At Treehouse, we have 6 developers in a team of 50+ people. I’m told that’s unusual for a web-based startup, and that typically the company’s staff (and hence direction) is dominated by a team of developers.

There’s good reason for this difference – at heart we’re a content production company, so that has to be our focus. The development team at Treehouse is really there to support that goal. We don’t get to set the priorities for what gets worked on and what doesn’t, but we’re all ok with that.

We had lately fallen into a trap though, and as the team leader I’ll admit that it was mostly my fault. With 40+ internal ‘clients,’ the list of “really important things to do” is kind of overwhelming. There’s a huge temptation there to just plow through the list as quickly as possible, and that’s what we were doing – each of our developers would spend 1-3 weeks completing project A, and then immediately turn around to start on project B.

The reason this is a trap is because it ignores the importance of self-motivated work in creative disciplines (And yes, software development is a creative discipline – I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say something dismissive like “it’s just engineering…” but that’s a topic for another post, perhaps). Staying on top of the priorities for the rest of the company is a great thing, but it also can turn into kind of a grind when you never get to tackle any of those awesome little ideas you have day-to-day.

This was manifesting itself on our team, and it was really apparent once I started looking for it – we believe pretty strongly in the 4-day work week and maintaining a healthy work/life balance at Treehouse, but the dev team (including myself, back when I actually wrote code) was consistently spending a lot of time working on nights and weekends. Why? Because stuff we did during working hours was all the stuff we had to do, and on nights and weekends we could work on those little things that we wanted to do. It’s fantastic to work with a team of guys who are that motivated, but that’s a solid recipe for burnout.

To try to address this problem, I’m giving the developers at Treehouse time to be awesome. Specifically, after every major iteration they do on the app (one of those 1-3 week chunks of work), I’m encouraging them to take some time (a few hours, a day, maybe a day and a half) to do something they think is awesome or important even if it isn’t on our “big list of stuff to do.” Maybe that means refactoring an ugly part of our code, or adding in a “nice-to-have” feature to the site, or fixing a workflow for our teachers in admin that’s been bothering them. The big thing is that it’s something they choose, and is something they think is awesome.

We’re just starting this policy, so I can’t yet report on results, but I really like the theory of it. Delays to our company-wide priorities are going to be minimal (we’re talking about a few hours here and there), and while I don’t expect it to totally eliminate the extra work that the team is doing, it will allow the team to be more expressive in what they work on. I think it’s a win-win.

I am curious, though, if anybody has any other ideas or thoughts about my “take time to be awesome” initiative.

The post Take Time to Be Awesome appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

UMBC’s Special Collections holds a world class collection of photographs. With over 2 million images, including those by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Berenice Abbott, the Photography Collection includes a vast array of photographic treasures. Former UMBC Photography professor Jaromir “Jerry” Stephany deserves much of the thanks for this collection. An influential photographer and teacher, Stephany’s papers now sit alongside the collection he helped build. Stephany’s papers, which are open to the public, hold insights not only into Stephany’s teaching career, but also his personal life and the general history of photography.

Jerry Stephany was born in Rochester, NY in 1930. During the Cold War, Stephany trained as a combat photographer and served at Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Germany. In 1956, Stephany received his degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied under famed photographers Ralph Hattersly and Minor White. Four years later, Stephany earned a Master of Fine Art from Indiana University, where he studied Cliché Verre under the guidance of photographer Henry Holmes Smith.

Stephany first began teaching the history of photography when working on staff at the George Eastman House. In 1966, Stephany moved to Baltimore to start teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). At MICA, Stephany served as the chair of the department of photography and film.

In 1973, Stephany left MICA to become an Associate Professor of Photography UMBC. At UMBC, Stephany established the Photography program. Under his guidance, UMBC’s Special Collections began developing its Photography Collections. Even after his formal retirement in 1999, Stephany remained an active member of the UMBC community, continuing to teach a history of photography course and serving on the Council of the Friends of the Library and Gallery at UMBC.

