Photo by kevindooley
2009 is over and it is a good time to summarize it and announce plans for this year.
Straight to the point, 2009 was a great year. The blog tripled the number of regular
readers which reflected on the activities and the content. Although I don't
post often, there were enough articles and tutorials which grabbed the attention
and helped establish a good conversation on the blog.
The most popular reading was
Create Vimeo-like top navigation unrivaled. The other popular readings were:
Since the most of them were tutorials I am glad that the next few articles became
also very popular:
They are all published in the last months of 2009 and didn't have enough time
to achieve the Vimeo popularity. Also, my
Free Sketching & Wireframing Kit became surprisingly popular in just
two weeks.
I met a lot of great people with whom I will continue to cooperate in the future.
Besides warp speed, I wrote a
copule of articles for Smashing Magazine and had three speeches on
local events, here in Belgrade.
Plans for 2010
Without doubt, this will be an important year for JankoAtWarpSpeed. I will expand
the goals of Warp Speed and besides the regular tutorials I will write more about
the topics I do everyday: UI design, usability, sketching&wireframing, agile
and other. This is why I am glad that the three articles I mentioned earlier became
so popular.
To achieve this JankoAtWarpSpeed will need a redesign. Well, this is one of the
reasons, at least. Before I was even thinking about redesign, I performed several usability
tests and found some issues which made me confident that redesign is a must (one
of the first things that will be changes is dark background). I will made one or
more posts describing the goals behind the redesign, and explain the redesign process.
I hope that making this process transparent will start discussions and sharing of
knowledge.
I've already done several iterations (from sketching to prototyping and testing) and I'm still at the "pencil phase". The screenshot above is one of the ideas that haven't been tested yet, but it is very close to the final solution.
I will also do my best to improve the content. By this I don't mean only to expand the
topics, but also to improve my writing skills (in English, of course). If you see any error or nonsense, please let me know :)
So, big plans. Short time. Let's go to work.
Janko is a UI designer, software engineer, blogger, speaker and artist. You can read more about him and warp speed blog here.