Creating a weekly family schedule

My husband and I both work full-time and we have two elementary-age kids. This means that our life can get pretty busy sometimes, what with everyone's activities, obligations, doctor appointments, etc.

Several months ago, my husband wished for a way to organize our chaotic schedules, to have a big-picture idea of what was coming instead of just being unpleasantly surprised by his phone alerting him that David has a basketball game across town in 15 minutes. Synced smart-phone calendars help, but they don't do a very good job of giving all four of us a picture of what our week will look like.

In the past, we'd also had laminated chore charts on the fridge so we could check off everyday chores. He wanted to bring those back, too, so I took it up as a design challenge to save fridge space and combine the two: weekly calendar and daily chore chart. After all, I'm a graphic designer turned UX specialist. This sort of thing ought to be right in my wheelhouse!

After several iterations, here is what I came up with. This is an example of a weekly schedule from a few months ago.

Here are some of the notable features of this design:

• Only 4 activities fit on each day, a reminder that it's just not realistic to try and do too much in one day.
• The schedule begins on Monday, because that's how we think of our weeks: five days of school/work followed by two days of weekend. Also, some events go across the whole weekend and having Saturday and Sunday next to each other makes it easier to show that.
• The chores can be changed each week when I print out the new schedule. For example, this week I added making & delivering a cake to the chores. 
• Originally, I had initials next to each chore showing who was supposed to do what. I ended up getting rid of those because everyone already knows which chores are theirs.
• We can use this schedule to plan meals for the week, seeing ahead of time which days we'll have a lot of time for cooking and which days will be 'Leftovers a la Microwave.' If I were a terribly organized sort of person, I might even add the menu to the schedule (but I'm not, so I won't).
• Even the youngest member of the family can easily see which days are busy and which are not, especially useful if you want to know when you can invite a friend to come over.

I'm still working on the design of the weekly schedule, refining features based on user feedback. For example, I'm experimenting with the best way to display multi-day events like the camping trip shown here (especially tricky since this has to work in print, not just on the screen).

I'd love to hear any feedback you have on this design, especially any ideas for improving it!

Cell Towers as Art

Why do cell towers have to be ugly?

I know why they are ugly: cell towers are built solely for function and cost-savings, with no eye toward aesthetics. When enough people complain about the towers, the mobile companies make a token effort at concealment by trying to disguise the tower as a tree. I don't think they're fooling anyone, do you?

What species of tree is that? The rare Turris Cellularis?
(photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

But I don't see any reason why the towers have to be unattractive. If Jonathan Ives can design an attractive cell phone, if Michael Graves can design aesthetically pleasing kitchen tools, why can't someone design a cell tower that's not an eyesore?

I'll be the first to say that I'm no architect, but here are a few ideas I sketched out.

Imagine how the landscape could change if we let architects and artists partner with engineers to design cell towers that doubled as art.

Update: Solutions to My Illustrator Problems

It occurred to me after writing the previous post that perhaps there was some way to fix Illustrator and get rid of those pesky issues with the pen and brush tools. After all, plenty of other people use Illustrator to draw, so it must be possible.

Lo and behold, the solutions are out there:

• Keep pencil from erasing previous line when you start a new one.
  The answer is buried pretty deep into this thread, so I'll reveal it here: Double-click on the pencil tool. Uncheck "Keep selected." Do the same for the brush tool.
• Make a brush that responds to tablet pressure.

After making these adjustments, I was able to create the following doodle:

This was all done with one brush. See how close the circles making up the necklace are? No way I could have done that before! But now I can draw a row of tiny circles, one right after the other, without hitting Cmd + D after each one.

I Miss FreeHand

I miss Macromedia FreeHand's freehand tool. When Adobe bought Macromedia, I wish they'd incorporated it into Illustrator. Instead, all I've got is Illustrator's lousy pencil and its dumb brushes.

You see, if you're drawing in Illustrator and you start drawing a new line too close to where you stopped the previous one, the software deletes the old line and replaces it with the new one. I don't know why somebody thought this was a useful feature. Perhaps Adobe's programmers thought that everyone likes to draw in one, long, unbroken stroke?

The only way to stop Illustrator from deleting the line you just drew is to deselect it. In older versions of Illustrator, this was Cmd + D. Annoying, but not too much trouble. However, in CS3, they've changed the keyboard shortcut for deselect to Shift + Cmd + A, a whole new "three-finger salute." At least I can change it back in the preferences, but it's still annoying.

In FreeHand, I could just draw, with a tool that responded to the pressure of my pen. Look at the difference. Here's some doodles I drew in FreeHand:

And here's one I drew in Illustrator, with a pencil and a brush line:

See how one-dimensional the brush looks? I miss FreeHand.

Words as Images

Since joining Pinterest, I've noticed a lot of links to inspirational or humorous quotes displayed as graphics, sort of like digital posters. I suppose this trend has been building for a while, since the popularity of image macros started to take off. But I didn't really think about the consequences for semantics and search until I read this post by Kevin Marks: Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague.

I can understand the appeal of a pithy phrase turned into a poster-like graphic. I am also a fan of good design and typography. But a solid color rectangle with Arial block letters made in MS Paint? Really, that doesn't convey anything that actual text can't.

And yet, the current structure of some social media (Twitter being a notable exception) makes it worthwhile to put text into images, instead of using actual text.