Category Archives: Misc

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August 31, 2017

What Is a Design System and When to Create One

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Throughout my continuing journey as a designer I have started to notice several companies are creating what they call design systems. Some people also like to refer to them as design languages, visual languages, or human interface guidelines. Google has Material Design, Apple has created their Human Interface Guidelines, last year Salesforce put together their Lightning Design System, and Airbnb has recently put together a visual design language for their design team. I became curious as what a design system is and why these companies have started to create and document them. Below I’ve broken down my research into a few sections: what is a design system, what are the benefits, and when it is and isn’t beneficial to create one.

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July 14, 2017

Improving Supply Chain Management with Software

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By definition, Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. Supply chain management involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies.* SCM is becoming evermore important for small businesses as larger companies they compete with invest more in transportation, logistics, and inventory.

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July 7, 2017

The Elements of Style

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A spate of applications have popped/cropped up in recent years with slogans like “Make Anything Art.”  They purport to transfer the style of one image and render the content of another image in that style.  In the sets of images below, the small inset image is the source of the “style” which is transferred to the larger image.  It’s an impressive trick, although I don’t know that it accurately represents what we mean by ‘style’.

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June 16, 2017

Moneyball for Brands: How Communications Agencies Are Using Data Science

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New model of the media landscape

Before I came to Grio to do software development, I worked as an analyst at a digital marketing agency. Communications agencies are experiencing an industrial renaissance thanks to the rise of social media and the proliferation of data around consumer online behavior. Every Facebook like, every Instagram post, and every click of a link is an opportunity to measure a brand’s influence.

In the past, agencies were separated by activity, such as public relations, advertising, or branding, but these days the responsibilities are much more blurred. Clients are demanding increasingly complex marketing campaigns across multiple platforms. As a result, all firms are being asked to do more work outside of their comfort zone. Basically, clients are looking for a one stop shop for all of their marketing needs. Companies are more than happy to try to be that full service agency.

In this post I’d like to share a quick overview of the changes that communications agencies are encountering, and how they are adapting by incorporating data science into their service offerings.

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June 6, 2017

Fake news

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Traditional media is no longer the only source of news. Internet and social media have become the main platform for news sharing.
According to Pew Research Center 62% of Americans get their news from social media. This means anyone can create and share news stories, regardless of their truthiness.

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June 6, 2017

Introduction to 3D Printing

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3D printing is the process of creating a three-dimensional object by adding many layers of material together. This process is performed by a computer controlled machine commonly called a 3D printer. This article will primarily be discussing the Fused Deposition Modeling(FDM) method of 3D printing. Most FDM printers will heat up plastic and push it out from a nozzle. This process is called extruding.

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May 31, 2017

Centaurs Versus the Total Perspective Vortex: Data Visualization and Complexity

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Data visualization projects are probably what first drew me to software. I loved the idea of creating tools with beautiful interfaces that allowed people to see, interact, and play with big systems and concepts that are ordinarily hidden from view. Our lives are shaped and shaken by complex forces; making them tangible is a potent challenge, and one that really speaks to me.

In this post, I’d like to talk about some of the ways data visualization holds utility as a means of democratizing systems thinking, some considerations for how this can be effectively achieved, and how we might think of data visualization as a tool in our kit when approaching Big Serious Complex Problems.

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May 17, 2017

A Brief Introduction to Game Theory

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Game Theory is a field shared by math and economics that aims to describe strategies and outcomes of games. A game is simply a set of possible decisions and their outcomes. While Game Theory is immediately applicable to certain board games (Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess among others), its usefulness goes far beyond into areas such as public policy and business strategy.

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April 26, 2017

The Magic of Agile and the Design Process

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Over the past year, I’ve been working as the solo designer embedded in a team of mostly developers and one project manager designing web experiences and publishing software for one of our clients, Rivals.com. We follow an agile methodology and work hard to effectively and efficiently integrate design. This blog post breaks down the major phases of our process and illustrates, at a high level, the role of design throughout.

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April 12, 2017

Esoteric Programming Languages and You!

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Have you ever heard the term “esoteric programming language” and not known exactly what it was referring to? If so, this blog is for you, and hopefully an entertaining jaunt if not.

Esoteric programming languages are a unique class of programming languages that are generally NOT designed for everyday use on projects such as a website or phone app. Instead,
they are designed with a goal in mind, such as being a difficult as possible to program in, or to layout the code into a physical space that has meaning. Amusingly enough, even though they are often rather crazy, they also tend to be Turing complete which is quite impressive considering they weren’t necessarily designed with that goal in mind.

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