My Journey in UX, Design Systems, & Life

I have just finished reading Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm and all I can really say is WOW! As a big fan of Mr. Cederholm’s work, I have read, re-read, and enjoyed all of his books and I had high expectations for his latest release.

Of course, my expectations were blown away and once again Mr. Cederholm hasn’t let us down!

As an advocate of web standards and accessible web design, I recently submitted my application to become a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers. I strongly believe in building websites that are as accessible to as many users as possible, despite the type of technology being used to view a site.

I do not write about web design industry news or designers. There are plenty of sites out there that supply plenty of web design news along with a plethora of top 10 to 100 lists of everything design related.

Today though I wanted to give back a little something to a few designers that have been outstanding and very helpful recently.

I am a little late in getting this posted due to being away in San Francisco for 6 weeks. In issue #191 (Aug. 2009) of the .net magazine, my website was featured in the Readers’ sites section. I was pretty excited to find out!

I just thought I would share and give big thanks to the .net magazine for a bit of exposure in their awesome magazine.

Over at unmatchedstyle they have put together a small video review of my site. I really appreciate the honest feedback, suggestions, and ideas. It’s really awesome how they took the time to comb over my site and put together a video.

Check out the video review at unmatchedstyle.com

Projects come and projects go. Some are quick and some are never-ending. Some clients want a design to be constructed based on a plan that they have in mind, while others want us as designers to decide the best plan of attack. I think there are both pluses and minuses in either situation and recently I have found that there is a very fine line between which I actually prefer.

I recently submitted my site to be critiqued by the fine folks over at Please Critique Me. After receiving some great feedback from Chris Wallace, I decided to make a couple of updates around here.

While most of the updates this time are mainly visual, I have a few ideas in the works to help clean up my site even more. Stay tuned for a few more tweaks and updates that I will be adding as time permits.

I have just finished reading a great new book called Sexy Web Design by the awesome web designer Elliot Jay Stocks. Although I read a lot of web design-related books, I usually don’t write reviews about them but I thought this one deserved a mention.

I was recently tasked with creating a prototype for a web application and it has turned out to be a much better experience than I expected. The project started off a bit different than usual due to the lack of creating a concept in Photoshop or Fireworks. I almost always begin designing with graphics that can then be approved or modified based on feedback from clients or coworkers.

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that a new interview with yours truly is now live on the interweb. I was contacted by Spicy Web Designers recently and I am honored they chose me to be interviewed on their site.