Last 50 Posts
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Apr 7, 2010
Introducing CodeWise
As WPQuestions has continued gaining users, we’ve also expanded our family of sites to include Javascript, the Symfony framework and PHP, all using a single installation of the custom Q&A software we’ve built.
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Aug 30, 2010
Moving Target
My favorite book on the film industry is William Goldman’s (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. What I love is there are no specific conclusions about filmmaking…
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Jun 10, 2010
LiveView for iPhone & iPad
LiveView is a specialized remote screen viewing application intended as a tool to help designers create graphics for mobile applications.
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May 13, 2010
My Ex-Wife’s Wedding Dress
The model for setting up a quirky blog then waiting for the coffee-table book deals to roll in is being stretched a bit thin, but good luck to this guy.
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May 9, 2010
Community Expectations
Dribbble opened to the public last month while generating a lot of discussion about community and exclusivity. Drawar runs a great community of its own where this week users discussed what disappointed them about Dribbble.
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May 2, 2010
Designing with the Elements of Play
This post by Jared Spool is another chapter in the strongest recurring theme of 2006-2010: gameplay in everyday activities. See also, this talk by Jesse Schell.
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Apr 20, 2010
Designing with Social Skills
Raise your hand if you never went to art school. For better or worse I jumped into interactive design without learning design fundamentals. Instead I worked backwards, self-educating intensely, even now.
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Mar 22, 2010
Repent Amarillo
Design-wise, RepentAmarillo.com is a curious mix of military- and spiritual-warfare with video game aesthetic. Also, animated snow. Or nuclear fallout?
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Mar 15, 2010
Chat Roulette Piano Improv
The first thing I thought of when I discovered ChatRoulette was “hey, stop doing that that!” The second thing I thought of was its great potential for improvised performance.
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Mar 14, 2010
Tweets to Remember
Specific blog posts can be credited with widespread influence of opinion. Can microblogging’s limited format accomplish the same thing?
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Mar 10, 2010
Obama Theme, Republican Candidate
Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters.
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Mar 9, 2010
Dribbble, Meritocracy and the Open Web
Last month I was lucky to be drafted into Dribbble by a fellow designer. It’s a private beta site with a lot of buzz. It will eventually grow and go public which got me thinking about the ramifications.
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Feb 21, 2010
Animal Collective
A photo my wife and I took and blogged about respectively reached its peak of internet fame before completing its life-cycle and appearing on a Tumblr making fun of bad tattoos.
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Feb 13, 2010
TrustoCorp
No one knows if TrustoCorp is more than one person, but s/he/it makes street art in the form of signage which I recently spotted on Houston Street in NYC.
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Feb 10, 2010
World’s Most Influential Designers
Business Week profiles “27 luminaries who represent a diverse cross-section of design disciplines”.
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Feb 7, 2010
InstantWatcher
If you need suggestions for Netflix movies and are set up to stream, InstantWatcher aggregates from NY Times and Rotten Tomatoes, and breaks them down by genre.
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Feb 6, 2010
ChatRoulette
After an afternoon spent on ChatRoulette, Sam Anderson of NYMag, felt “socially trampled, excluded and e-viscerated”. This is a social web I’m not ready for.
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Jan 7, 2010
Design Versatility
At the beginning of each new year, I do some navel-gazing about where I should be career-wise. I look over my portfolio and take note of things I could have done differently.
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Dec 29, 2009
Complication
How do you explain a truly disruptive band like The Monks? Someone played them for me back in college and I refused to believe they’d existed in 1965.
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Dec 22, 2009
Creating Custom WordPress Widgets
With each new version of WordPress, the argument whether or not it qualifies as a CMS gets a little quieter.
In the WordPress core we have widgets, custom fields, custom taxonomies, and with version 2.9, an expansion of get_post_type. Add a few plugins and all sorts of post-types and custom write panels become a reality.
All [...] -
Dec 11, 2009
Feature Suggestions for Gravy
I released a baseline theme and PSD set called Gravy back in August and am happy sales have exceeded expectations. Just as important, user feedback has shown that the theme speeds up development time and can be used for diverse projects.
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Dec 8, 2009
Best Songs of 2009
This has been my busiest year ever on a personal level, so I’m glad to see Said The Gramophone has compiled all the good music from 2009 I’ve missed out on.
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Dec 8, 2009
Introducing WPQuestions
This week, my development partner and I launched WPQuestions.com, a new problem-solving site for the WordPress community, and the response so far has been incredible.
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Dec 6, 2009
Choosing a typeface timelapse
Brian Hoff records his process of choosing the right typeface for a project. Would love to see a few tooltip overlays explaining the choices he made.
