Gesture Theory Redesign of the AIGA | Aquent Survey of Design Salaries 2011 Website

Monday, August 8, 2011

ABOUT The AIGA engaged Gesture Theory to review the AIGA|Aquent Survey of Design Salaries 2010 website and provide our recommendations on how to improve the site for the 2011 launch. In the proposal they expressed the importance of building an online experience that tells the story behind the data. As we looked at the data it became apparent that the design philosophy should focus around adding visuals to compliment the numbers in order to make it more appealing and easier to consume for the reader. We approached the project in a number of phases. First, we identified a number of “quick-win”...

The Design Landscape Today Within the Context of Devices Everywhere

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to be a part of an AIGA Webinar titled Devices Everywhere with Ethan Eismann and moderated by Callie Neylan. In the next day or two there should be a more in depth recap of the actual discussion on the AIGA website. For the time being though I thought I’d share some of my points in response to the design landscape within the context of devices everywhere. Below are some of my my points to the design landscape within the context of devices everywhere, a recap from the AIGA can be read on their site. Designing for mobile first A couple years ago, the typical...

Gesture Theory’s deck for AOL’s Experience Design Studio (XDS): Observing, Remembering & Sharing

Monday, May 16, 2011

On Friday Gesture Theory was invited to present to AOL’s Experience Design Studio (XDS). We talked about Observing, Remembering & Sharing. Below is our deck. Observing, Remembering & Sharing View more presentations from Michael Surtees Read More

Recording my design process for an all encompassing multi platform app for @SWITCHED

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Because I’m a hybrid designer of sorts, it has always been a long conversation for me to convey what I do. As I explain parts of the process, people nod their head like they understand but sometimes I wonder if they really do. Recently I received an email any designer would be thrilled to read. Chad Mumm of SWITCHED asked me if I’d be willing to design an app while they filmed the entire thing. About a month ago I went through an intense three hours going through the entire process that made sense for me within the time frame to design an all encompassing multi platform app. I broke...

Talking about Scaling Personalities at How to Build Great Products: Insights

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Even if I hadn’t been invited to How to Build Great Products: Insights I would have probably attended. There was a number of products & brands that I think are doing things better than everyone else. There was Kickstarter, Foursquare, Chartbeat, Buzzfeed and Huffingtonpost among many others. It was really exciting to be able to talk and share some of my experiences inside the group. Plus I got to hear and learn from all of them. Ty Ahmad–Taylor and Kevin Kearney did a great job of planning and organizing the event. While the event was only one day the prior evening there was a dinner...

My Parsons Design IV Presentation is Up

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Parson's Design IV Presentation: Unexpected Narratives and Creating the Right Conditions View more presentations from michaelSurtees. I’ve posted my presentation that I prepared for Parson’s Design IV class. It’s quite similar to the talk that I did in Dallas for the AIGA in February though I shuffled the order up for a more appropriate context for the class. On Monday night James A. Reeves asked if I’d like to come in to his Wednesday class to talk about Design Notes and Agile Design. What is interesting today is that a lot of people that are now in school have grown...

Design

My Favorite Autumn/Winter 2012 Collection

I don’t typically write too much about fashion but I thought this was a worthy exception. My friend Mei Liu has released her first collection under the name PRIORY OF TEN for Autumn/Winter 2012. Like I said I don’t know much about fashion but what I do know is a sense of proportion, attention to details and the art making something great. All of those elements are displayed in her look book. A couple months ago she walked me through her process. To see it all come... Read More

Reflection of craft with a desire for a story

I really enjoyed watching the two part film from Gourmet Films. They interview the founder and CEO of Icon, Jonathan Ward. It’s fascinating to listen what drives him to create. When you start listening to the decisions made it becomes clear pretty quickly that everything was done with a purpose and was thought out extensively. Things like color to the materials to the proportions all went through the same thought process. Inspirations came from jets to classic watches.... Read More

On the Appropriateness of the Mad Men Poster

Last week I came across a poster advertising the premier date for this year’s season of Mad Men. I took a shot of it for my daily photo project and posted it to Flickr, Instagram and Twitter. My tweeted title was “I’m not too sure how appropriate is this Mad Men poster”. Thinking nothing more of it I continued with my day and shooting more images each morning. A couple days later I went back to the photo and noticed a spike in traffic to the photo. A couple blogs... Read More

