Its official. I have launched another personal project of mine : Designer Eats.
Basically, its a site about creative, healthy and fun food.

Check it out : Designer Eats

In the current design atmosphere , I hear the term wireframe being thrown around a lot more than it used to be. Over the last few years, wireframing is a process that has endured a lot of misunderstanding and has been become much more widely known as a software and web design methodology. I’ve begun to notice that the concept is warping and not for the better. This twisting of the terms is making it difficult for newer designers and students to understand the real application of the process.

Wait, whats the problem?

Recently, I gave a talk at a design school and I had a few students ask me about wire-framing and their mental model of it was pretty far off base. Their concept of wireframes included design, finalized layout, and a number of aesthetic decisions to name a few of the inappropriate things they considered part of wireframes. The worst part : they didn’t even want to do it. These students just knew it was a step they were supposed to do but didn’t understand why it was so useful. They just accepted it as step in the process and breezed through it to get to the fun look and feel parts. This was troubling to me. At first, I thought it may have been an isolated incident, but more and more I have been noticing that the workplace application of the process is suffering due to a bit of incorrect and popular saturation among clients, new designers, producers, product designers, etc. Wireframing is an essential step in the web design process and it would be a shame if up-and-coming designers did not learn to love it.

Read the Whole Article

The day is here! I have launched the public open beta of Coffee Experiences.

Coffee Experiences is a personal project I have been working on for sometime now. As a lover of coffee and especially of enjoying coffee, I saw a big problem.

The Problem:
Like most coffee lovers I enjoy finding new coffee and especially supporting small shops and roasters that make coffee such a vibrant and wonderful product. Don’t get me wrong, I love Folgers, Maxwell House, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and even McDonald’s coffee. But, they are what they are. Which is pretty boring and standard tasting. You know about these coffee providers because they are multi-million dollar corporations and have the ability to reach anyone they want with their marketing and brand exposure.

Small shops and roasters who make craft roasts and delicious unique coffee simply don’t have the reach or money to achieve this. If you don’t live near one of these businesses then it is unlikely that you would know about the shop or roaster. Coffee lovers and shops needed an online database that is curated, shared and maintained by the people who love them, run them and want to share them.

The Solution:
Coffee Experiences is born. Coffee Experiences allows anyone to quickly and easily add their favorite coffee roaster or shop to the database. If the shop is already in the database, people can add their experiences and lend their experience with the coffee. All the logins are done with Facebook. The result? Real people sharing coffee that they love and want to share. On top of that users can help expose these shops and roasters to the rest of the coffee loving world!

Coffee Experiences is a living and breathing project. I want to build a place to help people share and discover coffee. If you have an idea or suggestions, I absolutely want to hear about it. Please visit the site and add your favorite coffee shop or share an experience with one who is already in the database.

Visit the site: http://coffeeexperiences.com

I have been busy on personal projects, client projects and writing crazy articles ( I am sending out 6 this week) but I digress. It is time for some pretty cool news.

You guessed it. Well maybe you didn’t but its official.I have teamed up with passionate and talented developer, Manoj Sachwani ( @Designerfoo) to build a new website for web professionals. I present:

Webdeveloper.fm

Another design blog?!!!  Not quite.

Webdeveloper.fm will have articles and tutorials.But, it will also have podcasts, excercises and learning resources. We completely dedicated to helping designers and developers get better at what they do and what they love.

If you work on websites professionally to grow, share your love and get better: Webdeveloper.fm is for you.

Oh, I didn’t mention our giveaway to celebrate the launch: We are giving away an Amazon giftcard($200) and a $50 Threadless tee, all you have to do is sign-up and help us spread the word on Twitter and Facebook!

As a consumer, we seek out products, services, and practitioners that are friendly, helpful, interesting and overall pleasant to deal with. When you select individuals and organizations to interact with or do business with you are making a decision based on the totality of their behavioural characteristics and how you emotionally react to them.

Read the whole article at Spyre Studios

Over the years, I have read probably hundreds of usability tips and tricks. They all seem to give generally decent advice that are all blanket statements about usability. Such things as “Use a sans-serif” or “Make sure to minimize scrolling” are common among these lists.

Read the whole article at Spyre Studios

I have found that the best way to think of user experience is as the core of a brand: the reactor or the nucleus. Without good user experience your brand means nothing. But what is a brand? Its most basic definition is the sum of the experiences that a person has with a company or organization. You may be wondering what branding has to do with you the interface designer.

Read the Whole Article on Spyre Studios

A core place to begin a website discovery process is to learn the goals and objectives of your client. It is imperative to understand what the website needs to do and which things are the most important. In order to do that, we need to establish a hierarchy.

