March 2010
-
Wed 10th
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.
-
Tue 9th
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.
January 2010
-
Thu 7th
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.
October 2009
-
Wed 28th
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.
September 2009
-
Sun 20th
Better Button and Nav Interactions
Using a simple button example to remind myself about the fundamentals of user interaction and expectations.
April 2009
-
Tue 28th
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.
February 2009
-
Tue 3rd
Best Designs of 2008, from the Client’s Perspective
Every client I meet with is given a questionnaire beforehand so they can clarify their design tastes. It usually includes links to galleries like StyleGala or Web Creme (or my own Yahoo Pipes gallery mashup feed) to get them started. During the meeting, we discuss their responses and analyze their favorite designs on a large screen projector.
January 2009
-
Thu 8th
Interviews with Church Designers
Browsing the various CSS galleries is one way to gauge which industries place value on good design. I was surprised these past couple years to see a big surge in lavishly designed church websites. As a non-churchgoer, I wasn’t sure I understood why so many churches suddenly wanted a cutting-edge image for themselves.
December 2008
-
Thu 4th
Effectively Advertising an RSS Feed
Google Reader’s popularity is surging and the number of people consuming web content via RSS readers has grown overall, but no one’s claiming RSS is a mainstream concept just yet. It’s mostly the geeks and early-adopters who know what it is and what to do with it, thus they don’t need to be sold on whether a blog offers an RSS feed…
October 2008
-
Fri 3rd
Improvisation in Design
On days when I’m not designing mockups, I’m creating paintbrushes and downloading textures and editing Kuler palettes, organizing them all in a central library, plus writing documentation, chipping away at baseline PSDs, CSS and WordPress frameworks, and generally streamlining the process. Setting the Rules and Regulations for the design department is part of my job description. This can be a double-edged sword.
June 2008
-
Tue 24th
Designing for the Empty-Handed Client
I’m in the midst of a drafting a long post titled “Making the Most of Mediocre Content”. As you could guess, it’s about molding client-submitted materials into something more organized, focused and attractive. But what happens when a client has nothing to submit — no photos, no taglines, no logos, no text, no identity?
-
Tue 3rd
The Rise of Visual Browsing
This time last year at the annual TED conference, Microsoft Live Labs demoed an immersive media-browsing tool that literally caused gasps in the audience. Seadragon/Photosynth is exactly the kind of ‘3-D web’ experience people were hyping in the late 1990s, along with VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), as though they were poised to go mainstream.
May 2008
-
Mon 26th
New Design Article Up at Fadtastic
Andrew Faulkner’s excellent design journal Fadtastic has published something I wrote last month called, “Getting Design Approval: The Single Mockup Theory“. It’s essentially an argument for convincing clients that exploring one focused design direction works better than chasing down multiple concepts.
-
Fri 23rd
A Site Redesign for Spring 2008
After taking a break these past few weeks, I decided to reboot the blog and point it in a new direction. Part of the motivation was a desire for something warmer, more spacious and more readable to accommodate longer bits of writing and tutorials. As for the shorter bits, I’m also posting links to Twitter. I still want this site to be a ‘final destination’ for readers rather than an index of outsourced content as Zeldman has noted.
March 2008
-
Tue 11th
A Wordpress Theme for Barack Obama Supporters
We had a departmental meeting last month at Category 4 and realized that 1) we all liked Barack Obama, and 2) we wanted to release some free Wordpress themes since we use Wordpress for so many of our smaller projects. The combined result is Probama, the first freebie of what I hope will be many…
December 2007
-
Sat 29th
Preliminary Sketches of Mimbo Pro
At the beginning of this month, I mentioned I’d be developing a paid version of the Mimbo theme while continuing to evolve the free version. My original deadline was the end of this year, but…
-
Thu 27th
Results of Eye-Tracking Studies on Websites
VirtualHosting has published a list of lessons taken from eye-tracking studies over the years. As applied to web design, eye-tracking is a method of analyzing user interactions according to how information is oriented on the page. It’s especially vital in layouts which are complex but also expect users to focus on different elements in a specific order — this applies to advertising in particular.
-
Tue 11th
Vertical Columns, Horizontal Content
About halfway through the newest post by Andy Rutledge is a section called “How Big is My Silo?” The premise is ridiculously simple: newspaper and magazine layouts in the print world do not translate necessarily into good layouts on the web…
