Dani Nordin's blog

It was a dewy, slightly drizzly day on the Internets. I was on my third latte. 

Serenaded by the sounds of a bustling coffee shop in Prague, I chatted over Skype with Leisa Reichelt, part of the UX team that is responsible for the overhaul of both Drupal.org and Drupal 7. What follows is a rather incomplete summary of our conversation, which centered around the challenges inherent in doing, communicating and selling quality UX work. 

Recently, I got an e-mail from a fellow designer asking me (and a few other friends in the design community) to answer three seemingly simple questions:

• What is the logo?
• What is the identity?
• What is the brand?

One would think that, as a designer who has built her career on knowing the difference among these three, that there would be an easy answer to this. Interestingly, even among seasoned designers, this is a tricky question to answer in a soundbite-sized format, neatly organized into bullet points.

This afternoon, I got into a bit of a heated Twitter debate with logo guru (and online buddy) Jeff Fisher. The debate centered around the idea of "crowdsourcing," which Jeff uses to refer to sites like 99designs, LogoWorks, etc. Jeff believes, quite rightly, that these sites result in ineffective work that does a serious disservice to the client. To quote him,

"Too often [the] process fails to effectively include participation of end-user | client | organization | cause."

It's getting to be that time again on the East Coast; the time when specialty food makers (and the foodies who love them) start gearing up for the two big tradeshows: the Fancy Food Show (held each year in June at the Javits in NYC), and Expo East (held for the last couple of years and going forward at the Convention Center in my hometown of Boston).

On May 9th, I braved the Boston subway system to attend the Future of Food Conference at Boston University. Speakers and attendees included policy analysts, food activists and thought leaders from around the world.

Just in time for the holidays, it’s the zen kitchen’s first annual Holiday Survival Kit! This handy-dandy PDF is full of worksheets and tools - some practical and some downright silly - that’ll help you get through some of the most common family holiday dilemmas, including:

On Sunday, the

The more time you spend in social media - or maybe, the more time *I* spend in social media - the more I notice how much time it takes to keep up with everything. As such, I've developed certain strategies to deal with the onslaught, including putting my activity on various sites into specific contexts.