I couldn’t find any data on a previous, similar sorts  but I was interested in what data would come out of it and if any of the challenges would be insightful. Even if it was for not I figured at least I would get the basic card sort data to work with. I was surprised by the results.  The challenge proved compelling enough for several groups to adjust their methods and one group to change their sort entirely. Part of it, clearly, was also documenting where those changes took place and what that meant as a whole.

I started the concept with a presupposition of how I would sort the data and used that as a model to test my personal insight as well as several coworkers to see how I lined up against the tested end users and my coworkers.

In the next section I am going to describe the sort as it is presented to the sorters with a bit of insight to why it would be presented in this manner.   Stay tuned!

When does printing matter the most? As of right now, I’m going to say on a signature piece e.g. my new business cards, all of which are officially crooked.

I was entirely too excited (debatable), as a designer, IMHO, these were supposed to be the cards I always dreamed of: 19pt stock, satin finish, spot varnish, .25 in rounded corners, double sided.

Mine.  500 of them in fact.

The original idea to do a new business card came from a client whose cards I was working on and I wanted to see what printing options were available. Well had I know how dynamic of a card I could order fairly inexpensively on the internet, I would have done so much sooner. I designed what I wanted,  simple clean but with a bit of flair, entered my credit card data and submitted my artwork. Now the wait begins.

Two Weeks

I had to wait over two weeks to receive my new awesome cards. As I got home on Friday the box was already there waiting for me. I quickly cut open the packaging examined the back (got some sweet spot varnish there) and the front… wait a minute… something is odd.  Was it the uppercase U next to a bracket that was throwing my eye off?  Was I overreacting? Wait. Where was my ruler? It is always around until I need it. I think my business card is crooked. No couldn’t be. Where is that damn ruler!

We were having guests in town all weekend so I decided to shelf the problem until Monday, chalking it up to my overreacting. I was wrong.

1-2 millimeters.

1-2 millimeters is huge when you are talking about a piece of paper as small as a business card. Let’s not even go into the fact that said card advertises that I am a “print designer”. I am currently beside myself I feel cheated.

This is not over yet!

I have contacted the printing company and will be updating with results.  I really hope they fix this.

*UPDATE* They are reprinting the cards for free, but won’t expedite the shipping so it’s at least a decent win.

If you’re looking to save files locally, having a storage solution without backup is a bad idea. Hard drives fail ALL the time so redundancy is key. There are many solutions for storage but none are as easy as the “Drobo” the main advantages between it and just a plan old external are as follows:

1. Multibay and upgradeable – the basic “Drobo” has 4 slots for drives (upgrade models have between 5-8), start with three and add/replace as needed. It will reformat the new drives and expand storage automatically, (if you go with a RAID setup instead the entire set of drives need to be reformatted and erased to add more storage and all drives must be matched in size in addition to needing a machine to handle the RAID array).

2. Redundant storage – all your data is protected if a hard drive fails just replace it with a new drive of equal or larger size and the missing data will be rebuilt with the new drive. Unlike with a regular drive, if it fails it’s gone or you have to pay for data recovery which will alone cost more than a drobo. It also self heals itself while idle searching for bad sectors and repairing them.

3. Additional hardware is available to support it, the base unit supports an add-on called “Droboshare” that allows the device to function as network attached storage that could be mapped to computers across the network or you could just buy the “Drobo Fs” model that has just the network attachment and everyone can access it that way from the get go (and it has 5 drive bays).

The base unit retails for around $425 normally without drives. 3 X 1TB drives should cost about $170 with shipping. which should give you about 1.8TB of storage (1800 gigs) after formatting and full redundancy. The “Droboshare” add-on is $195. (all prices relative to the time of writing)

The storage drive total – to – available storage total ratio, increases with multiple drives (I recommend starting with three). A full storage calculator can be seen on drobo.com.

It sounds a bit expensive at first but for fully expandable, redundant, networked attached storage the literally is NO other easy option that I am aware of. If you want network accessibility I would probably just go with the FS model it’s more expensive (at least while the base unit is on sale on amazon otherwise it’s the same cost and you get an extra bay and upgraded internals) but it has built in networking and an option for dual drive backup in case for some reason two hard drives fail at literally the same time it can still recover fully.

That is my opinion on the matter