I headed to my first concert three days before I turned 20 to see PJ as they were breaking big on MTV. Because I designed promos and ads for the events council at CU I was able to get in early and free. I stood right in front of Stone Gossard (he’s the one with …
Author Archives: Mike Rivera
Change and the Habit of the Present
Christina Wodtke gave some needed depth to an old cliché: people don’t like change. Whether or not change is adopted, she argues, is not determined by a simplistic and innate dislike for new things. It’s determined by how well the change is communicated and how smoothly people transition to it. Wodtke writes: “…when a big …
Bad Feedback
I visited Ustream’s website and needed to update my password. The form they offered to do so indicated that what I entered wouldn’t work. The error it gave me said I used an illegal character, but they didn’t indicate what character was the issue. I’m left to guess what character is problematic. Why not tell …
Trust Us, We’re Experts
A site that purports to teach HTML/CSS has a buy button with an HTML/CSS bug.
The Fundamental Higher Ed Website Issue: Centralization vs. Decentralization
You can’t talk about centralization unless you first talk about how things currently work under a decentralized system. So I’ll address that first. Many traditional universities (most? all?) take a decentralized approach toward their websites, both in terms of creation and maintenance. It’s thought that a decentralized structure where each division, school, college, department and …
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Now That’s What I Call Diligent Customer Research
Get out of the building indeed: I specialize in [designing] downtowns, and when I am hired to make a downtown plan, I like to move there with my family, preferably for at least a month. There are many reasons to move to a city while you plan it. First, it’s more efficient in terms of …
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The Trouble With Surveys
I received this survey from Diana Degette in one of her regular newsletters. It’s designed so poorly that you have to ask yourself “who would consider the results from this survey seriously?” Well, politicians would, that’s who. You can ask a simple yes/no question on a survey, but the responses need to be yes and …
Denver Startup Week Panel Session
I had the privilege to sit alongside visual designer Geoff Thomas, developer Sean Dougherty and fellow UXer Jim Orsi as the panelists for the Caffeine, Bits & Pixels: Design & Tech Breakfast Panel, one of the many great sessions during this year’s Denver Startup Week. The discussion covered a lot of ground, but was grounded in a common …
Photoshop’s blend modes explained
I’ve used Photoshop for so long, I used to keep a backup copy of it on a floppy disk. Nonetheless, I’ve never really known how the blend modes worked. I simply experimented until wither my file looked the way I wanted it or I abandoned the exploration altogether (which was usually the case). Decades later, …