uzzy Math representin’ the Daily Drop Cap! I stumbled upon Jessica Hische‘s website awhile back and have been following this series ever since. She posts a new, decorative cap every day for us internet folks to enjoy and use on our blog posts. They’re fun to sift through and offer a nice creative jolt to my day that is oftentimes needed.
Thanks Jessica, much respect!
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Yes, it’s name appropriate, but this new app from Montessorium uses great design to create an engaging interactive learning tool.
Now I can give my nephews a little math lesson with that “shiny glass screen thing” instead of throwing YouTube videos at them. Awesome. Continue reading
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Here at Fuzzy Math, in addition to all of the other projects we have going on, we’ve been working on creating a dashboard to help the powers that be (aka, bosses) help keep track of what is going on in the company, who’s working on what, how the blog is doing, and so forth over a given time period. With that in mind, we set out to pull in data from the various resources we use and combine them in a meaningful way. In this post, we’ll explore what resources we’re using and how we accessed them.
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Update: See how we mashed up all the back-end bits to create our small business dashboard.
Inspired by other small business dashboards we decided to create one for Fuzzy Math. The first iteration is going to be geared for the three co-founders by providing a heads up display of company performance. Normally we send out a series of emails or Basecamp posts to each other. It’s tedious and doesn’t really provide all of the right information at a glance.
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Our built-from-the-ground-up website and blog are rollin’! It was a battle at times, but I couldn’t be happier with the result. Brett just said the rebuild process “wasn’t that bad.” He might be finally feeling the effects of the air conditioner that stopped working at noon…
We still have a good deal (lots) of work to do before we can say it is polished, but we are definitely on the right track. Please cruise the new digs and let us know what you think (or if you find any errors — I blame Brett if you do).
More changes coming, but this is the biggest for a while.
We are off to enjoy an adult beverage and think about what just happened. A more thorough recap of the process will be up in a day or so.
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Hello all! Here I be! Thanks Ben and Fuzzy Math!
I was going to leave my first blog post as just that but felt the need to clarify one thing. I was BORN in Omaha (*), but I’m not sure I can say I am FROM there. It is one great Midwestern town — and I have still have family there — but I’ve lived 66% of my life in-and-around Chicago. Chicago is my jam. It is where I am from.
I’ve spent the last few years freelancing for various agencies here in the city and felt it was finally time to settle down. As Ben mentioned, I’ll be leading the front-end charge here; coding up sites, html’ing our crazy ideas and promoting Web standards to our clients and comrades. I am very much looking forward to the challenge and am excited to be a part of the team here.
Good design deserves good code.
- Brett
p.s. If anyone has a recipe for a veggie Runza, please contact me. Those things are pipin’ hot!
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Well, at least bigger ;)
We have experienced growing pains here and there, but now we have something to show for it! We are super excited to announce that we have made our first full-time hire in front-end ninja, Brett Meisinger. Brett has worked with Fuzzy Math a couple of times over the past 12 months as an independent contractor, but this time it’s for keeps.
Personally, I have known Brett for about a decade, where we have spent loads of time together at DePaul University, liQuidprint, the Fireside Bowl, and multiple road trips across this great land of ours.
He will have a bit more to say for himself in a bit, so I will leave this short and (relatively) sweet.
Welcome aboard, Brett!
* Even though we have “Math” in our name, don’t trust us as math tutors. We were 3 and now we are 4, sooooo 33% bigger? I have no idea.
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We recently finished a project on data visualization for the fine folks at Cancer Treatment Centers of America in which we redesigned the display of health and wellness data. The challenge was providing a compelling story through the display data instead of just slapping on a new coat of paint.
Two data visualizations from two very different sources caught my eye in Google Reader yesterday because they both told stories through a simple visualization.
via Andrew Sullivan
His visualizations and simple one-liners not only tell a complex story but motivate his students with a real purpose.
via SwissMiss
The second is a bit meta since it’s a graph about storytelling which itself tells a story. But through the use of simple graphs makes a powerful insight concerning truth in storytelling.
Here at Fuzzy Math we’re big on storytelling in UX design. We stitch user scenarios together based on personas and tasks in order to produce a realistic user story. We believe these stories can better aid our clients in understanding their users and their users’ needs and build consensus among their team.
But it’s a lot of work and in no way do I want to imply that the above examples are easy to create. In fact that’s the beauty of a great visualizations, they explain something complex in a way that makes it seem effortless. There’s a lot of power in that ability.
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A few months ago we were tasked with a redesign of a pretty large site and we had to get a grasp on what was out there quickly. We saw they had a sitemap.xml file, and it kicked off our innate laziness: someone on the internets must have made something to suck this XML into Omnigraffle, right? In fact, several someones had wrangled with this quite a bit, but there wasn’t a nice and easy solution out there. Just lots of hair-pulling.
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