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I am excited to announce the launch of my latest project at Yahoo!, the redesigned Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. This is a project that’s been in the works within my team for over a year now (and on my radar for a few months), so it’s very exciting for all of us to see it go live.

A couple of months ago, I caught word that the always fascinating Christian Crumlish needed a hand finishing the construction of his Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The old pattern library was painfully out of date, both visually and content-wise. I was happy to lend a hand to help build something that not only matched the modern aesthetic of our Yahoo! Developer Network (a site that I helped build and launch in its current state about a year ago), but also integrated some new features, while supporting a massive content inventory.

Last Summer, Chris Hanrath wrote up a great IxD spec for the new Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, which then made its rounds through the classic big-company hurdles. Eventually, Nick Terry designed the vis-de for it (based on Stepan Douris’ original VisDe), which made its way to my desk. I built the new front end with the help of Mich Cook on the middlelayer engineering, while Christian Crumlish tweaked the content to fit the new format.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, it’s a very powerful design asset, especially for anyone who needs to communicate/refer to the “correct way of doing things” when designing a site/project. Christian Crumlish is the resident Yahoo! Design Pattern Library curator, who observes and documents common interaction design patterns and documents them here, on the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. Christian (or xian, or mediajunkie) is a really fun guy to work with because his mind is constantly in the IxD Design Patterns headspace. If you get a chance to see him give a talk, don’t miss it - his wealth of knowledge matched with his great sense of humor makes for always a great time. Christian is currently putting the finishing touches on a book titled, ”Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide)“. He’s co-authoring the Patterns book with Erin Malone. This book is the evidence of a ton of hard work by Erin and Christian and is due out in a matter of weeks.

When you’ve got a moment, head on over to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and check out our hard work!

Sadly, I’ve been neglecting my blog. I wanted to pop by real quick to share a fantastic little piece on a very talented Bay Area photographer, Erin Malone. Erin used to manage my team at work and has recently left for greener pastures. While I will miss Erin as a manager, moreso, I’ll miss talking shop with Erin. Her fantastic journeys out to the marshland behind the Sunnyvale campus at work are forever documented in her fantastic photo portfolio. This KQED piece just showcases a few:

Finally, we’re allowed to discuss the big project that we’ve been working so hard on, here at Yahoo!. Today, our CTO, Ari Balogh announced that we are “rewiring” the Yahoo! you know and love and allowing the platforms to be more open, in order to allow developers to not only use our popular APIs, but to actually plug their own, home-grown content in, right there, on the actual Yahoo! pages. The Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS, affects pages such as the homepage, yahoo.com, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports and many others. Developers have the opportunity to build apps that actually run on the pages and allow users to hook in to their vitality streams, interact with content that might pertain to other content on the page or even play games, right there in the YOS canvas, on the related platform pages. This announcement in coordination with the SearchMonkey announcement gives the public a view in to the future of Yahoo!. Also, if you look closely, you might be able to spot me in one of the screen shots in Ari’s beautiful preso. IM IN UR VITALITY STREAMZ, POSTIN UP YUR CONNECTIONZ!

More info:
ycorpblog
Yahoo! Open throws down the gauntlet for the open social graph

This video is pure 90’s-technology-fun. Thanks to waxy.org for capturing this and posting it for our enjoyment. I love the exciting use of Yahoo! at about 8:30 in to the video. Classic!!!!

Compliments to mr ‘zilla, this is one of the more tremendous corporate whiteboard diagrams I have seen during the entirety of my employment with Yahoo!.