A hierarchy is essentially an order of items, goals, ideas, and/or needs. Hierarchy in web design is centrally about influencing a user to understand and embrace the principal goals of a website and interact with the material in the ideal order to facilitate a smooth and pleasant experience with the website.

Read the Whole Article on Six Revisions

In the interest of speeding things up, it’s tempting to skip over small details. This is an easy pitfall to which to succumb, but in the end, it can hurt your overall career.

This article will share methods and simple tools for building better portfolio pieces, having happier clients, and imbuing your work with more value.

Read the Whole Article on Six Revisions

In this post, I wanted to show some of my process on a logo I just did for a friend’s new site, Talkbackr ( http://talkbackr.com), this was conceived and built by Brian Seitel ( http://blog.brianseitel.com/).

Admittedly this logo did not take me as long as most do. But, I also felt like I had a strong feeling and imagery to work with, which is surprisingly hard to come by these days.

Brainstorming

In my process, I started off with the basics. Identifying the main elements of the name. “talk” made me think of dialogue and speech bubbles. I figured sometimes the obvious option is the right one. So, I started drawing some speech bubbles and since I was trying to convey “back”, I thought an arrow pointed left would work. Since if you read the logo, left to right, then left reads as back. My original idea was a speech bubble with big ol’ arrow pointing out ( seen above). But, it felt bulky and unelegant. So, I opted to create a more trim bubble with less of a tail but still read as pointing “back”.

Since most logos rely heavily on their text, the next thing I did was to look at how I wanted the logo to feel and how it would read. I wrote it out naturally and without thinking I wrote it all in lowercase.

Which reminds me of a tangent… I always find it interesting how we can rely on our inherent approaches and instincts for many decisions. For instance, there are some words that I actually cannot spell unless I type them without thinking about the word. Like asphyxiate, ha BAM! No spell check. ( Trust me). So, I always find it helpful to see what my instinct is. In the case of Talkbackr, it seemed innate to write it lowercase. This is undoubtedly because of my influences in seeing other companies who remove the whole last vowel thing. It’s almost become a convention, and there is nothing wrong with convention.Just to be sure, I wrote it in all uppercase, which I thought, “Wow, the K and R don’t work well together this way.” Although, it was valuable because I saw that the negative space on the K and R almost felt like a speech bubble, maybe if a massaged it a bit…

Next, I started doing a slightly bigger and more detailed write-out of the text. To help me think about what it should feel like. As I wrote, I thought about how I think the word ” talk”, feels much better with a serif, but not a fancy serif, just some nice solid anchors on the text. So I immediately thought, “Hey! Slab Serif or classic serif”. So I thought of two slab serifs and two classic serifs to work with.

Next step, was to tryout my main typeface choices and see how it synced up.

After taking a look at these typefaces ( Geometric SS, Clarendon, Century Old, Garamond Premier Pro), I thought about what the logo was for.

The website is about getting honest and real feedback on artistic endeavors. I also thought about the creator; Brian has got a sense of humor about things and is fun and comfortable to talk to. I thought , “You know, giving real feedback is hard because you cannot be comfortable when talking to someone’s face”. This website is about making the audience comfortable enough to give their real opinions.  So, I opted for a Clarendon base, because of its bold friendliness. The serifs curve in nicely, and have a variable thickness that makes it feel more personal ( such as in the C and the A). Next, I decided that the type needed be stronger, so I opted to work with Clarendon Bold. As a note, the friendliness turned out to work perfectly, since even Talkbackr’s FAQs are a bit comically charged.

Execution

So I started with my base and began adjusting the kerning to make it read better. I adjusted the “A”s to line up better and matched up curves where I wanted to bridge the words together. I also connected the K and the R as in my drawings so I can really visualize  how close the type mimicked the thought bubble. I even tried a large bubble lined up on the K in talk.

At this point, the form is strong, but I was not happy with the big speech bubble . It was too obvious and not clever at all. Its just a bubble, and the site is not just about talking. The site is about the kind of talking that is less out in the open. There is a bit of subtle imagery to convey that. The speech is not loud or in your face. Much like good feedback, it is more quiet but still immensely helpful.

I went back to my drawings and worked on a possible shape with the negative space which still felt heavily like a bubble, but not enough to read as one. After some drawing and some tweaking I ended up with my solid one color logo type.

I was pretty happy with the form so I went into pairing it with some color and some more volume and form. With some projects I spend a lot of time on color choices. For Talkbackr, I immediately went for a strong grey text placed on a calming color. I thought about what was calm and comforting to me.Light blue was the first thought I had, so I went with it.

I think Talkbackr’s logo is evidence of how sometimes your conventional reactions and instincts are the best guides to follow. As designers there is a lot of pressure to make every project insanely clever and ground-breaking. I think it helps to remember that simple is smart. We shouldn’t be afraid of doing the obvious thing if it solves the problem.

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