Some people (like myself) are lucky enough to have a team of developers to write all of their code for them. Its a blessing and a curse. On the upside, I get to concentrate on design and usability while letting others concentrate on the technical aspect of making it all work. On the downside, I’m not gaining as much technical ability as I would if I had to code everything myself, and I don’t see the agony that a lot of developers go through in order to turn our mess of a comp into usable slices for markup.
So I asked some of the members of my development team what they liked and didn’t like in Fireworks comps. I was expecting the usual complaints that you hear from Photoshop files: layers are a mess and unorganized, too many hidden layers, no grouping, etc. A lot of these problems either stem from a lazy or unorganized designer, or even just from a rushed project, but, to my surprise, these weren’t complaints associated with Fireworks files.
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I use my debit card on a regular basis, and have to suffer through the horrible experiences of those credit card consoles quite often. Every now and then I run across one that’s intuitive and easy to use, but I can’t remember what retailer uses those, and for good reason. You’re not suppose to remember your experience with the credit card machine! There is one in particular that has been getting on my nerves and last time I used it I took a picture. Its the “enter your pin” screen at my local Central Market.
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It amazes me how many people in my industry are not using fireworks these days. Simply put, its the best tool when it comes to web design. Especially for any kind of content driven design that relies on information for its content rather than graphics alone. For those who haven’t tried it, or don’t know what Fireworks can do, let me try to give you a quick rundown of a few of its advantages.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve gone through the process of designing this site for myself and thought I’d share some of my findings about designing for your own worst client…. You.
As designers, we’re never going to be satisfied with our own work. There will always be something better out there, and we’ll always strive to have the coolest, slickest web portfolio out there. Its a never ending loop that ends with frustration and an unfinished design. The key is to stay simple and set a deadline…
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Roles: Art Direction, Information Archetecture, Lead Designer
URL: skatereel.ea.com
Launch Date: Fall 2008
The Skate2 site had already been designed by another firm, but EA hired us to create the user interface and functionality behind the skateReel section of the site. This involved designing around and solving many complex problems and use case scenarios to create the best [...]
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Roles:Art Director, Lead Designer
URL:www.pollstar.com
Launch Date:December, 2008
Pollstar.com was due for a redesign, and they hired Telligent to handle the project since they were planning on running it on our CMS and community platform called Community Server. It wasn’t exactly a seamless transition from what they had up, and a lot of collaboration and thought went into [...]
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Should our online personal and professional personas be separated?
Online Social Media and Networking isn’t really all that new anymore, but it’s relationship to your professional life is. If you’re like me, you’ve got accounts on sites like myspace, facebook, flickr, delicious, twitter, brightkite, a personal blog and professional blog that are all recording and broadcasting your life to your friends, family and co-workers. I share lots of personal experiences on these sites, as do a lot of other people, that may or may not represent myself as a reliable and professional person. There wouldn’t be much of a problem with this except that my professional life has taken over just as much a share in my online identity as my personal life has…
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Roles:Art Director, Lead Designer
Date:March, 2008
This was a proof of concept for a client looking to build a site for an upcoming video game. The game and assets delivered had a very grungy and over saturated feel to them, so we ran with that and created this concept for the home page design in a couple [...]
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Roles:Art Director, Lead Designer
URL:mises.org
Launch Date:June, 2008
Mises.org is a rich community based upon the “Austrian School of economics and libertarian political and social theory”. They have a ton of content and a lot of activity on their site and it needed a redesign and some restructuring. They hired us to redesign the site as well as [...]
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Roles:Art Director, Lead Designer
Date:December, 2007
Independent Exposure is a company dedicated to the Independent Film Industry. We designed and built this proof of concept using Microsoft’s design suite called Expression Studio. Its a community, store and desktop application all centered around the independent film industry and its fans. Our goal was to include the users as [...]
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Roles:Art Director, Designer
Launch Date:April, 2009
This was a fun project. The guys over at EA and Double Fine hired us to create a blog, but they didn’t want the typical blog. This blog had to be special. It had to be Metal! Some of the adjectives used by the client during our kick off meeting were [...]
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By
Jon Broom
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Published
February 13, 2009
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Roles:Art Director, Lead Designer
Date:October, 2007
This is a site that we spent a lot of time developing the Information Archetecture and User Interface for, but unfortunetly it doesn’t appear that it ever got funded and built by the client. Hopefully its still in the works. The idea behind the site was to create a rich online [...]
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