the 1920s, with clean, highly readable shapes.

Marigny ($50+)

Marigny is a casual typeface consisting of five weights, from thin to black. It also includes a full set of small caps, fancy swash caps, and more.

Maritime Champion ($48)

Maritime Champion is a seaworthy all-caps font thatcomes in six weights, along with a Shoreline style with an additional four weights.

Laski Slab ($42+)

Laski Slab is a suite of twenty fonts designed for editorial purposes, originally developed for an online children’s magazine.

Science White ($10+)

Science White is a companion font to Science Noire, without the spider web. It comes in 3 weights, plus italics.

Lame Font (free)

Lame Font is a display typeface with a decidedly art deco slant.

Strato ($10)

Strato is a layered, slightly humanist sans serif typeface inspired by the city of Rome. It’s proportionally based on classical Roman inscriptions, but with a modern twist.

Wonderhand ($275)

Wonderhand is an extensive family of scripts, in seven widths and three weights. It has a total of 63 fonts, with two sets of alternate characters and automatic features to better imitate handwriting.

Ciao Bella ($10.50)

Ciao Bella is a sophisticated, hand-drawn copperplate script that includes four ornament fonts. It uses OpenType features to create a more genuine hand-lettered look.

1,075 Pixel-Perfect Vector Icons from Icons Solid – only $19!

Press release...

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is accepting applications for its new Health Information Technology Master's Program, offered beginning fall 2014.

As technology infiltrates the healthcare industry, the health IT field continues to grow at a rapid pace. The industry presents significant career potential, with postings for health care informatics jobs rising 53% between 2007 and 2012.

Given its large population and dynamic healthcare environment, the Baltimore-Washington area is poised for significant continued growth in the health IT field. UMBC, located just outside of Baltimore, offers a convenient location for industry professionals to receive the credentials needed to move into high-demand health IT roles.

UMBC's MPS in Health IT is an excellent choice for those who already have a degree in an IT or healthcare-related discipline, as well as those whose career has taken them into the field of healthcare IT. Designed with working professionals in mind, the program offers flexible evening, weekend and hybrid course options.

Those interested in learning more about the program can attend UMBC's Professional Graduate Programs Open House on April 23, 2014, for an opportunity to learn more about the curriculum and format, as well as receive information on financing and meet Career Services representatives. Those interested should RSVP in advance.