This post was written by Josh on November 19, 2010

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…

This post was written by Jason on November 4, 2010

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 post was written by Jason on September 30, 2010

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…

This post was written by Jason on September 17, 2010

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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This post was written by David on September 13, 2010

I have a great memory for faces. Yet, I’ve worked on projects with clients and team members that I couldn’t point out in an empty restaurant. It’s not that I’m going senile; I’ve never seen their faces.  I’m a web designer and, like many web designers, the people I work with are frequently scattered all over the country.  However, this style of working didn’t fully prepare me for working with a development team in Chennai, India. continue reading…

This post was written by Josh on July 12, 2010

A couple years ago my mind was blown when, after spending years working Photoshop, a friend of mine brought a tiny checkbox to my attention: Auto-Select. Auto-Select is pretty self explanatory. When turned on, it allows you select objects on your canvas by clicking directly on them no matter what layer they’re on, similar to using Illustrator. Furthermore, if you simultaneously have View > Show > Layer Edges selected, you will also see bounding boxes around elements, again similar to Illustrator.

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This post was written by Josh on May 11, 2010

One of my pet peeves is difficult to open product packaging. You know the kind I mean. The rigid, impossibly sealed plastic containers that electronics often are encased in. The product looks so appealing in its glossy synthetic bubble. It serves it’s purpose well. No ugly cardboard to get in the way of you and your desire – just clear unobtrusive product packaging at it’s finest. It’s perfect. Perfect, that is, until you actually want to get it out of the packaging. To me, this is the perfect real world example of forgetting the user experience once you’ve got them into the funnel.
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This post was written by Josh on May 7, 2010

NOTE: I wrote this entry while in the NICU hospital room shortly after my second daughter’s birth. There’s a lot of down time with a baby that sleeps 20 hours a day…

The faucet in our hospital room in the NICU is aesthetically very pleasing. It is sleek and the absence of nobs, buttons or handles definitely adds to it’s minimalist form. It is essentially the simplest form of a faucet. I place my hands under it and water comes out, cold at first and then warm. I remove my hands and the water ceases to flow. Perfect right? Not exactly…
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