Design

  • Evaluating 4 Responsive Designs

    January 8, 2013

    We've got a Simply Recipes redesign on the horizon, and one of the priorities for this new design will be making it responsive.

  • Let’s Get Browsercam!

    August 24, 2009

    UPDATE: The Browsercam slots are all filled. Thanks to everyone who joined me—I’ll contact you all shortly with your credentials. One of the problems with being a freelance web designer is that you can’t afford to have every system with every version of every browser sitting around your office. So one of the things I’ve... Read More

  • Simply Recipes Gets iPhone Simple

    November 1, 2008

    We had a blast putting together the original Simply Recipes site, so it’s been a real thrill developing and designing an iPhone web app for Simply Recipes. After all, what could be more exciting than developing a simple interface for a simple recipe website on the easiest-to-use phone out there? There’s nothing like working on... Read More

  • Bipartisanship

    October 29, 2008

    A few days ago, Jane Wells put out a call to all WordPress-loving Icon Designers over at WordPress.org to design the icons for the new WordPress admin screen. Now, it’s no secret that I work primarily with Movable Type, but I’ve tried to make Plasticmind Design less about the tool and more about helping users... Read More

  • SymbolAssist: More Symbols, Less Work

    September 19, 2008

    After seeing the nifty characters TwitterKeys made readily available for posting into your Twitter and IM conversations, I got inspired to dig around the 65,000+ Unicode characters and find some more gems. As I did, I started to realize a couple of things. First, a huge list of symbols wouldn’t be all that helpful. Second,... Read More

  • Tools of the Web Design Trade, Part 2: Building Trust

    July 29, 2008

    In the previous article, I said that this article would be about the resources and processes of web design. What I hadn’t really considered was just how involved the process is, so I’ll just address the initial stages of the process in this article, specifically how to build trust with people and ultimately turn them... Read More

  • Tools of the Web Design Trade, Part 1

    July 25, 2008

    Unless you count watching The Secret City with Mark Kistler on Saturday mornings as a child, the only formal training I’ve had in graphic design is an Intro to Desktop Publishing class that taught me the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop and Illustrator. Everything else I’ve learned through observation and synthesis. That’s one of the great... Read More

  • The Blogging Interface: Flexible vs. Focused

    July 5, 2008

    Decreased Clutter, Increased Productivity When Six Apart launched Movable Type 4 last year with it’s brand new UI, I attempted to design my own user interface for it—partly to try out the new custom UI capabilities and partly because some folks were complaining that the new UI was script-heavy and slow. The Pep-o-mint UI (as... Read More

  • 10 Tips For Creating Website Mockups In Photoshop

    July 2, 2008

    Here are some things I’ve discovered while creating website mockups in Photoshop. They’re not gospel, just things that you may find helpful: 1. Use shapes and shape layers as often as possible. You can resize then easily without quality loss, good for later changes. 2. Blending options are your friend. Double click a shape layer... Read More

  • Simply Recipes Logo Love

    April 18, 2008

    Logo Design Love, an online publication dedicated to logo design and analysis, just awarded the Simply Recipes logo that we helped create fourth place in their Logo Design Love awards. The purpose of the contest, which featured several distinguished judges, was to uncover the most effective blog logos amongst todays popular blogs. The judges shared... Read More

  • Helvetica, Meet IRC

    March 25, 2008

    If you enjoy the feeling you get when you look at my website, and you’re a Colloquy user, you’re in luck! As part of my “let’s skin applications” kick, I’ve created Haas, a minimalist, Helvetica-based design for Colloquy. Plenty of variants to make you happy. Default Light Skin Dark Variant Download Haas for Colloquy (.zip/8k,... Read More

  • Lovable Type: Creating A Theme For Colloquy IRC

    March 25, 2008

    I waste a good deal of my day arguing about colonialism and pronunciation in the #movabletype-talk IRC channel. And when you spend a good deal of time using a piece of software, you want it to fit the way you work. I downloaded Colloquy, an IRC client for OS X, a while back, but was... Read More

  • Designing eComm 2008

    March 14, 2008

    When O’Reilly cancelled ETel 2008, Lee Dryburgh fought hard to keep the community of emergent communications activists alive by organizing eComm2008. The conference was a rethink of the trillion dollar communications industry, a challenge to industry leaders who have largely remained stagnant. Because of ETel’s last minute cancelation, Lee needed an tremendous amount of design... Read More

  • SXSW: Day 2

    March 10, 2008

    Kick ‘08 The day started out well with Kick ‘08. (It didn’t hurt that we crashed early the night before.) About 150 people showed up in Palm Park, and almost everyone played. True to Anil’s word, no one was picked last. Team 1 picked some odd name and Team 2 (my team) stuck with ‘Team... Read More

  • Redesign, Part 1: The Logo

    September 6, 2007

    Redesigning a website is like having a baby. It’s exhilarating and fun when you’re in the planning stages; but when it comes right down to it, it takes a lot of hard work and sleepless nights to see it through to completion and do it right. I couldn’t think of a better way to start... Read More