Stephany exhibited his photographs at a number of venues, including the George Eastman House, Baltimore Museum of Modern Art, UMBC Library, Smithsonian Institution, and the International Center of Photography. With his photography, Stephany held a constant fascination with the abstract and science fiction. Throughout his career, he would also return to the Cliché Verre technique.

In April 2010, UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery hosted a long-planned retrospective of Stephany’s photographs with an emphasis on Cliché Verre, titled Music of the Mind: Jaromir Stephany Photographs and Digital Images. That same month, Stephany passed away. Two years after his death, in 2012, Tom Beck and Emily Hauver published the exhibition catalog, which is now available for purchase.

The Jaromir Stephany papers contain records relating to Stephany’s work as a photographer and educator, as well as his personal papers. Included in this collection are professional and personal correspondence, teaching materials, personal photographs, genealogical records, and files from Stephany’s exhibitions. There are also personal writings, interviews of Stephany, and audio-recordings of lectures given by other photographers. The papers were processed by History Graduate students Robin Martin, Johanna Schein, and Dorothy Alexander under the guidance of Archivist Lindsey Loeper.

Want to come look at the records yourself? Contact Special Collections to set up an appointment at x52353 or speccoll@umbc.edu. We also hold open research hours on Monday through Friday, 1pm to 4pm, with additional hours from 4pm to 8pm Thursday nights.

This post was written by Special Collections Graduate Assistant Johanna Schein.

I’ll come right out and say it. I think the grid is the unsung hero of a good design. It gives structure and lets the design fall perfectly into place on the canvas. With a grid, adapting and building something new into your design is easy. Think of it like a house’s foundation. With a solid foundation, the house is stable, and building on it is easy. With a solid grid, your design can easily be adapted to accommodate whatever changes come along.

Today, we’ll share iOS Grid System, which I’ve been using when designing apps in Adobe Fireworks. The extension is free for both personal and commercial use, and it works with all iOS devices as of March 2013.

Installing and using the iOS grid extension in Fireworks is pretty easy. We’ll explain the process in detail, but you can jump to the download section and try the extension right away.

Why Are Grids Useful?

Before we continue, a bit about grids.

I like consistency. It helps me feel like I can trust whatever I’m using at the moment. At a deeper level, users appreciate consistency because it builds trust — trust that you aren’t going to pull the rug out from under them in the middle of whatever they’re doing. They know what they’re going to get, and they’ll be more comfortable with you if everything lines up just right, rather than if elements look like spaghetti thrown against a wall. In the end, consistency improves trust and credibility through better design quality, and it improves usability by making a website or application more understandable, predictable and findable.

As a designer, I like figuring out a system that makes updating easy for me. Grids help here because I don’t always have to worry about how a particular element should align with another; I’ve thought ahead and done that work already.

Learning about grids helps you put out better designs. Grids — specifically, how to apply them so that a design can be consistent and grow into itself — are an essential topic for designers.

Actually, they’re only essential if you want an interface that is:

• consistent,
• easy to update,
• polished even after you’ve finished working on the interface. (I guess we needed to make that clear first.)

Whether you work with clients or are on an internal team, grids are especially useful when those last-minute “Hey, can you just add this little button in somewhere? It’ll take only a second, I swear!” changes come in. Accommodating that request becomes much less trouble simply because a good grid is in place. Just pick the appropriate column (or columns), and boom — you’re done. Happy client, happy you!

I like what Khoi Vinh has to say about grids in this short (but great) interview:

“The grid is a tool for me to impose order and logic and law. There’s a framework. If you remove all subjectivity, then you get some essential truth, some core idea that’s not clouded by inaccuracies or approximations or subjective feelings.”

Why Make An iOS Grid Extension For Adobe Fireworks?

The easy answer is that most of my designs these days are for iOS, and a grid system is essential to every design I craft. I start using it early on in the design process, and having a solid grid in place when I design makes sense for me.

I decided to build it after noticing how much time I spent making decisions that I could have easily automated. With this extension, I don’t have to spend time tediously clicking and dragging around to make sure my grid’s shapes and guides are pixel-perfect. This extension allows me spend more time on other important parts of the process (such as how the design works and looks).

