Surreal Notions » Surreal Notions updates

Merging sites

Josh — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:38:03 +0000

After entirely too many hours rewriting my site templates from the ground up, I’m preparing to merge Surreal by Design and Surreal Notions. I have already started transitioning existing portfolio items into the new format and will transfer existing blog entries once that is complete.

Once I’ve finished the rollout process and crushed any outstanding bugs in the interface, I’ll finally have time to finish writing my half-written blog entries.

Cheers!

** UPDATE (2010-04-11) **

I’ve managed to work out most of the kinks. I’m still writing project entires for the portfolio and plan on revising some of the visual design (especially around the portfolio navigation); however, things are moving along. I’ve also updated the resume available in the About section. Pretty soon I’ll be able to finish some of those half-written blog entries

Philip Haine of Obvious Design

Josh — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:00:01 +0000

Great news everybody! Philip Haine (Obvious Design, Steal this Idea) has invited me to work with some of his clients, because he’s taking a sabbatical to finish his book on product vision. Philip and I worked briefly together on a couple projects at Intuit, and I’m really excited to have the opportunity to learn some more from him. Philip has been a user interface designer for years and consulting for about 11 years. Needless to say, I have much to learn from the Jedi Master.

Philip was the primary designer behind TurboTax Expense Pro (I had a bit of input simply because I sit 30 feet from the developers). He also worked on MyCorp and TurboTax Business. In fact, Expense Pro and MyCorp are the two products with the most potential at Intuit in my opinion. Philip designed very solid interfaces for both applications. Philip walked me through the terrifying complexity of MyCorp with ease… which is quite a statement considering the hundreds upon hundreds of offering combinations possible–each with legal and financial implications.

I should have my official LLC documents within a couple weeks, so it is looking up for the consulting gig. With Philip’s generous help and a little luck, I’ll be able to get involved with a couple Silicon Valley projects before the end of the year.

Surreal Notions, LLC

Josh — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:00:24 +0000

I am in the process of forming an LLC to start independent consulting. This, with a little luck, will help me put my skills to the test. Most importantly, I hope to get involved with some interesting projects around the country that push interaction design to the limits and test my ability to manage product vision.

Sorry about lack of content on this post, but I’m excited to see where this leads.