In design, execution is everything. By executing solutions with your own hands, you share the workload with your team and create bandwidth to implement those small touches of polish. Some teams would refer to these polish pieces as ‘nice to haves’ and gloss over them. But these little pieces are what make a good thing into a great thing.
If a custom interface is part of the value proposition of your product and you’re currently using bootstrap, then you should be asking your team “At what point is this product bankrupt?”
Screen-shots from a prototype that built for a recent inception. I had 4-days to come up with some graphics and UI elements for the project.
A stylesheet talk at 2013 ThoughtWorks North America Awayday #2013naad. We’ll look at how to use some of the powerful features of SASS to choreograph modular, maintainable and highly-flexible css keyframe animations.
A graphical representation of agile team ceremonies.
One example of how visual design workflow has changed from waterfall to lean in the digital space.
Collaborative design just makes everything better. This is how @colemanicewater, @gga and I polished and published the Calatrava logo in about 2-hours.
When face-to-face communication isn’t an option, it can be challenging to express your tone. A method that I’ve found to be effective: use a meme. Here’s an example.
Video + pics. Almost ran out of ink on this one. I wish DrawSomething would make the videos available to their users. Until then, I decided to capture it myself with AirServer. Hope you enjoy it.
When I built this Tardis for halloween, I didn’t have plans or measurements; just a picture and agile methodology. I cut a section, determined what could fit next, cut/attached those pieces and repeated until finished. This discovery process wasn’t easy, but I’m happy with the final product.
This is a css 3d transoforms/animation demo I made some months ago as a teaser for ThoughtWorks Awayday talk.
Creative blocks are sometimes difficult to overcome, when they’re your own. Someone else’s creative blocks can be a bit trickier. Open your teammate’s mind and remove their blocker often requires a work-around.
Following the 2012 IA-summit, this is a sketch I made on the flight from New Orleans to SFO. It covers my thoughts around what it takes to get ThoughtWorks XD North America Team together for a conference/knowledge share.
Octobox is a lightweight lightbox solution for octopress. I wanted a lightbox for my octopress blog so I decided to make a small one myself.
UI-polish: some before and after shots of an open-source iOS development tool, Symbiote - part of Frank by Pete Hodgson.
From sketch to illustrator to web/mobile: A few shots of the Artvark logo creative process with Nanchu.
A simple way to make beveled lists.
A living styleguide showcases the visual and interactive elements of your application. Companies spend a lot of time and money creating highly detailed brand styleguides. They do this to keeep visual consistency around their brand’s identity. It’s becomming more popular for brands to also have digital styleguides in their websites/apps. The more progressive digital styleguides are not built in photoshop, but in dynamic html, css and javascript.
Organizing partials for your stylesheets can help to: Quickly add and remove elements/features, reduce merge conflicts, reduce ramp-up time, and keep your styles out of the html markup.
A short slideshare story as told by @aconnjob to the IXDAChicago.
A print/information-design sample from a contract gig I did for Digitas Recruiting.
Examples of how to prep your visual assets to make business cards with UV-spotting.
A Chicago neighbor, Marco Foster, was building his personal brand and needed a logotype. Marco also had a small group/agency that he was building at the time called Chicago Models. I created Marco’s logotype with a simple ligature and color. Then I adapted the logotype to also work for his modeling group.
Logo and business card I designed for a fitness personal trainer brand.
While freelancing, contracting and consulting, I created a brand to represent my work. This is collection of logos, logotypes, lockups, print design and design-process artifacts.
Here’s a chance to relate two of my favorite topics: social media and social beverages.
The validity of social influence is under constant debate. Who is more influential? How does it work? Why isn’t my score higher? Who the hell is Justin Bieber? Social influence is still an experiment. In time, the brave individuals who are blazing the trail will come up with answers to the above. Until then, influence scores are just way to have fun - sort of like cocktails.
Pelotonia has a special place in my heart (as it does for many). During 2009, I was part of a dedicated team, working day-and-night to create the inaugural Pelotonia ride. Fueled by the passion and the support of an entire community, Pelotonia 09 raised $4.5MM for cancer research @thejamesosu.
I can honestly say that being part of Pelotonia was, and still is the greatest thing that I have ever done with my life.
Challenge: Acquiring partners and participants in a non-profit event, for which the noble-cause does not directly affect them.
A video expressing some progressive ideas about data analysis and application from IBM: viewing digital-behavior tracking as a benefit by applying what we learn from human habits and urban system to improve quality of life…
Jesse Schell delivers a hilariously insightful talk at DICE 2010. Jesse discusses gaming and how creative-companies have used psychological principals to innovate conventional products.