Hello, world
I make things for the cyber and the hoomans.
My Presentation from PHXDW 2017
I meant to post this like, 6 months ago but life happened . Lots of work. An in-lab sleep study. Hospital visits. A trip to Disneyland with my wife and my kids. Well, that part was fun!
Thinking About Disfluency
When something becomes hard to think about people transfer the discomfort of the thought to the object of their thinking.
Derek Thompson, Hit Makers
BLACK LIVES MATTER
I’m really struggling for words right now. The only words that really count are that Black Lives Matter.
Keyboard shortcut to show hidden files in macOS!
Oh man. Why did I ever mess around running terminal commands to show and hide hidden files? Just open the Finder, and hit Shift + Command + Period to show and hide hidden files. Seriously excited about this.
Joel Califa
My newest designer man-crush is on Joel Califa. What a fantastic site. Don’t forget to push the button. The glorious, glassy button.
Guy on a Buffalo
Codebase update
For a long time, my site was built using Bootstrap (1 or 2, can’t remember) and Jekyll/Github Pages. Well, I finally got around to overhauling my codebase to lean things up – and switched to Foundation!
Brand colors don’t need to be your UI palette
A lot of people think that the interface for their product needs to use the same colors as their brand. In reality, the color palette used for a brand (logo, etc) has different goals from a UI, and being forced to use the same palette can be limiting and have unintended consequences.
Filtering ideas and inspiration
I was listening to a conversation (eavesdropping) about inspiration and thought to myself, “Does inspiration happen more frequently when you’re not as experienced at your craft because it’s easy to have lots of bad ideas?” Then, as you grow in experience and craft, inspiration happens less frequently – not because you’re having less ideas, or a decrease in inspiration, but because your brain is less receptive to bad ideas. It filters through the cruft more efficiently and rejects the bad ideas before you’ve had a chance to even register them.
Fighting Flies
I’m always turned off by the way some MMA fighters gloat over their opponents when they get a submission, TKO, or KO. I always think “Have some humility and respect for your opponent!”
Designers don't (just) make things pretty
In some ways, this post is definitely a rant. It’s about being frustrated by (what seems like) an industry-wide misperception. As a designer, but my job isn’t to make things pretty. My job is to make sure users are delighted by the product, app, or website that I’ve worked on. It’s to make software that’s humanly relatable.
Notes: Customizing My Ruby Environment on OS X
This post is as much a note for myself as it is sharing my setup and experiences with others.
Book and Audiobook List for 2014
I almost kept my New Years resolution for 2014: read a lot more fiction, and read a couple of books about design. I nailed the fiction part. I only partially read some books about design.
Password Friction
We’ve all dealt with this: Horrifying password creation experiences. I was trying to set up an account with a service that’s mandatory for me to use… I followed their instructions for setting up a password, but this error message came up each of the 7 times I tried submitting the form:
Scientist, or Artist?
So a friend and I walk into Press Coffee, which is spectacularly close to the 29th Drive office. While waiting in line, an older gentleman notices my beard, which at this point is long enough to attract attention. Now, it was quite noisy, and this gentleman had an accent which made him hard to understand at first. I’m quite American in that I only fluently speak American English, so accents are sometimes impossible for me to understand (Never mind the fact that my hearing has been damaged from far too many Punk Rock shows in my youth). He commented on my beard, and since I couldn’t quite understand, I replied with “Oh, thank you.”