Harmony is a hosted content management system by the talented folks at orderedlist. It’s built with developers, designers and their respective clients in mind. I know what you’re thinking, “no way they pulled that off elegantly”. Well, I’m afraid they did. They pulled it off quite brilliantly actually. Read the rest of this entry »
Generally that problem is that they don’t have a website, but sometimes it’s that they don’t have a website and don’t have any budget either…Solving both of those problems at the the same time is my job.
I’m all for keeping costs down and what a great way to defend the use of templates with clients.
This is a topic I absolutely can’t keep to myself any longer. You’re a web designer and you rock the socks off client work and even stuff for friends and family. But when it comes to designing something for yourself, for example, your freelance businesses website, you go completely blank. It’s as if creative block only applies when a design relates only to you. Read the rest of this entry »
I learned something very valuable at my current gig as a manager at a local convenience store. People learn a certain way to get things accomplished and that is how they will continue to accomplish pretty much everything. They often continuing down the same path even though it leads no where. It begs the question of whether a web designer can really call himself a web designer while specializing. Read the rest of this entry »
Web design is almost not even a real industry without Adobe Photoshop. I mean seriously, think about it. You can’t walk into any web designer’s office/workspace without seeing at least a trial of Photoshop. It’s a staple of web design. Well, a staple in any creative field for that matter. After all these years, I’ve come to hate it. It’s time to [partially] remove it from the tool belt. Hit the jump to find out my reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Software developers often have to wear multiple hats in the midst of time constraints, small teams and lack of support manpower. So it’s no secret that software developers naturally aren’t very good at providing support to users. As one who has been on both sides of the fence, it only makes to describe what users of software don’t care to hear when they’re sending you support emails and tweets. Read the rest of this entry »
If you have ever cared about designing a website, typography has always been an itch rarely scratched considering the support provided both legacy and modern browsers. But that is all changing right in front our eyes with such tools as Typekit and Kernest. Today I will talk about Typekit and why it’s not quite the tool it needs to be.
Since most web designers design first in photoshop or [your favorite design app here], Typekit does not do much good. Unless I can actually download those fonts for use in my pre-browser workflow, how can it possibly make sense to use typekit for a real project? Sure I can change my workflow to sketch designs and then go straight to the browser, but sometimes you just want to see how two fonts work together and that is difficult with Typekit.
If typekit offered some sort of 30-day “design time” trial on font downloads, that would be most awesome. I’d even pay a fee for it. It would give me enough time to test the fonts before I go to “production” or the browser.
Typekit is great. It is exactly how I expected this kind of solution to look and work. The font rendering is very consistent across browsers and darn near instant and the implementation is simple and portable. What more do you want? Font selection? Oh yeah, they have that too!
The font selection is awesome. But after riding the coat tails of Arial, Georgia and Tahoma for the past 10 years, I can’t say that it’s easy to get use to expanded horizon of typography options. I found myself looking for fonts that resemble what I’ve been using in the past. But that changes after a few tweaks to the imagination.
Like I said, I’d love to see more respect for pre-browser workflows (aka photoshop, fireworks, what have you). Another thing I’d like see is faster font rendering. I know, I know. It’s blazing fast for a first run, but dude, sometimes it’s not that fast and almost comparable to sIFR (Yeah, I just went there).
It’s no secret that I once was a decent web designer. I loved everything about it from conception to development. But my wings were eventually clipped because it became more about the race (aka career) and not the craft. Needless to say, I haven’t designed much of anything as of late and the things I have designed have been total failures. At one time I use to do both print and web design. But over time my burners eventually burned out.
Guess you can say I’ve given up on design. I’ve digressed into a spectator who once knew what it was like to see a design built with sweat and tears, be launched into the wild. The smell of the servers as they spin up to serve my awesome pixels, the click of my harddrive as I’m…alright, so maybe it’s not as poetic. But man I do miss design.
Brett Favre and I have a lot in common. We love what we do. We never want to stop doing it. But at some point we have to take a break and realign, rediscover and realize the real reason we wake up to do what we do.
I’m starting over. I’m emptying my portfolio, blanking my LinkedIn profile and online resume(s). I’m going zero on my entire history as a designer. It’s all burning down today.
The designer I was before today is no longer the designer I want to be going forward. Sure, the work of my past could be something to keep around, but I’m not really proud of that work anymore. Lessons were learned and those will stay with me forever.
Most would probably advise against this journey I’m embarking on, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a couple years but never really got up the guts to pull the trigger.
Being a designer “with no experience” will be fun. I promise. I’ll vlog about it as well.
It’s rare that a movie can actually make me feel really good at the end. Avatar is a James Cameron joint that had me on the edge of my seat for the full two and half hours and let me down nicely at the end.
Unfortunately lots of folks out there are scolding James Cameron for giving us a boat full of eye candy but no depth in the writing. Frankly that’s just wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Whether you’ve read the books or not, you surely know of the Twilight series. It is a tale of a human girl and a vampire (and a werewolf) falling in love. If you enjoy werewolves and vampires fighting while caught in a love triangle, this is the ticket.
Although most (as in non-teenagers and mature highschoolers) would find it difficult to believe that New Moon eclipsed The Dark Knight by just under $3 million at the box office on opening night. $70 million is now the new record to beat for a single showing of a single film here in the states.
Now on to the good stuff.