Design
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Evaluating 4 Responsive Designs
We've got a Simply Recipes redesign on the horizon, and one of the priorities for this new design will be making it responsive.
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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
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Simply Recipes Gets iPhone Simple
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
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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
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SymbolAssist: More Symbols, Less Work
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
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Tools of the Web Design Trade, Part 2: Building Trust
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
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Tools of the Web Design Trade, Part 1
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
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The Blogging Interface: Flexible vs. Focused
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
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10 Tips For Creating Website Mockups In Photoshop
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
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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
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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
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Lovable Type: Creating A Theme For Colloquy IRC
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
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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
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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
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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