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Dec 5, 2009
Radical Faith
Shane Claiborne has been making news this year and I’ve begun his book, The Irresistable Revolution. See also his recent Esquire editorial.
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Dec 5, 2009
BoingBoing without Steampunk
Waldo has provided what so many have wished for: the ability to browse BoingBoing without tedious references to the steampunk genre.
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Dec 5, 2009
Build it With Me
This is kind of like a matchmaking service for designers and developers who want to collaborate on building apps.
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Dec 5, 2009
Little Stabs of Happiness
This week I lost an inspirational family member, the second in two years. This poem by my old poetry professor always makes me feel better about feeling bad.
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Dec 5, 2009
Google Public DNS
Google has launched a public DNS service aimed at improving speed, security and validity. Go change your settings and give it a whirl.
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Dec 5, 2009
Flock Draw
The collaborative sketch-and-save space is becoming a bit crowded, but I do like the relative simplicity of FlockDraw. What are your favorites?
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Nov 12, 2009
Friedisms
A parody of stuff Jason Fried might say. Example: “Timecards are the enemy. The only thing timecards will prove is that your employees are liars.”
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Nov 12, 2009
Kind of Bloop
Just like it says: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. It would rekindle my interest in video games if the soundtracks were like this.
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Nov 3, 2009
31Three Relaunch
One of my top favorite designers (@jessebc) has relaunched his portfolio site with new colors and typography. The overall tone suits him and his work perfectly.
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Nov 3, 2009
Isolator
A small menu bar application that helps you concentrate. When you’re working on a document, Isolator covers up your desktop, icons and other distracting application windows.
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Oct 28, 2009
Notes on the Pro Theme Redesign
Last week, Ben and I launched the new version of Pro Theme Design. For me it was the first opportunity since going freelance to design a concept, logo, layout and content from the ground up, so I thought I’d make some notes on the process.
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Sep 20, 2009
Better Button and Nav Interactions
Using a simple button example to remind myself about the fundamentals of user interaction and expectations.
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Aug 29, 2009
Move Title Stills Collection
If you’re a typography nut or find inspiration from title screens in old movies, go check out this collection by Christian Annyas. Gotta love the film noir.
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Aug 14, 2009
Tori’s Eye
Quodis has released a Twitter visualization site that mixes sophisticated javascript animation with beautiful, handmade-looking design elements.
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Aug 4, 2009
A Design Framework for WordPress
Gravy is the codename for a new project I’m releasing today. It’s a design and theming system I’ve evolved over the years to help build a ton of my own WordPress-driven client sites.
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Jun 21, 2009
TinEye
TinEye is a “reverse image search engine” that matches your uploaded photo with similar images around the web. (If “TinEye” is a variation on “tin ear”, isn’t that a bad thing?)
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Jun 11, 2009
WPTopics: A WordPress Content Filter
WPTavern had a discussion last week about the huge number of WP developer blogs that have sprung up. As an experiment I decided to build a WordPress content aggegator that would filter only the most useful stuff.
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May 31, 2009
Popular Culture and Philosophy Podcast
An audio series that applies academic philosophy to topics like Radiohead, The Sopranos, Monty Python, Battlestar Galactica and the Atkins Diet.
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May 24, 2009
A Real Human Interface
The workings of a computers from the human perspective, designed and filmed by Multitouch Barcelona. Beautiful concept and music.
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May 20, 2009
ColoRotate
Here’s a new palette tool similar to Kuler that lets you explore color relationships in 3-D.
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May 20, 2009
A WordPress Theme for Writers and Journalists
Traditional newspapers continue closing their doors as more journalists are striking out on their own to start blogs, news aggregators and hyperlocal community sites built on open-source platforms like WordPress.
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May 14, 2009
Some Basics of CSS Animation
Monday by Noon makes an argument for progressive enhancement with this little example of transitions that can be done with CSS3.
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May 7, 2009
Creating a Flickr Carousel in Expression Engine
Flickr is still one of my favorite online services in terms of features and interface. The Uploadr tool also makes it an especially easy image-hosting solution for clients who are out in the field, taking their own photos, and updating them frequently.
Lately a few Expression Engine clients have needed to display their photostream dynamically in [...] -
Apr 29, 2009
PolyPage
Polypage was designed to ease the process of showing multiple page states in html mock-ups. By simply adding class names to a document you can imply state and conditional view logic.
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Apr 28, 2009
A New Design and Game Plan
This spring brought a few surprises which inspired the site redesign. The biggest was that my wife got into grad school in NYC so we’re currently scrambling to find an apartment and start new lives. It also means I’ll be taking the plunge and beginning a freelance design career.
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Apr 25, 2009
Share and Save Google Map Directions
The LatLong blog announced some cool new Google Maps features that let you save directions, trace the route and share/embed the directions with others.
