WA 2016 Week 31: Design Things Galore

Weekly Whaaa…?

Design Things, Here, There, and Everywhere

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post one of these. I realized that there were a few design related things in my “I should post about this” file, so here they are!

The buttons templates and tutorials from Librarian Design Share and Char Booth / Claremont Colleges Library have been a big hit around my library. We’d actually purchased a machine a couple months ago, but having these templates helped me get “unstuck” and to actually making & then designing new buttons. Huge, heaping portions of thanks to Veronica Arellano Douglas and Char Booth!

Turning the Revolution into an Evolution by John J. Meier and Rebecca K. Miller connects to a lot of other design-thinking things that have been floating around here in Idaho lately.¹ I particularly like how they talk about rapid prototyping for library instruction, as that’s how I’ve been trying out different ways of teaching information literacy; seeing which metaphors or analogies work with students, seeing what connects with different professors, etc. as we gear up to make lots of new videos and tools.

Finally, here on the site, I’ve made the font sizes generally larger and changed the fonts to be exclusively sans serif. Currently the fonts are Alegreya Sans and PT Sans Narrow. I also added James Walsh’s Academicons, a project that supplements FontAwesome with Academia-dot-edu (), Open Access lock (), Zotero (), and other relevant icons.

1. Design thinking has been quite a topic locally. A few months ago, I was fortunate to work with people from BSU’s Albertsons Library on the Acumen + IDEO Design Kit course. Shelly Doty, Lindsay Dwyer (who’s also a fantastic colleague at CWI in addition to working at BSU), and Margie Ruppel were all excellent at shifting hats between being creative, critical, and practical as the course suggests. At the Southwest Idaho Library Association Unconference, Natalie Nation and Deana Brown lead an illuminating presentation on design thinking. And Amy Vecchione keeps doing lots of great work with students at BSU’s MakerLab and representing librarianship more broadly at Boise’s Trailhead startup incubator & coworking space. ↩