GregBellDesign

With my recent announcement, I felt it was necessary to make a fresh start with a brand new site design. The purpose of this design is to simplify the site and move the focus onto the content.

I did away with a lot of the site structure and moved to a more classic blog layout. While I still plan on refining the homepage design, I do feel that the site gives me more room to express myself through the blog content without all the busy background elements.

Also, I plan on extending the type of content that I blog about. Up until this point the site has been more or less related to user experience design (and a little bit of self promotion for ScrnShots). Now that I'm starting my own company, I plan on extending the content to include web startups, web development and anything else that impacts my life as a startup founder.

If your reading this in an RSS reader, come check out the site. If your already here, what do you think? Leave me a comment.

PS: I haven't done a lot of browser testing, so things may still look funky on non-mac-os browsers.

On May 1st I'm embarking on a new journey. I'm leaving Analytic Design Group to create a new company with my friend and colleague Derek Kehler. Although we haven't decided on a company name yet :), we do know that we want to produce web based software products that we, and our users, are passionate about. The first product we're directing our ninja-web-fu skills at is our social design community ScrnShots.com.

My time at ADG has been both exciting and fulfilling, and I'll always look back at my time as employee number 1 with fond memories. But, the desire to work on my own personal projects (which are plentiful) has left me with very few hours in the day and a decision had to be made. Although the safe thing to do would be to give up on the personal projects, that's just not in my nature.

So, after many hours of deliberation, Derek and I finally made the decision to give up the cushy jobs and go out on our own. This decision has brought on a mix of excitement and anxiety knowing that our products need to pay our bills, but at the end of the day, we want to work on projects that we love. This will allow us to do that.

I'd like to thank Karyn for being such a great teacher and mentor. She made ADG a great place to work, learn and grow professionally. Also, I'd like thank the rest of team and all the great clients that made each day a pleasure. I wish nothing but the best to ADG and hope that this is not the end of a great working relationship between myself and the people there.

More info on the new company should be coming soon so stay tuned!

All of the hype around Google's supposed gPhone that's been keeping tech writers busy for the past few months has finally come to realization. Yesterday Google announced a new open source mobile operating system called "Android". So no gPhone (as of yet) but instead we get an operating system which will create millions of gPhones... or Androids.

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Here are my slides from the presentation I did last Thursday at VanUE. I plan on writing a post to sum it up on Monday, but I thought I would get the slides up now.

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Just wanted to give a quick heads up that I will be speaking at the VanUE event this Thursday night. My talk is entitled Mobile Web: The Expectation of Experience.

Here is the abstract:

Almost half of the global population in 2009 is expected to have mobile phones, of which 90% of them will have web browsers built right into them. The landscape for consumption of websites and media is changing at a rapid pace and as user experience professionals we need to provide appropriate advice to create engaging mobile experiences for our clients.

This talk explores how the user’s expectations of the mobile web is based directly on their desktop web usage. Examining the mobile strategy for two major web properties, key aspects of an effective mobile web strategy will be discussed.

There will be three other presentations as well that night, check out the details at www.vanue.com.

Hope to see you there.

Last week marked the end of my stint in the Interactive Design faculty at Capilano College. The past 2 years have been an amazing experience, coloured with education and personal growth. The faculty continually pushed me to produce better and better work, and I thank them for that.

Although the program has it's problems, it does allow for an open education where students can choose to be the leaders of their future and enforces the necessity of self education within this industry. This point was re-iterated by Dave Robertson in his keynote speech at the Grad Show this past week where he shared his views on continual education.

This point in time marks an end of formal education in my life (for now) and a new beginning in the industry (although I have been working in the design world for the past 5 years) at Analytic Design Group. I would like to thank everybody who helped me at Cap these past two years and say good luck to all of my fellow graduates. Keep in touch.

Well, it was finally time. A new design is born. There is plenty of cool stuff in this new design as well as an entirely new section called Library which will keep track of all the reading that I do. While there are still some kinks to work out in the style sheets, on a whole, I really like the direction that the site took. I think that it incorporates both my design and analytic sides better than the previous design.

I hope to continually evolve the design and typography throughout the site as the content continues to grow.

So, what do you think? Do you like it?

Welcome to the newly redesigned Greg Bell Design.com. A new site for a new year (school year that is). I still have some work to do, but the main pages are in working order.

I felt that it was time for a new look around here, as well as a major structural change. The site no longer pushes to my design portfolio. Instead, i am allowing for a more organic experience through my writing. I am looking forward to filling this space with User Experience information, links and knowledge.

First stop will be the CanUX conference this weekend.

Cheers.