Now, I just open Adobe Fireworks, create a new project, and then select what iOS device I’ll be designing for and the number of columns I’ll need. Then, the grid appears on my canvas, along with some nicely sized gutters, which help my design breathe a little easier.

Here’s what it looks like (notice the green overlay):

The iOS grid in practice. (Large version)

About The iOS Grid Extension

The extension is made for Adobe Fireworks and is optimized to help you create designs for all of Apple’s mobile devices (in both portrait and landscape modes) as of March 2013. It will be updated as new iOS devices and resolutions arrive.

iOS Grid System will build your grid automatically on any page in Adobe Fireworks. (Large version)

Here’s what’s included in the extension package:

• Non-Retina iPhone (3GS) grid command
  Grid size: 320 × 480 pixels
• Retina iPhone (4, 4S) grid command
  Grid size: 640 × 960 pixels
• Retina iPhone (5) grid command
  Grid size: 640 × 1136 pixels
• Non-Retina iPad (1, 2, Mini (2012)) grid command
  Grid size: 1024 × 768 pixels
• Retina iPad (3, 4) grid command
  Grid size: 2048 × 1536 pixels

Note: Apple doesn’t allow designers to specifically target the screen of the iPad Mini. To work on a design for iPad Mini, you can simply use the non-Retina iPad resolution, which is 1024 × 768 pixels.

You’ll notice that all of these grids have a few things in common:

• Both the landscape and portrait versions of the grid for each device share the same column and gutter widths.
• On each side of the grid is a mini-column that helps your layout align with the leftmost and rightmost icons in the status bar. What good is a grid if everything doesn’t align properly, right?

For the iPhone, each column is 30 pixels wide, with a 10-pixel gutter (the Retina iPhone is 60 and 20 pixels, respectively). The iPad versions use 44-pixel-wide columns with a 20-pixel gutter (the Retina iPad is 88 and 40 pixels, respectively).

These exact dimensions make it easy for you to have adequate space between each column, while giving you flexibility in structuring the design. This is the best combination I’ve found from experimenting with different column and gutter sizes, because I’m able to keep the same dimensions while adding or subtracting columns as I change device orientations.

How iOS Grid System Works

When a command from iOS Grid System is run, it automatically creates two things: “guides” and “shapes.”

Here’s how to access the iOS Grid System commands from the “Commands” menu.

1. Guides

A set of guides will be placed directly on the page.

You can lock them (in the menu, View → Guides → Lock Guides); you can activate snap-to-guides (View → Guides → Snap to Guides), which can make moving and resizing objects on the page easier; and you can temporarily hide or show the guides (View → Guides → Show Guides).

2. Grid Layer

The shapes (which will serve as columns) will be placed on their own locked layer in the page, named “Grid,” and combined into one symbol. Because the shapes are added as a symbol, reusing them anywhere else in the document is easy, if that’s your thing.

After you run a command from iOS Grid System, in the Layers panel you’ll notice that a new layer with the grid on it (contained within a single symbol) has been added. The “Grid” layer is initially locked, to prevent you from accidentally making changes to it.

The columns in the “Grid” layer have 33% transparency, and objects in your design placed on layers underneath it will be visible. But you can move the “Grid” layer to the bottom of the stack, if you prefer.

And when you don’t need the “Grid” layer to be visible, simply toggle its visibility in the Layers panel.

Further Notes

Can the Commands Be Run on Pages With Existing Content?

Yes, absolutely!

When the extension is used on a page with existing content, it will create a new “Grid” layer, move it to the top of the layers stack, lock it automatically, and then return focus to the original layer on which you were working. Smart!

It will also resize the canvas automatically (read more about that in the next section).

