I recently came across a fun portrait exchange site by Los Angeles-based illustrator and teacher Rama Hughes via Danny Gregory’s blog. It’s called The Portrait Party, and its purpose is simple and excellent: to get people drawing and sharing their artwork. You and a fellow artist pair up, either in person or using photographs, to draw each other’s portraits....
I have a feeling that a lot of people, especially those unfamiliar with Mark Frauenfelder’s work (BoingBoing, “Make” magazine, and lots more), will look at this publication and think that they’re above it. The subtitle, “How to do everything on the Internet—better, faster, easier”, describes exactly what this book does. But those of us who have worked on the...
Luke Wroblewski Luke Wroblewski is a Web strategist, designer, and author. He is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy he founded in 1996. Luke has authored a book on Web interface design principles entitled Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, as...
You can be a great communicator without being a great designer, but you will never be a great designer unless you are a great communicator. Or you might, but no one will ever hear of you, much like the famed tree falling in the forest with no audience. Obviously, you’re not going to become a virtuoso overnight, but there...
There are some great new additions to Fireworks CS3. I could probably start this post with some bad puns about Fireworks CS3 and declaring your independence over other graphics apps, but I’ll spare you that and give you some quick tips for making the most out of Fireworks CS3. Fireworks didn’t get all that many new features in the...
Don’t let criticism fall-out hold you back. It’s hard enough to take negative feedback, but as a designer you have the even more difficult task of making sure a client’s criticism comes in a form you can use to produce a revision that hits the mark. We’ve all heard clients use hazy negative statements like “I hate it,” “It’s...
My hard drive (from LaCie) looks like a bright, shiny LEGO brick. I can’t miss it, so I can never say I forgot to back up. How many times have you heard or said, “My hard drive crashed at the worst possible time!” There’s never really a good time for a hard drive to crash, but it doesn’t have...