My Initial Reaction to the Book on Saul Bass

2011 was a crazy year for me so over Christmas I rewarded the hard work I put in by buying a couple design books. I bought Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible by Sophie Lovell, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story by Paul Shaw and Saul Bass by Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham. The first two books came right away but the Bass book was on back order and there was no defined delivery date. I ordered it anyways from Amazon. To my surprise it... Read More

Getting a Glimpse Into Ford’s Design Process

It’s been almost a week since I was in Detroit for the North American International Autoshow that Ford invited me to. I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the days that I was there and wanted to start talking about what I saw inside Ford. I along with 149 other bloggers from across the world got access inside the company that they’ve never given the public access to. We checked out different labs for testing, rooms where designs are reviewed and some of the workspace... Read More

Cars I liked on the first day of the North American International Auto Show

Having never been to Detroit or the North American International Auto Show, here’s a couple cars that caught my eye on the first day. Read More

Experiencing the Henry Ford Museum

The Henry Ford Museum was the backdrop for the first dinner put on with Ford in conjunction with the North American International Auto Show. I had the opportunity to walk around the museum both before and after dinner. I was really was really impressed with the eclectic nature of the collection and vast size. There was everything from cars to trains to airplanes to different forms of machines that made energy. I really enjoyed seeing how a lot of those items have evolved over... Read More

In Detroit for the North American International Auto Show with Ford

Over the next couple of days I’ll be taking a lot of photos, tweeting and writing the occasional post from Detroit. I was invited from Ford to take part in this year’s North American International Auto Show. The two day schedule put together from Ford looks pretty cool as it is busy. I suspect by the time I fly back to NYC I’ll know a lot more about vehicles than when I landed in Detroit. Read More

Tweaking the New Year

A couple years ago after reading a post from someone that visited the Empire State Building once a year on New Years Day I decided to follow the same tradition. Just like last year and the year before that it gave me a focused opportunity to reflect on the past year and decide what I will do for the remainder of the new year. Looking back it was like no other. The biggie was Gesture Theory. We worked with more people, released better products and ultimately we we’re in... Read More

A couple tech interview video sites to catchup with over the holidays

I’m in the process of starting to reorganize some of my sources of info that I deal with on my browser. As I started to shuffle links around I noticed a nice set of tech video sources. Now that the holidays are almost here I figured I might be able to catchup on some of the interviews I’ve missed. Below are some of the sites that I think are worth visiting to learn a bit more about technology and some of my favourite interviews that I’ve seen. Bloomberg West I... Read More

Publishing Decks to the iPad and iPhone

There’s essentially two ways for people to publish online theses days. Using a print solution like a pdf or a web based CMS. The problem is that both ways were created before tablets and smart phones. I don’t think they really take advantage of what screens have the capabilities of doing today. PDFs also need a lot of time to make and CMSs assume people know how to code. It’s also a lengthy process. Over the past couple of months Gesture Theory has been working... Read More

Old Piers on the Hudson River

I try to take some time each weekend to walk down the Hudson River. It’s a great way for me to reflect on the past week and let my mind wander a bit with new ideas. This weekend I decided to shoot each old pier that I walked by to see what patterns might emerge after looking at them in a set. First thing I noticed was that I didn’t realize that there was that many piers clustered together within a short distance of each other. The second thing was the placement of... Read More

I shot more images this November than any other month, November Reloaded in Images

Looking back at November, the first thing I saw was the quantity of photos I shot. This was the first full month with my iPhone 4S and the weather in NYC this November was amazing. I can’t recall seeing a better fall month since I was in NYC. This was also the first month that a majority of my images were published first on Instagram and passed to Flickr second. The catch is that almost all my images for this post are being pulled from Flickr because it’s an easier... Read More

Why I returned my Up by Jawbone

I got really excited about Up by Jawbone as the first posts were published. My interests was because of it’s ability to ambiently track my walking habits without getting in my way. I was curious to see what that experience would be like and how that data would transfer to my iPhone. I wanted to test that interaction out. I also want to see how my behavior would change. I also wanted to experience it to see what new questions about fitness, measurement and interaction... Read More