Size of Canvas and Cropping of Objects

Here’s another thing to keep in mind. When running a command from the set on a page that already has some objects placed on the canvas, and if the canvas is larger than the iOS device you are designing for, then some of the objects may be cropped or deleted when the canvas is made smaller. This won’t happen in all cases, though, because in Fireworks there’s a setting (in Edit → Preferences → Edit) that controls the behavior of canvas cropping:

• If “Delete objects when cropping” is checked, then the objects will be cropped with the canvas.
• If “Delete objects when cropping” is unchecked, then all objects will be preserved when cropping the canvas.

The “Delete objects when cropping” preference can be toggled on and off by going to Edit → Preferences → Edit.

When you run the command on a page with some existing artwork on it, this preference is important to remember!

Running the Commands Multiple Times

You can use any of these commands multiple times in one document. Just create a new page and select the command you wish to run, and a new set of guides and grids will be created.

(Just be careful when you try to run them multiple times on the same page. This is not recommended — things can get weird.)

Download, Install And Use iOS Grid System

Want to try iOS Grid System for yourself? Follow these simple steps:

1. Download the iOS Grid System extension (the ZIP contains an MXP file and is around 20 KB). Alternatively, you can download it from its GitHub page, because this project is also maintained there, if you’re that kind of geek.
2. Unzip and then run the MXP file, and it’ll launch Adobe Extension Manager. Follow the on-screen instructions, and you’ll be ready to use it in Fireworks! (For general information on installing and working with extensions in Fireworks, I highly recommend the article “Optimizing the Design Workflow With Extensions”.)
3. Open Fireworks and create a new document. As mentioned, the size of the canvas doesn’t matter, because the command will resize the canvas automatically.
4. Go to Commands → iOS Grid System and select an iOS device. Then, iOS Grid System will go to work building your grid!

Alternatively, you can apply the extension to existing pages as well. But keep in mind that, while existing artwork won’t be touched, the canvas will be resized (unless, of course, you run a command that matches the dimensions of the current page).

Roadmap And Final Thoughts

You’ve probably already figured out that I love grids and find them very useful. If you use Adobe Fireworks for iOS design, I hope that this grid system will help your design grow as you maintain it.

I’m also curious to see how and where you use it. Share a link to your app or mobile website. We’d love to see it in action!

Now let’s open it up to your suggestions for improvements. This idea has existed (mostly) in a vacuum up until now, and these kinds of things always benefit from other people’s suggestions. For example, I’m curious if anyone would prefer to use templates, instead of commands that run on a per-page basis. Or perhaps you’ve found a bug somewhere.

I would greatly appreciate all kinds of feedback!

Of course, any questions about how to use this extension are welcome, too. Just leave a comment — I’d be happy to help.

Further Reading

• “Interview With Khoi Vinh,” The Grid System
• “Grid,” Thinking With Type, Ellen Lupton
  We didn’t talk about typography here, but this is great resource to learn more about the fundamentals of good typography, too!
• “Design Cutting-Edge iOS Apps With Adobe Fireworks,” Ivo Mynttinen, Smashing Magazine
• “Optimizing the Design Workflow With Extensions,” Ashish Bogawat, Smashing Magazine
• “Creating a Pattern Library With Evernote and Fireworks,” Kris Niles, Smashing Magazine

(mb al)

© Joshua Mauldin for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

Fall 2013 Plan

The end the spring semester is only a few weeks away and soon almost 3,500 residents will be moving out.  Some will move on to new opportunities, such as internships, co-ops, or even trips abroad.  However, most of them will be returning home, returning to you:

There are several things you can do to make the move out process easier for you and your student.  The main thing is to be knowledgeable about the end of semester calendar. 

• The last day of classes is Tuesday, May 14
• Final exams run from Thursday May 16 through Tuesday May 21st. 
• The residence halls and apartments will be closing on Tuesday, May 21 at 8:00pm. 

If you live locally, you can help your student get prepared for the move out process by having them take bring the majority of their items home during the weekend before finals (or sooner!).  This will make the move out process run more smoothly and put less pressure on them since they won’t have to try to squeeze everything into one car load.  Please know that they will also need to leave their room in a clean condition.  Cleaning supplies will be available at the desk of each community to aid in this process.

