Make Design, Not War

May has been an unexpectedly busy month for - I’m working on a few big (and fun) projects that I can’t really say too much about yet, and I’m also completing an intense marketing course at Cal Poly with a graduate student (which is turning out to be incredibly educational). I don’t have much to say in this post, except that I just released the new “Atlantica” template over at ThemeForest - go check it out when you get a sec

I’m also in the process of redesigning this site using that same template and a yet-to-be-released Wordpress theme… More details on that later on. Cheers!

Our new Surf Report App was just released! More specifically, Shane&Peter Inc. (the team that I do quite a bit of my work with), just released the first version of their new Surf Reports App for the iPhone. I contributed the loading page designs and I also acted as curator for the photos by Anthony Ghiglia that show up on the loading screen. Reid Peifer (Giant Squid), Shane, Peter, and Aaron Spjut handled the rest of it with the additional support and data from the WaveWatch crew.

Oakley already has a darn good app out - so the team’s goal with this app (our first iPhone app adventure) was to explore new territory with live surf cams (19 cams so far) and some cool tide-report UI that shows up when you flip the phone. Check the thumbnails out to see the loading screens I helped with as well as a little ad that I helped design:

In an apparently neck and neck race, Iconic pulled ahead to win the Anniversary Template Contest at Nettuts.com!!! I was a little shocked that I won - not because I didn’t work incredibly hard on the design, coding, marketing, support, and updates for Iconic, but because there were so many other great, high quality templates in the running that I just figured one of the more established authors would have taken the gold.

That said, I’m stoked to have been selected for the contest! I worked quite a bit on the design and initial dev work , and 2 major revisions to Iconic later, I feel that it represents some of the stronger work currently offered on the marketplace. There were several other templates in the contest that I could have easily seen winning, but I’m incredibly happy that Iconic was selected in the end and I’m proud to be the author.

Congratulations to everyone else who won, as well as the other themes that were submitted that aren’t showcased at the winning board - I’m sure this was an incredibly hard decision for the reviewers as there were lots worthy of being on top.

Oh, and happy anniversary to Nettuts.com, as this was the main purpose of the contest

After a week up in NorCal, I’m back in my office and getting back into the work rhythm. While I was out, NetTuts posted my “Ultimate Web UI Kit” in one of their blog posts!

I also officially began some work to a) release a few new theme designs & b) get the Concept theme developed as a HTML/CSS template. I expect that both will be happening in the next two weeks, so keep an eye out!

This is just a teaser for now, but take a peek at the new “Iconic” theme that I’m working on here, and let me know what you think. Like I said, it should be available at ThemeForest in the next week or two. I’ll post it here when it’s up.

This is a quick-fire post as I’m about to head out for our week-long Santa Cruz/San Francisco trip. I’ve got three update for ya…

1. First order of business: I was featured on ThemeForest as both the author of the week and the product of the week! It’s been a mere week since I began posting themes over there, so I’m pretty stoked to have already been featured… now to hammer out some new themes and code up the existing PSD.

2. Next, PubMatic, one of the clients that I’m working on a redesign for, has been featured in Smashing Magazine. We’re stoked for you guys!

3. Finally, We’re heading up to Santa Cruz to see the Shane&Peter team. I’m looking forward to doing a little business getting to hang out with the guys up there! As such, I’ll probably not make another blog post till I return, unless I’ve got something awesome to share.

That’s it. Short n’ sweet.

The recent redesign of Facebook (in addition to a client that simply insisted that I adapt his design for a Myspace page), has prompted some curious morbidity on my part. Admittedly, this whole topic of the beauty of social networking design is completely missing the point - the purpose of these apps is to drive traffic & ad sales, not to please the design gods with perfect padding and scannable page hierarchy… but that said, when mediocre design turns into bad design, at what point do little things like font usage and margins begin to harm the business goal of the site?

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For better or worse, the stock art marketplace has become a permanent fixture of the design & web development world. Ignore it at your own peril. In a previous post, I introduced my new plan to begin investigating the value of affiliate networks and selling stock artwork.  This post will dig into the latter.

Rich Designer, Poor Designer

The lesson behind the renowned book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is that in order to become rich and stay rich, you have to find a way to get ownership over a product or service that allows you to make income passively. As an ultra-hard-working designer (I generally work 12-14 hour days… and I love it), I’ve always been interested in business ventures that might allow me to use my skills to generate  a passive income, but I’ve always been so nose-to-the-grindstone on client gigs that I never really had much time to work on my own side projects.

Sure, I had setup an iStockPhoto account, I considered Threadless, ThemeForest, & FlashDen, I activated my DeviantArt prints account, I’d even looked into collaborating with local clothing labels to produce my own private line of t-shirts. The fact is that all of them required more time and effort than I had to give.  More specifically, they required me to do types of work that took me out of my established workflow, a dangerous distraction for any successful freelancer.

After GraphicRiver opened, I decided it was time to try my hand at selling stock art. For those of you who don’t know yet, GraphicRiver is one of the first major marketplaces where the main product is PSD files, not flat images or themes or code files. Perfect for me since it required very little ‘extra’ work to prep and upload files. Two weeks later, I’ve learned a ton.

