Erik Bjarnason's Portfolio

/ About Me

?, I’m Erik and I’m a UI/UX
Designer living in Los Angeles.

? Braindroppings

01

AMP and You

Google has just released their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, or AMP. The new mobile framework is bringing faster load times at the expense of programatic freedom. This is a good thing.

02

Designing For Emotion

With a low barrier to entry and a highly competitive landscape filled with already usable and beautiful products, the big competitive advantage and recent focus of many companies is beyond usability (Jeff Bezos wants to delight you).

03

Robin Williams and Living

Robin Williams once said: “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel all alone.”

04

What are the effects of the $15 California minimum wage?

George Peterson, of Project Dimensions has this to say about the raise of CA’s minimum wage.

05

Mobile First?

A mobile experience shouldn’t be treated as a scaled down version of a larger web experience. In fact we should drop the terminology “mobile experience” all together.

06

Trends and UI/UX

The digital world is an ecosystem. Mobile, big data and personalization are converging points that create a connected User. The future holds a system that shows us the user experience takes us far beyond the screen.

07

Future Aesthetics

Design has an impact when following the fundamentals of form meeting function and the specifics that come with the specific medium a design is created for. In 2013 there began the debate of realistic skeuomorphism versus flat design.

08

Augmented Reality for Advertising

The brands looking for innovative ways to emotionally connect with audience realized the need to incorporate Augmented Reality into their marketing, advertising and branding solutions.

09

Crazy Eights: Generate lots of ideas really quickly.

Crazy Eights works great in the early stages of the ideation process to come up with a lot of varied ideas on an interface very quickly.

10

Progressive Web Apps: The Future.

PWA involves a set of technologies which runs at the client side so irrespective of your backend language/framework you use, you can create a PWA.

11

Homelessness and Los Angeles

Homelessness is a complex and difficult problem. It is intermingled with issues of poverty, healthcare, mental illness, drug abuse, and veteran’s issues, all tough problems on their own.

12

Comics and Emotion

For all the flack the narrative of superhero comics still receive, this storyline that places heroes and villians into our post-9/11 world is very moving.

13

Kickstarter and Timing

When inventing a new product BEWARE of putting it on Kickstarter to raise money. It will end up on Alibaba being sold on Shopify sites by the time you raise $20k.

? Clients I’ve worked with.

An experience is an exchange. Let’s not fool ourselves. People don’t line up to hear about products and services. People line up to get something of value. The best experience gives the audience a gift. It could be entertainment, a promotional offer or an emotional experience in exchange for their attention or consideration.