It is important to recognize that students have different feelings about returning home.  While the majority will be excited about going home, others may approach it with more apprehension.  This hesitation is caused by any number of reasons, but some of the more common ones are sadness that they will be leaving their friends behind, while others may be afraid of disappointing you.  Maybe their spring courses didn’t go as well as planned, or maybe they want to change their major but are not sure of how to tell you.

Your students will be going through a change when they come home, just like when they transitioned to college in August.  “Change requires people to make transitions and it is these necessary transitions rather then the changes themselves that are difficult.” (ACUHO-I, 1996, p. 82) This change will also exist for you as parents, as well.  For some this will be positive, others negative, and for some of you, you many not even notice a difference, other than possibly an increase in dishes and laundry.

You students will experience this transition in four primary aspects of their lives: their roles, their relationship, their routines, and their assumptions about themselves and the world.  (ACUHO-I, 1996)

Their roles:  They may have been very studious in high school, an outgoing individual, they may have left home with blonde hair but come home a brunette.  During college your student has begun to find their own identities.  How they dress, how they look, how they interact with others, and how they see themselves may have changed.  Some changes may be drastic, but most will be subtle as they learn who they want to be. 

Their routines:  This is often the hardest adjustment when students come home.  They have been used to setting their own schedules for the past 9 months.  They eat, sleep, and study when they want.  They have no curfews.  The only person holding them accountable was themselves.  They now need to adjust to the routines that you have established in your household and this can cause some friction with your newly independent student.  Be open and flexible and trust that they did alright for the past 9 months making their own decisions. 

Their relationships:  In addition, your student has spent the past 9 months having a shared experience with some new friends.  They may have gone through homesickness, relationship changes, finals, and many special times that had an impact on who they are becoming as adults.  The people who have come and gone in their lives are often different then the one’s that were influential in their lives prior to college.  Romantic relationships may have ended or blossomed, students may find when they come home from college that they do not have as much in common with their best friend anymore.  These changes can be hard for students and for you as the players who are influential. 

Their assumptions:  Students may find the summer break a time to reflect on many different things:  are they in the right major, what do they want to do with their life, did they pick the right classes, when are they going to get to see their now long distance partner? 

The summer provides students the chance to think about what their past has been like, what they want their future to hold and how they go about getting it.  For many parents, the summer is a time to look at your student and see the adult that they are becoming.

Source: BASIC-an ACUHO-I Publication, 1996

So you think politics are rough in Washington DC? Check out Venesuela.

This week when tempers flared, a bare knuckle bar room brawl broke out among politicians on the assembly floor…watch the carnage here. 

For those of you who haven’t been following the recent trajectory of Venezuelan politics here’s a quick recap:

After the recent death of the controversial strongman Hugo Chavez, a snap election was held to fill his seat.

The April 14 contest pitted his chosen successor and former bus driver, Nicolas Maduro,  against opposition leader (and US favorite) Henrique Capriles. The first count tally gave the victory Maduro by 300,000 votes, or 1.8%.

Most nations including the members of several key countries in South America were quick to recognize the new president, however the US did not (of course). It appeared some parts of the electoral process were regarded as, how do we put this, a tad shady.

Capriles demanded a recount. Initially he was denied but eventually the National Electoral Council (CNE) gave in and did a quick recount of about 46% of the votes. Earlier this week the results came in and narrowed Maduro’s victory to less than 225,00 votes, or 1.49%. 

Capriles’ backers were still not satisfied. After his supporters unfurled a banner in the National Assembly protesting a proposed law demanding them to officially recognize the presidency of Nicolas Maduro, the Statehouse brawl broke out.

Yesterday, International Workers Day,  thousands have taken to the streets in Caracas. Pro- Capriles and pro-Maduro supporters marched and battled. There were deaths and injuries, and a US film maker arrested for treason.  Capriles plans to appeal the election results to Venezuela’s High Court before taking the case to the international community. 

Who knows how much longer this election debacle could carry on for? The case is already subject to large amounts of international attention and Capriles shows no sign of slowing down. But if we’ve learned anything from these events it’s that democracy can be a little crazy.