Doctor's Note

A mix of essays and commentary about design, innovation, technology, society, coaching, personal and leadership development. Since 1996.

atm Design interaction pentagram Struppek UI wells fargo

Design is Money - ATM Design

ATMs in Germany are lame, I have to say. They’re slow and clunky and appear to be designed by software engineers rather than UI designers. So I wish …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
cultured code iphone prototyping things wireframing

Prototyping and Wireframing on paper

There are a couple of great shots of prototyping on paper over at at Cultured Code’s blog for Things, their task manager app that they’re bringing …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
Design error interface microsoft UI

Why Good Looking Error Messages Matter

Almost anything involving computers falls over once in a while, but it’s how you handle it that makes all the difference. I spotted this in Newcastle …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
apple elgato eyeTV imac pvr thelonius monk

Keep Thelonius Monk Off Your PowerBook

(C) Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Since we’ve got a couple of MacBooks now I noticed my old 2GHz iMac G5 gathering dust, which seemed to be a shame with …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
apple hypercard multimedia tilestack

Hypercard lives again

Hot on the heels of my post about Director 11 there’s now a web-based version of Hypercard called TileStack. It’s still in beta (aren’t they …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
advocacy backspace data Design ngo social design notes tufte visualisation visualization

Information Design for NGOs

The Tactical Technology Collective have released a great little PDF booklet online called Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An introduction to information …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
3d adobe director flash macromedia

Director 11 Released - R.I.P. Director

ed. Director 11 was released a couple of months ago apparently, though I hadn’t seen the press release. If this was a new version of Flash, the web would …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
Design desktop HUD interview iron man orphanage post-production rauch Writing

Iron Man's HUD and interaction design

The current issue of Desktop has a snippet from my interview with Dav Mrozek Rauch from The Orphanage talking about their work on the HUD for Iron Man. If you …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
apple gmail imap mail mail.app

IMAP folder subscriptions with GMail and Apple Mail

If you’ve read 5ThirtyOne’s post about setting up Apple Mail with GMail’s IMAP you may be enjoying iPhone goodness and be all happy. But you …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine
DIY Interactivity multitouch

Multitouch with a cardboard box

Whilst we’re on the multitouch subject (is it multi-touch or multitouch yet?), here’s a short vid from Seth Sandler showing you how to make your …
Andy Polaine
Andy Polaine