Musings on design & other stuff jen's place

I know, it's a shock, but I'm more designer than one blog can handle. No, no — don't say anything — just let me talk.

It started a few weeks ago ... at first, it was nothing. An interview here, an editorial there, but today ... today, I did something I've never done before. I blogged about Jakob Nielsen as he was giving a talk. While people were asking questions, I was linking to content. And, once the talk was over, I posted it. There. I've said it.

Really, it's ... it's not like I'm proud of the way I behaved. I just thought you should know ...

On Tuesday of last week, an online financial publication ran an article on Sun. Normally, this would be cause for an "uh-oh". These publications tend not to post positive articles on Sun. Surprisingly, this article looked at our board of directors, and found Sun to be both ethical and transparent. That felt good. Finally, an article that wasn't about our imminent demise. How refreshing :)

Two weeks ago, my organization launched a group blog. Not to tell the world how great we are. Not to say what we're doing right and others are doing wrong. And not to promote the individuals in our design community as they search for another job. No -- this blog was requested by our director, and is being executed collectively by us, the designers in software. Not for any of the reasons above, but to show our shareholders, our communities, and even other parts of Sun that we are facing interesting problems and solving them in new and creative ways, based on customer feedback. How's that for transparent?

If you've read my blog before, you'll noitce that it looks different today :) I love the look of the brushed metal theme, but didn't like that the postings were hard to organize by topic. This theme allows the reader to view all of my postings or to view just those posts in a praticular vein, like design.

I may change my blog theme again, going forward, to try out other features of other standard templates that we have available, but eventually, I suspect I'll need to modify an existing template to get all of the functionality that I'm looking for.

Now don't tell anyone, because we haven't actually announced it yet, but yesterday, we started a new blog -- "we" being the folks in my organization, software experience design: xDesign.

You'll see that we've posted an interview with our director, Kartik Mithal, where he explains why we've started a group blog -- essentially to show some of the problems that we're working on, and how we've solved them.

And you didn't hear it here, but we'll be posting a couple times a week, so check back tomorrow -- we're likely to have something new for you.