I love it when I get a whole weekend at home to design, draw, create and paint. This is a pretty rare thing, and the kids spent most of the weekend creating too.

I like these two layouts the most from the weekend's efforts, in which I created about 6 layouts, backgrounds for a short animation and started a new photo series.

Beautiful girl



"Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Beautiful girl." Sorry John. Bastardised the song lyrics 'cause she is a beautiful - and somewhat mischievous - girl.

The devil is a hand-drawn, altered version of Maurice Sendak's Max from "Where the Wild Things Are" - Max was dressed as a wolf not a devil. There is a wheel inserted between the pages which contains 6 different cheeky faces of Miss M's that can be turned/changed.

Background is a piece of my grandmother's stationery paper, painted with tea and coffee and rubbed over rough bark with pastel. Fonts are Porcelain and Diesel.

Fightin' kids



"Everybody was Kung Fu fighting.... those kids were fast as lightning"

Actually, it's tae kwon do. But there's no songs with funky lyrics for tae kwon do.

Paper was painted with acrylic paint and coffee, drawn on with Derwent drawing pencils. Lettering hand-written with pen and ink. Cutting out all those little fighting people took AGES!!

Six months in the making, but I've finally finished this rather ambitious book project of our holiday to Norfolk Island last Christmas.



The book and cover are hand-made. The layouts are all hand-made. There is nothing digital at all in this book, aside from the occassional bit of typesetting and the faux polaroids.

The only thing I didn't make was the papers; they're mostly from Basic Grey.

Norfolk Island has it's own language and wherever possible, I have used Norfolk phrases throughout the book.

There are three folios each with four sheets, stitched with garden twine and bound with beads. This is my first attempt at a bound book with a clasp-cover. The stitching is not very neat, but I'm pretty happy with the end result.

Click here to see the interior layouts of the book on my Flickr pages.

So busy busy during the holidays... and they've gone so fast!



Climbing trees and making mud pies at the beach.



Exploring Boudhi National Park on the Central Coast.



Riding ponies at a friend's farm at Mangrove Mountain.



Miss M now wants a pony...



Hunting easter eggs and playing with chainsaws.



Playing with the new family hound, Sniffy.

Every year, Kinma takes the kids camping at the Goulburn Yurt Farm. It's a fab place, rustic and rural, with lots of fun adventures to be had. I only got to spend one night this year because I'm a working gal now, and I want to go for much longer next time... it's so much fun, so peaceful, so devoid of bling and gadgetry. Everyone needs to experience this at least once in their lives I think.

In teaching usability design, I spend a lot of time musing on usability and seeing design problems everywhere...

Lately I've been shopping for books, an exercise which has an intriguing array of unnecessary hassles and difficulties associated with it. I have a list of about a dozen or so books, most of which are fairly obscure or specialist, and require some effort to track down. So I decided to do a little experimenting and analysis of my experiences.

Before going out to a book store, I set up a list on Amazon.com. It took about 45 minutes to locate all the books – and to ‘discover’ about 20 more thanks to Amazon’s recommendation system, which I added to my wishlist for another day. It was very easy to find all of the books on my list and to learn which ones were still in print, available for shipment to Australia and the prices.

The total cost was $240AU – but postage was almost $95AU, which I felt defeated the purpose of buying them from Amazon rather than locally.

Next I paid a visit to the Dymocks website. This proved to be a much less usable experience. For starters, they don’t have a wishlist option. Secondly, I couldn’t work out how to remove an item from my shopping list and thirdly, every time I wanted to add an item to my shopping list, the website took me to the shopping cart page and provided no option to keep shopping.

The site offered no recommendations for other books I might like, had no facility for comparison shopping and none of the nice, user-friendly tools Amazon offers.

The process was annoying and convoluted, taking over an hour to search for all of my books - and in the end, I could only find 8. The total cost for these 8 was $211AU, but the website did not divulge postage costs.

Frustrated with this online experience, I headed for the local mall where there were several shops I could walk into and, I assumed, easily comparison shop.

I spent about 40 minutes in both Dymocks and Angus & Robertson trying to locate the books on my list and the experience in both was unintuitive and illogical. The organisational structure of both was bizarre; several books were located in unexpected sections, unrelated to the book’s subject matter. For example, a book about educational philosophy was located in the Business section and a book on philosophy located in Literature.

In both shops, I had to resort to asking staff, who were busy serving customers, to help me locate the books or find out their availablity. I only managed to find two books in each of the stores; without the help of the staff, I’d wouldn't have found any.

For my four books, I paid just over $100AU; not good value for money considering.

And an idea struck me. If libraries can have computer systems allowing users to look up books and locate them within the library, or order books in without needing to bother staff, why can’t bookstores?

Why was the Dymocks store not organised in the same way as the website? Why couldn't I browse the website in the store? Why couldn't I use the website in-store to locate the books?

If most bookstores have a comprehensive database-driven website which is country-wide, it would not be difficult to implement the same system in-store. This would provide so many possibilities...

1. Allow online shoppers to see whether a book is in stock and/or order a book to be picked up from their local store
2. Enable in-store shoppers to find a book in the shop or see whether a book is available at another nearby store

And so on. The shopping experience would be so much easier for customers and staff, save so much time and frustration - and could even, if well implemented, lead to people spending more money.

There is an old adage about success in business; make it as easy as possible for customers to give you their money. If traditional retail outlets are going to compete with efficient online ones, they will need to change how they operate, services they offer to customers and how they think about customer experiences.

After my frustrating and fruitless experience trying to purchase books locally through retail outlets, I feel the $95AU for postage from Amazon is well worth the money.