I first got a tablet because I was blown away by a friend demoing his work to me at a morning coffee meeting. I saw it as an elegant way to present work to friends, clients, coworkers and prospective employers.

Once I bought my tablet (Android-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer - love it!), I saw the potential to use it for a little more. Luckily, the folks over at Adobe did, too.

So when I first learned Adobe was working on a suite of touch apps, I was pretty excited. Other developers who had wireframing and sketching apps in the field weren't that great (with the exception of Autodesk's SketchBook, of course), and the ability to work with my existing toolset on my desktops was simply not there. I was hoping Adobe would change that.… Read more »

I’m pretty ticked. The Amazon Kindle is out for only a few weeks and Jakob Nielsen of useit.com weighed in on the usability issues pretty quickly. His points were all well-made and valid, and because the Kindle is a popular topic even amongst regular consumers, mainstream media picked up his scathing criticism. What’s got my goat were the comments I saw on the articles.

Why am I so ticked?… Read more »

I am writing in frustration. I consider my client lucky to have me involved in their project after we had launched, because I undoubtedly saved them from a painful slide in organic ranking.

After the project launched, the client got an "expert" marketing company who "specialized" in their industry to help push things along. After about a week of launching, their website had already climbed to the first page of results for relevant keywords due to my holistic strategy - this is not horn-tooting; it is fact. They were nowhere to be found before my redesign.

I know what I'm doing in the web because I do it every day. I'm a designer with a programmer's-tech savvy, a business man's strategy, and I make it my duty to know what works on the web.… Read more »

Whew! That was a lot harder than I thought it would be! On a whim, I decided I wanted to bolster my credentials in the field of User Experience, so I signed up to take Human Factors International's Certified Usability Analyst exam - without taking their courses (and saving $5,320 of their track price). I had about a week to prepare.

I already have a job, so why'd I do it? Well, in the web design world, it's easy to let your work speak for itself. You wanna see websites?? Bam! Here's some websites! If you're good, your work is good, and everybody can see it's good. Good, clean, semantic markup; cutting-edge css3 techniques; slick JQuery - it takes mere minutes to see if someone's got the goods, just by looking at a couple websites.… Read more »

I used to be vehemently anti Hallmark cards. I felt guilty paying $4 for a mass-produced sentiment. The personal-sounding contents of the card were not created by me and it all felt so saccharine and fake. I had the abilities and time and created my own custom greeting cards. But as my circle of friends and family grew, it became impossible to keep up. So, I now freely give one of the machine-fabricated cards with the cute designs to everybody.… Read more »

Just got my copy of one of Packt's books, "CMS Design with PHP and JQuery"! Packt always puts out high-quality books at all levels of web design, so when they asked me to review it, I was excited to get my [disclosure: free] copy.

The title is a little misleading to designers - there's little in the way of "design", although from an engineering perspective, they may consider it design. I'd rather it be called "building," or something less open to interpretation.… Read more »

Drupal is a highly customizable content management system. If more designers were able to get past the programmer-speak, we'd see a lot more Drupal websites out there. WordPress is great, too, but Drupal may be more versatile and flexible, able to power small brochure websites, blogs, as well as vast social networks and online communities.… Read more »

Small achievements may be hurting your success

I first heard the phrase while on a job interview. The owner of the company had very non-discreetly parked his fancy Audi R8 by the entrance to the building, and his license plate read, "BHAGS." When inside, the interviewer asked me if I knew what it stood for, and proceeded to explain the meaning: Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Some time later, I was reading Fast Company magazine which mentioned BHAG and referenced it to the original source in Jim Collins' book, "Built to Last." So, I finally knew where it was from, and added it to my reading list. (And you should read it, too!)… Read more »

I see I get some inadvertent traffic from people searching for how to create a testimonials page in Drupal. Since that's what people want, I'll be glad to tell you how! I'll assume you're somewhat familiar with Drupal 6 and web design, in general, and with the basic concept of installing modules. You'll need to have Drupal 6 Views and CCK installed for this one.… Read more »

I've seen some very interesting experimentation with illustrating with CSS3 which reminds me of the good old days of ASCII art. It's fun and interesting and takes an incredible amount of time and attention to detail. It's not practical, but it's fun. I've seen it on some production sites, even. To me, this is as bad as designing with Tables. Don't do it!

Illustrating with CSS3 is certainly creative, and a fun way to push the limits of what CSS3 can accomplish. It starts with creating sometimes dozens and dozens of divs and spans, creating any number of rounded corners, rotating the divs/spans, adding drop shadows, and presto! Scalable image that can't be seen on Internet Explorer. Here are some interesting examples: http://ping.fm/5coll http://ping.fm/ouEPW http://ping.fm/UGMwn… Read more »