Josh On Design

I had hoped to have my next tutorial article done by now but, alas, travel and JavaStore deadlines snuck up on me. I'm currently flying to Sweden for the annual OreDev conference.

If you live in northern Europe and have never been to OreDev I highly recommend it. It's not too big (600ish attendees), has some excellent speakers, and covers a broad array of topics. I love speaking at OreDev because I not only teach others about JavaFX but also get to learn about many other technologies that I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. Last year I learned about JRuby, Silverlight, and Jython.

This year I'm speaking on JavaFX user interfaces and the Java Store, as well as announcing an open source project I've been working on for the past few months.

In the mean time, I'm also starting the NaNoDrawMo drawing challenge. This isn't a competition like the challenges I run on JFXStudio. Instead this is purely personal. Your goal is to draw 50 things in 30 days. Just draw and draw. Practice makes perfect.

And by draw I do indeed mean drawing on paper with pencil or pen; though any form of drawing, analog or digital, is valid.

Why am I discussion drawing, typically considered an 'art' on a design site? Well, I'm not an artist and I never will be. But many of the skills of an artist have great use in design. As I'll cover later, the first step whenever I design a new user interface is to sit down with a piece of paper and draw it. Drawing is fundamentally the ability to take what's in your head and put it on paper. And only once it's on paper for others to see can it start to become design. So drawing is a valuable skill which I wish I had more of. Hence: practice makes perfect.

I'll be posting my drawings on Flickr as the month progresses, as well as more posts on design theory and tech tips, so stay tuned.

- Josh