I had the honor of speaking last week at DrupalCon in New Orleans, and got to see a whole slew of great presentations. For a recap at our local DrupalPVD meetup I put together a few slides listing some of my favorites, and a few others that I know... read more
An attempt to articulate the ‘why’ behind how we design, and what should guide us Over the past five or six years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, tinkering with, and teaching the process of designing and building digital products. My... read more
I’ve never had particularly lofty ambitions for Beep Edition, the responsive base theme I started a few years ago. Rather than make a new ‘all singing, all dancing’ kind of theme, I wanted this to be my starting point, and include all of my... read more
And if you can’t explain it, you’re not done designing it yet A while back I wrote an article about one of my most influential experiences studying Graphic Design: the requirement of one of my instructors that we show up for any ‘first crit’ with no... read more
Will it evolve to a higher level of thinking or fall into commoditization? Design Thinking is Simply the Power of Thinking Like a Designer I wrote this initially back in 2011, but Peter Merholz’ post today about creating a ‘Charter for Design Teams... read more
Hee Mong Kim, our instructor for Graphic Design 1 (and 4 & 5) at Rhode Island College had a rule for starting any project: 30 thumbnails. If you showed up for the first class after getting a new assignment without 30 little sketches, he wouldn’t... read more
I read a thread on Twitter today between (among others) Harry Roberts ( @csswizardry ) and Aral Balkan ( @aral ) about the use of the word ‘craft’ in our industry. While I can’t disagree with the take that saying code is ‘hand-crafted’ sounds silly... read more
Content modeling is a pretty interesting emerging topic these days. Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) and Jeff Eaton (@eaton) had a great conversation about this recently on Lullabot’s ‘Insert Content Here’ podcast that really got me thinking. Spending... read more
It’s what drives innovation. It’s what drives the web. It’s the force behind the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’ If Tim Berners-Lee was not curious, he would not have created the very place we all work. If Marc Andreeson wasn’t curious there would... read more
Design Thinking (DT) is a pretty big ‘buzzphrase’ these days, it’s true. Big in business education, business innovation writing and even (shockingly) in the design world. What has always struck me is that purely by definition, design thinking is... read more