The lessons I’ve learned, after the jump.

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I bring you the “Ultimate Web UI Kit“. Oh sure, the word ultimate is far overused nowadays, but honestly, I’m pretty sure if you’re a web designer who’s done more than one project that included mocking up a page with a lot of form fields, you’ll agree that this kit is long overdue.

Over the past couple of weeks/months, I’ve had this idea to compile a PSD of all the web interface elements that I use with regularity. The idea is quite simple - I spend a ton of time during web design projects where all I’m doing it creating basic ui elements that involve next to no creativity whatsoever. In the past, I’ve either taken screenshots of websites that use these ui elements, or opened up old PSD files we’re I’ve already used those elements in the past. This takes time - valuable time that I’d rather be spending on the creative aspects of a project, not pixel pushing checkboxes and dropdown fields. This “ultimate web UI kit” seeks to solve that problem and expedite the process of designing some of the more generic web elements, including:

• Mouse Cursors
• Check boxes (on/off)
• Radio buttons (on/off)
• Next/Prev buttons (Left/Right)
• Form Fields
• Dropdowns
• Button Styles
• Tooltips
• Scrollbars
• Miscelleneous Elements (toggles, arrows, close buttons, etc.)

The full PSD file is available on GraphicRiver for $6, along with more details about what exactly is in the file - take a moment and check it out - I don’t set the price over there, but if you factor in how much time you’ve spent on these pieces in the past, I’m sure you’ll see the value in dropping a few bucks to speed up your workflow.

Cheers!

Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7 (which totally kicks ass btw) broke this blog’s design. For a minute anyways. I’m wasn’t surprised… actually, I was a bit shocked that the heavy alterations that I’d made to my Fresh News theme (from Woothemes.com) held up so gracefully. Pretty much all of the core FreshNews code, as well as my custom plugins, addons, and revisions handled the upgrade quite gracefully. This isn’t always the case, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised that it went well… until I tried to re-install my font-replacement plugin for WP.

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I’m going to share a design theory that I’ve been working on implementing into my own workflow for the past year or so: pixel perfect mockups. To some it might be obvious, but its a tenant so crucial to my own design process now that I’d say it’s been the single most influential idea that I’ve been presented with in over 8 years of designing. To adopt this theory isn’t just another step in the design process, it’s a perspective changing revolution of the mind that will undoubtedly improve the quality of every design you ever work on from now on. Want to be a better web designer and take on bigger projects? Read on. (more…)

This past September, when I launched my first blog, I did so with the basic intention of having a quick place to publish some of my freelance and personal work (well, the stuff that’s not under non-disclosure agreements). I blogged hard at first, then took a few months off while I was enrolled in a pretty tough quarter at school. During that time, I would casually check out my analytics, traffic reports, and the handful of affiliate links that I had setup on a whim.

Yesterday, after several months of neglect, I revisited those affiliate programs and discovered some rather interesting finds…

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I’ve decided to begin releasing some of my hand-drawn illustrations that I use in my own work as stock packages for a few bucks per package.

This first set that I’m releasing is a set of 25 hand inked ornamental drawings. Each drawing is very high resolution and stored inside the 5656×6350px PSD document, which is clearly labeled and layered for easy use.

These are not vector files – they are scanned in from ink-on-paper and are at such a high resolution that you can still see the grain of the paper and the crispness of the ink.

There is a rough quality to each of these that you simply can not get form a vector file, however each piece can be quickly and easily converted in illustrator to suit your preferences. (Just use the Live-Trace tool and adjust the settings to suit your desired level of detail)

Download the stock set at Graphic River

Each illustration has been completely separated out from it’s background and requires no additional editing to use in your compositions. Ready for print, web, or whatever else you’d like to use em for.

Cheers!

A friend of mine (and a good designer and a studio veteran) ran into an interesting problem earlier this week. After designing a brochure in Photoshop and sending it to print (as flat .tif files), the printer rejected the files and requested an InDesign package, which he didn’t have. Needless to say, after submitting several similar projects through other printers as flat files, he was baffled at the printer’s inflexibility and hit me up for some printer advice.

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Ok, so I took a 2 month blog vacation while the storm of life took over. Since then, my brother’s had heart surgery, his house was nearly burned down by an arson, Shane & Peter and the crew had our annual tropical business summit in Kauai, the holidays happened, CS4 dropped, we inaugurated a new president, and I discovered that hulu.com is an awful place to spend time when you’re trying to blog. Shockingly, I’m still getting a fair amount of traffic for a blog-on-vacation, so that’ll give me some motivation to get back into gear and start writing some more.

I’m just now assembling some new work to post (there’s a giant pile o’ work that’s happened since my last posts), and I’ll likely be announcing some brand/blog redesign stuff shortly here too.

Alright, so I’ll admit that school’s definitely been keeping me away from blogging more than I had anticipated. It’s not that school’s been a challenge so much as it’s been tricky to find quality blog posting time between freelance projects, personal projects, school projects, and life stuff. In any event, I’m as busy as ever lately, and I’ll be posting a bunch of new work as soon as the quarter closes up in a few weeks.