Using Twitter to Understand the Silence of an Unknown Emergency

This morning started like almost every other morning. Waking up early, walking my weim Madison, checking what’s going on with the interwebs via my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. I showered, drank some coffee and played some music while doing all that stuff. I also glanced out my window from time to time during the rituals. Something different arose on one of my glances. Smoke coming from what I guessed was 34th street. In a matter of seconds a lot of it arose. What surprised... Read More

Looking at the Nooka Zizm

I spent some time this afternoon hanging out at Nooka’s office with good friend Matthew Waldman. Anyone that knows Matthew knows that he loves showing off his new products. This time around he showed me the Nooka Zizm. I had seen some images on his site but was surprised to see how differently it looks in person. I wasn’t so sure about the angled glass from the images on his site, but in person I really liked it. The face was completely legible from all angles.... Read More

Link Drop 003

I’ve just published Link Drop 003 using DeckPub. The deck is viewable on both desktop browsers and an iPad. To view on an iPad just open the link deckpub.com/8/link-drop-003 on iPad’s Safari browser. Read More

Custom iPhone Coverplate

I really liked the idea of customizing my new white iPhone 4S with something a bit different from the iPhone cases out there. It took a while to figure out what I wanted to do but realized what better image to use than the Obey stencil. I found a pdf of the stencil online, opened it up in illustrator and made the pattern. The most difficult aspect was trying to align the camera within the eye… Read More

The Future of Publishing to the iPad, Announcing DeckPub

Over at Gesture Theory we reached a pretty significant milestone Friday evening. We published our first live deck from DeckPub to the iPad using our own product. We used Link Drop to test because it gave us an opportunity to see how the images loaded with text with online content that people would want to read on an iPad. The screen shots above show the Dashboard where people create their decks, the Editor which allows people to add content, the content’s and leaf pages... Read More

My new favourite iPhone Photo App

I’ve been loving the new iPhone 4S’ camera. I’m using it as much as I can with Instagram and Flickr. Typically when I shoot it’s pretty static in format. Usually the format is either a square or 16:9 proportion. Yesterday Mike Arauz mentioned a new photo app to me that you should download immediately after reading this post. It’s called Photosynth. It makes panoramic images amazingly easy to take. All I had to do was tap the screen once and started... Read More

Authoritative overview of Social Computing and its relation to social media by Thomas Erickson

I received an email earlier from Mads Soegaard who is the Editor-in-Chief of Interaction-Design.org. He wanted to let me know that they’ve released an authoritative overview of Social Computing and its relation to social media by Thomas Erickson. He mentions that Thomas Erickson is a veteran researcher in social computing at IBM Watson Research Lab. Apparently the materials have took 10 months to produce and involved 3 editors, 2 peer-reviewers, and a camera crew of 4 people. I’m... Read More

REVIEW COPY: Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits by Debbie Millman

In Debbie Millman’s latest book Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, she interviews 22 well known designers and other people with opinions about brands. The conversation about brands varied quite a bit from topic to topic. When the topic about the future of branding and implementation of new social technology came up, people recognized it’s importance but they didn’t really talk about how they’re taking advantage of it. The people being interviewed... Read More

October Reload in Photos

Taking a look back at some of the photos that I took in October, a couple influencers became apparent. First there was the technical. I started shuffling between a couple different mobile devices while continuing to use my GF1. It also made sense for me to take a closer look at where I place and store those photos because of my drastically changing camera habits. Typically a clean image will live on Flickr and another version on Instagram. This becomes noticeable as you scroll... Read More

Shuffling between an iPhone 3GS to a Droid Bionic to an iPhone 4S

October was a busy month for me shuffling between mobile devices and network carriers. I switched from an iPhone 3GS to a Droid Bionic to a white iPhone 4S. I also left ATT for Verizon. Below are some of my notes comparing the Droid Bionic to the iPhone 4S. There was a couple reasons why I left the iPhone family briefly. Basically I was unimpressed at the time of iPhone 4S launch. Yes, I was one of those people that wanted to see an iPhone 5 after waiting so long for a new iPhone... Read More