There’s a thought that has been forming in my head the past few days. My wife went to a class about sustainable living, and a big part of that was reducing the clutter in your life; both physical and abstract. It got me thinking about how we find peace through minimalism. The clean desk. The tidy room. The empty table top. These things bring peace of mind, they inspire and allow room for creation and imagination, at least for me they do. continue reading…

I booked a flight with JetBlue a couple days ago, and last night I wanted to check in online. I clicked on the link from my confirmation email and began the process of online check in. It ended up taking me much longer than anticipated, raised my blood pressure and forced me to end up calling their customer service line where I was told I was wrong and they were right and to have nice day. continue reading…

Twitter is on fire about the new Skype 5.0 beta for Mac. We downloaded it as soon as we heard, and yes, we were just as underwhelmed by the UI as you were. We love whitespace, but c’mon guys, we don’t want to buy a new cinema display to view our Skype chats. So, we had some fun this afternoon tweaking the CSS, and below is what we came up with. continue reading…

This vector icon set, just one of many from a collection, is meant to serve as a clear representation of the actions and elements users commonly deal with when visiting websites and using web applications. You’re free to use these for both personal and commercial use with no credit necessary, but please do not distribute directly. continue reading…

If you haven’t heard yet, jQuery released their new mobile framework over the weekend, and we couldn’t be more excited. To celebrate, we’re giving away a free set of mobile UI elements (.psd) to help speed the customization of your mobile web application designs. Use them in any way you see fit with no credit necessary, but please don’t redistribute directly! continue reading…

There is a well known saying in the design community, keep it simple stupid. It’s an oldie, but a goodie and has proven itself worthy through the years. My personal design style relies heavily on this concept as I think simplicity is the key to understanding. My job as a designer is to visually communicate a certain message to a target audience, so the clearer I can be the better off I am. While working here at Full Creative, I have been involved in quite a few web application projects which are very fun and very daunting. Simplicity in app design is essential, either use it or people won’t buy your product. After spending weeks in the application design process, I have come across some interesting issues and would like to share some of my solutions. continue reading…

Some recent work has made me think a little more broadly about accessibility. In the web design community accessibility has been one of the hottest topics over the years. Thanks to the hard work of a lot of smart people there are rules and standards we can follow to make websites more accessible to the blind, near blind and color blind. Joe Clark has even been pushing for better use of captioning to make video more accessible. While all of these efforts are great they still leave out a vastly larger audience. The non-English speaking world makes up over 70% of internet users. continue reading…

A few years ago, in my infancy as a designer, I would have never thought I’d be where I am today. I got excited creating logos. I was creating business cards and letterheads. I made some sweet brochure designs, and, yes, some basic HTML websites.

My how things have changed. I haven’t designed a business card in over two years. I haven’t actually worked on any printed designs for that matter. I spend my days working in Photoshop and staring at code for hours, trying to debug that damned pixel misalignment in IE6. In recent years I’ve labeled myself a “web designer”. continue reading…

With the introduction of the iPhone 4 and it’s new retina display, the process of designing for iDevices became a bit more complicated. In addition to creating designs for the standard resolution screens of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad, we must now create a higher resolution version for the iPhone 4. To help make things a bit easier, this post lists the most important things I’ve learned from my first venture into designing for the retina display.
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Everyone’s daily routine varies based on their everyday experiences, designers are no different. For the most part, however, we all have one goal in mind, “How can this be done more efficiently?” I have asked myself that question daily and have went through countless numbers of free trials for programs that handle various tasks. I like to kick the tires, but do you blame me. Investing money – and more importantly time – into something that may work is somewhat of a risk. continue reading…