This is a quick post on a topic I intend to write about in more detail later.

So, it has long seemed to me that it would be useful to have a library logo. Nothing fancy, but something that we could consistently use on print and electronic materials and eventually perhaps on library swag to indicate that the guide/event/service/etc. is sponsored and provided by the Library and its staff. Sure, we could in theory achieve this by including this detail in the text of a poster or research guide, but something that stands apart and is recognizable at a glance should be even more effective. We're not looking for something to scream, but something simple and elegant. Maybe even just a well-arranged typeface.

Last year we started a small group of design and font geeks to investigate coming up with a logo. We had some great brainstorming sessions--think Mad Men--and it was clear that while we knew exactly the sorts of things we didn't want, what we wanted was harder to express. Despite lots of doodling, none of us had the skills to create anything that realized the vagueness. We discussed doing a contest, but weren't sure how to run it. We also talked about approaching a professional design firm, but were pretty sure they would all be beyond our price range. We had even crazier ideas that I can't talk about. But sometime this summer I googled "logo contest" to see if there were any ideas for guidelines floating around the interwebs. Instead I found a number of companies that basically run contests for you. Bingo! (Quick acknowledgment: we're aware that there is debate in the design community about whether these spec design contests are good for designers.)

After a season of delays for AALL, summer vacations, and fall teaching madness, we launched our contest today, and I'm pleased with how it's going. We had our first entries, including one we quite like, within 90 minutes of going live. The contenders run the gamut of the subject line, with even a few that fall into the latter two categories having some potential. We graded them hard since it's the first day and it's already clear that we should have specified no academic regalia and emphasizing library instead of HLS in our initial design brief, but I feel confident we're going to end up with something good.

Panel blurb: Vitruvius, the first Roman Architect to write about architecture, asserted that any well-designed building must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas or be durable, useful and beautiful. Can these same three tenets be applied today to help us design better interactions in a digital environment? This presentation will first touch on the similarities between designing buildings and designing digital interactions. Then, there will be an introduction to Vitruvius and his book, De Architectura. In his book Vitruvius writes about this notion of a well-designed building being durable, useful and beautiful. Those three qualities will first be looked at in their historical context, but then will be examined to see how they translate into the contemporary context of interaction design.

Panelist: Jennifer Fraser, Lead User Experience Designer, Corel Corporation (Fraser has degrees in building architecture)
Presentation slides are available at SlideShare.
[edited to add] Presentation audio

Notes:

• Interaction design is a profession in its infancy
• Vitruvius was a theorist, not practitioner - we only know of one building he designed plus his treatise De Architectura consisting of ten books
• Trivia: Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man drawing is called that because it is based on Vitruvius's principles of ideal human proportions [I'd always assumed the proportions were original to Leonardo]
• Three design qualities: durability, convenience, beauty
• An example of what we might start with when approaching a project: the Winchester House
• Various foundations for different designers: OS, browsers, Facebook apps, mobile devices, etc. If not carefully built, project/product turns into house of cards
• Importance of failing gracefully. Examples: Twitter's 404 page and error pages, Firefox's "restore session" feature when restarting after crashes
• Not so great: MS asking you to send crash data
  
• No south-facing libraries in ancient Rome because of damp south winds
  
• Rooms = webpages
• Matching is important - don't mix Doric and Ionic features
• Adhere to established vocabularies and conventions, or at least be aware of them
• Good: MS Office 2007 minibar that shows up just when you need it and fades away after a moment
  
• Modern interpretations of Vitruvius's three design qualities: usable, useful, desirable
  
• Fraser used an equilateral triangle with points B, C, and D (for beauty, convenience, and durability) to illustrate. The aspiration is to be in the middle (in most cases--some products/projects will vary). Try to figure out where your project is in the triangle. There will be tension and pull between internal and external stakeholders.
• It is terrifying what people will do with products!

Thoughts:
Fraser's session was mainly theoretical and abstract, but managed to be practical at the same time. She said that she had been curious how traditional building architecture principles could be applied to interaction architecture design, and chose Vitruvius after considering several others.

Fraser's content was fantastic, but I wish she hadn't tied herself so closely to the prepared text. She made nice use of humor, but I'm not sure how much of the audience caught it in her delivery. That said, presenting solo to a SXSW crowd is an act of bravery I'm not sure I'd be up for.

Photo © Luc Viatour GFDL/CC

Lifehacker via the CALI pre-law blog links to a fantastic slideshared presentation about how to use PowerPoint without killing your audience (and shooting yourself in the foot in the process). I liked it so much I'm going to embed it here too, but do check out the comments at Lifehacker for even more helpful tips--like using being stuck in a bad presentation to assess the way others react to it.

My favorite part? The example slides in Russian to make the point that you don't have to know the language to recognize a bad slide when you see it.

Funny timing. Last night I made an enquiry about renting property in Second Life--something I've been thinking about for a short time now--and I just discovered that the NY Times ran a long and interesting article today called A House That’s Just Unreal all about Second Life real estate. It ran in the Home & Garden section, rather than technology, and included a few questions that puzzle me whenever I go furniture shopping in SL:

It has also given rise to a number of philosophical questions: since you don’t eat in Second Life, do you need a kitchen? Is a bathroom really necessary? Since you can teleport, do you need stairs?

It's mainly the toilets that puzzle me. I can sort-of understand wanting a really luxe virtual bathtub, but provided one has access to one in good working order, who fantasizes about a great toilet?

Virtual stairs, meanwhile, are my biggest virtual design pet peeve. They're so unnecessary, and my frustration in dealing with them is always accompanied by memories of the King's Quest series of games I played in the late 80s, in which there were always tricky staircases one had to navigate as part of the gameplay. One wrong step and your character was dead.