Simplifying artists’ workflow — and how effectively they transfer knowledge from one entity to another — promises gains for the entire industry of animated film production | by Guus Baggermans
The animated film industry has seen many seismic shifts over the last 100 years. From shadow play to the Zoetrope, printing on celluloid film to digital, hand-drawn to CGI — animated film production is ever-changing and evolving.
Yet, for all the amazing cinematic achievements these changes have enabled, they’ve also brought significant complexity to the production pipeline. The technical processes behind the scenes are far more individualized than one would imagine. In an industry in which creativity is front and center, that inventiveness extends to the ways in which its artists work.
With today’s announcement of the new Cortex 6 product, CognitiveScale takes another meaningful step in making AI tools accessible to line-of-business experts, outside the domain of computer scientists and AI engineers.
As the first-of-its-kind low-code solution, it’s a big leap towards a vision of empowering businesses to build and manage their own AI solutions. Now, subject matter and line-of-business experts can use AI campaigns to solve business problems, then disseminate the resulting data-driven decision intelligence throughout the company.
The work Cortex 6 does computationally has historically been done by business analysts, an audience with little-to-no code familiarity. The interface and…
In the early days of product design, the opportunity to influence the world was through tangible products, like toasters. Our role was to incrementally improve on, or ‘decorate’, the built world around us. It didn’t take long, though, for software to become the dominant focus in design innovation, with the mandate being to make software more useful and beautiful.
A shift happened while we were making beautiful things, one that turned out to be monumental — software embedded itself deeply into our everyday lives. It now determines our access to friendships, jobs, romantic relationships, financial success. …
Reflections on a year we won’t soon forget
Looking back on a year that challenged our modes of work and collaboration, and even the optimism that is fundamental to our approach, the strength of our culture shone through.
As a new year dawns and we celebrate the 7th anniversary of argo’s founding, here’s some of the work we produced with forward-looking clients who continue to invest in the future. We celebrate their vision and shared optimism.
A unified digital future for Salesforce
Crafting a design system that evolves with its users
Products are a reflection of the methods, processes, and cultures that produce them. A siloed company can create product experiences that feel disjointed. A thoughtfully crafted Design System solves for this, creating a commonality and cohesion across products and ensuring that decisions aren’t being made in a vacuum.
While a typical first step is for an organization to build and adopt a Design System (DS), that’s just the beginning — design systems don’t take care of themselves. They need to be maintained, updated, and evolved, just as products, customers, and businesses must evolve. …
Topics include social good, personalization, and remote collaboration
Our annual “It’s that time of year again!” post for SXSW voting is slightly different this year. SXSW has had to adjust to pandemic circumstances along with the rest of the world, and updated its PanelPicker process to account for a (primarily) virtual 2021 conference.
Coming later in the year and in a shorter window than we’re used to, the 2021 PanelPicker is now open for community input—so get your voting fingers ready! argodesign submitted three fantastic sessions this year, each that define a better future, and we hope you’ll show your enthusiasm for them by logging on and voting.
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How a life of exploration helps uncover and hone your strengths
We spoke to Sonia Prusaitis, General Manager of argodesign’s Austin studio, about her adventurous streak and how it’s informed her work and world view. Sonia grew up in Austin and moved around throughout her 20s, living in Florida, Sydney, Las Vegas, and Seattle. As General Manager of argo’s Austin studio, she focuses on client partnerships, studio operations, and bridging design delivery with backend operations.
You’ve consistently thrown yourself into challenging situations that developed your skills and prepared you to take an entrepreneurial risk with argo when it was in its infancy. Tell us a little about your path here.
I moved…
Machine learning can help us reimagine personal finance tech as a tool for developing emotional intelligence | by Roxanne Ravago
Money is never just about money. Emotions play a huge role in driving the way we spend and save, and the feelings we place towards our spending say a lot about who we are, what we value in life, and who we want to be. As we go down the funnel of collecting to processing, analyzing to displaying our data, the technology we use today in personal finance fails to capture the emotional qualities of our spending, which leaves us without a full, accurate, and nuanced picture of our money.
A dictatorship by numbers
Most personal finance apps today, even the most popular ones…
A creative director’s love for interaction design has an unlikely source
From his early years in East Germany to his current role as Creative Director at argo, Matthias Dittrich has brought his passion for interaction into every design opportunity. He started his career as a web designer in his hometown of Berlin. Matthias moved to Amsterdam to join frog design where he focused on interaction design and information architecture to help clients in various industries like telecommunication, health care and travel. Later, Matthias and his colleagues started their own consultancy, Raft. In 2019 Raft was acquired by argodesign, establishing argo’s first European studio. …
How to make your virtual collaborations flourish | by Sky White
Workplace technology is clearly trending towards real-time, high-bandwidth collaboration. Digital product design is increasingly influenced by this shift with tools like Figma, whose web-based foundation allows users to build digital products together in synchronous workflow.
Can Figma do it all?
When our team at argo started a project for a major telecom client, we decided to test Figma’s potential by using it for as many aspects of the design process as we could. We did this partly out of curiosity, but we also saw promise in Figma’s collaborative nature to accommodate a remote teammate.
In our experience, Figma cleverly supported remote collaboration in almost every…
