In light of Hurricane Sandy, I thought this post would be apropos. I really love seeing the evolution of brands over time, based on trends, fashion, sensibilities and the growth of a company/image/style. Here’s the “When it rains, it pours” Morton salt girl’s evolution:
Below is a handy, but not terribly witty, reference to 50 hexadecimal shades of grey. I admit, I post it more for the groans than for how helpful it would be.
As we round third plate to complete our 10th year of business at era404, it’s impossible not to reflect upon the previous decade’s successes and lessons. In fact, despite the enormous pride we have for our successes—the awards we’ve won, the opportunities we’ve been afforded, the pieces we’ve created—it was in the lessons that our company grew the most. We can only assume that the same way the triumphs and tribulations of a child’s first ten years shape his or her personality, a business uses its own experiences to analyze the risks it will take and the directions it will pursue.
The first ten years weren’t always easy. Read more
iPhone Blueprints is a new book by Scott Jensen that covers User Interface Design and its importance. In the book, Scott deals with everything needed to create an effective user interface. Most of the books that are available on the subject are typically full of design patterns with tons of theory and very little actual usable information. iPhone Blueprints [iBookstore link] is being featured here because it looks spectacular on the iPad and is one of the best guide books on UI design for the iPhone in existence today. The author currently works at Ender Labs that brought us the lovely music player app Track 8.
Everything from the book cover to the chapter mastheads in this book is drool-worthy. The book is split up into 9 main sections. The introduction deals with why UI is important and the author then goes on to discuss who makes a good designer by drawing some brilliant examples. I love the emphasis on why UI and UX go together.
“If you’re a UI designer, you should be making UX decisions. Otherwise, you’re a decorator, nothing more.”
Original article on BeautifulPixels.com
When I look over the scope of a fairly intensive project, it’s pretty daunting. I see a colossal list of components for a design and try to comprehend how I’m going to manage it all. And with most design projects, each successive layer builds on the previous one. Read more
A dozen years ago, I was sitting in the senior design lab at Ferris State University with the soon-to-be graduating class. Looking around the room, it was hard not to notice that I was only one of three guys in the room. My freshman year, close to fifty students had gathered in the survey courses. Whittled down to a dozen through the pressures of the program and a rigorous portfolio review, I found myself within the gender minority. In fact, all the professors of my core classes were also women.
Last fall, partially due to an increasing percentage of my studio‘s clientele being female, we rebranded the company to better appeal to women. This Spring, looking up from a dozen concurrent projects, I realized that, other than a few long-term clients from the previous decade, 100% of the projects I was working on were for women. Even those accounts built on the life and work of men were being driven and managed by female liaisons. And the digital peripherals of the design world also have afforded me the privilege of working with a rising number of women stars—notably Krystyn Heide (@SquareGirl) of SquareSpace and Caroline Schnapp (@CarolineSchnapp) of Shopify.
It makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Read more
