Always Have a Solution

14 Nov

Always have a solutionThe best bit of design and career advice I got this year didn’t come from a designer but from a brilliant developer at Newsvine. I resisted his advice at first, perhaps out of arrogance or an affinity for arguing, but looking back it was something I needed to hear. Although I’ve only come to realize it months later, learning this pearl of wisdom through words and actions made my internship at Newsvine invaluable many times over.

The advice is simple: Never complain about a bad idea without having an alternative ready to propose. The ramifications of this are incredibly far reaching

Syncotype Your Baselines

I often have trouble aligning text and graphics horizontally on the Web. To help horizontally-challenged designers like myself, Wilson Miner wrote a fantastic guide for building pages on a baseline grid. If you do the math right it works beautifully — but I often find myself tweaking and nudging to get every last [...]

Jul 31, ‘07

Three Questions for Mark Boulton

As a part of my ongoing Three Questions series, I’ve managed to score an interview with Mark Boulton. Mark is an expert on web typography and grid based layouts, he co-authored Web Standards Creativity, and he recently started his eponymous design studio—Mark Boulton Design Ltd.
This year at South by Southwest, Mark gave a fantastic [...]

Jun 18, ‘07

The Paradox of Perfectionism

Stop being a perfectionist—just throw it out there and see what happens. It’s simple advice, but something that I’ve been ignoring for too long. Not every blog post will be your opus, not every design will be your masterpiece. Stressing over every detail and clinging onto the project until it’s “perfect” only [...]

Apr 4, ‘07