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I put together a simple printable “I Love You” card. Download it, print it on cardstock, and give it to someone. The font is the free Blackout Midnight and the background palette is Ocean Waves from COLOURlovers. Enjoy!
Photoshop Source: .psd
Standard: .png
Interesting wallpaper posted by Paper Leaf. The wallpaper doubles as a reference guide on basic color theory: color types, meaning, and terms. Enjoy!
Sometimes there’s beauty in ugliness. Came across an awesome Flickr set of an abandoned and decomposing coal power plant in Hagerstown, Maryland. There is introspection in the desolation. Enjoy!
For those of us dealing with gobs of snow and freezing cold, this wallpaper is really refreshing. Stunning color and imagery. Enjoy!
Found a great quote by Aristotle about simplicity. The site to download the wallpaper is in German (I think). Enjoy!
I came across a great article at Before&After Magazine about how to choose the perfect color combination. There is a lot of information tucked into an easy-to-consume format. If you’ve got five minutes, give the PDF a quick read. It will definitely help you prepare your next presentation, build an informational flier, or whatever light design work you may do day-to-day. One downside is you have to enter your email address (a small price to pay for a great resource). Enjoy!
I have been using OmmWriter for several quarters now. It is very simple and clean. Love the ambient sound effects and distraction-free environment. I save all of my files to my Dropbox folder for automatic backups and versioning. Enjoy!
I came across an excellent free ebook a few weeks ago titled, “What Matters Now.” The book is a composite of short collaborative works by about 75 bloggers and authors. Shouldn’t take more than about an hour to read. Most of the posts are motivational and intended to inspire you as you head into 2010. It’s worth the time to read it cover to cover. Enjoy!
It’s been a little while since I’ve had time to post. Here’s a nice wallpaper called “Nightfall.” Check out Simple Desktops for some excellent wallpapers. Enjoy!
As you can see scattered throughout this blog, Helvetica is probably my favorite typeface. I really enjoy the wallpaper published by Paper Leaf this week. The text reads, “H stands for Helvetica a sans serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger.” Enjoy!
Came across this excellent wallpaper on Flickr titled Ready for Ignition. The bold colors and sharp contrast make this a very compelling design. I also really enjoy the macro photography with plenty of open space. Enjoy!
Take a look at the graph above–it’s pretty easy to see how much I love coffee. Let me clarify, though, that I never drink fancy coffee drinks. All of my spending on coffee since 2007 has been on black coffee. Thanks to the help of Mint.com, I’ve been able to get this habit under control.
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The folks over at psdGraphics released two high resolution wallpapers that make for a very clean desktop. I really love the plain envelope and rubber stamp in the design. While you’re over at psdGraphics do some exploring–they have a ton of great content and free downloadables for designers. Enjoy!
Stumbled onto a pair of awesome Flickr sets tonight created by a user that goes by the name of ѕңαмαη. Enjoy.
This is seriously the coolest laptop stand I’ve ever seen. The design elements are awesome. Click the image above to see the image in stunning 3583×2912 high resolution. The laptop stand works with all MacBooks and costs $49.99. More images and details can be found over at Twelve South.
Twitterheads know that a good URL shortening service can go a long way. There’s a ton of them out there (most notably): tinyurl, bit.ly, and ur.ly. You’ve no doubt seen shortened URLs thousands of times while normally browsing the web. When you submit a link to Twitter, if the link is longer than 26 characters, Twitter will automatically shorten the URL using bit.ly. For a variety of reasons, it makes damn good sense to use your own domain to shorten your URLs. For Wordpress users it will take less than five minutes to build your own URL shortening service.
I think there’s something extremely compelling about taking a deep dive into how someone manages their digital life and gets things done day-to-day. Lifehacker has run a series called “Featured Desktop” for quite a while and I always enjoy taking a look. Well, I thought I’d butt into the conversation and give a tour of my desktop and discuss some of the tools I use on a regular basis.
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You may have noticed that this blog now has a mobile version for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You may also have noticed that there is a second mobile format for all other smart phones, too. Thanks to the ease-of-use of Wordpress, you can make your blog mobile compliant in about five minutes and without writing one line of code. Nice!!
First, let’s start with a little background. Mobile phones (especially those with web browsing capabilities) are becoming very pervasive. The percentage of visitors reading your blog from a mobile phone is probably growing exponentially. The best part about the technique I’m going to show you is that it is not going to cost you anything to display a mobile version of your blog. If there’s no cost–either in your time, or otherwise–why not take a minute to satisfy a growing percentage of your readership? That said, let’s get to it.
This weekend Mint.com gave me (and others?) a first look at their newest feature called “Financial Fitness” which is currently in beta test. After several hours of exploring, I figured I’d weigh in and give a review. My verdict can be summed up as: mostly good.
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Free software has played an important role in my life. Simple. One of the strongest enablers of free software is the General Public License (GPL). The GPL is more than a simple license agreement for most software developers–it’s more like an ideology. Although we can’t always conform to the GPL with every line of code we write, the credos of the GPL remain very powerful:
Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have:
- the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
- the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
- the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
- the freedom to share the changes you make.
In this context, “free” has a much deeper meaning that just “zero dollars.” In fact, price isn’t even a component of free. The concept of free can be distilled into four freedoms:
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Although it looks simple at first blush, there are quite a few subtleties in this blog design that I want to comment on. Hopefully you find the design fresh, clean, open, easy-to-read, and light. Before I take a deep dive into my own thoughts on design, I want to give credit where credit is due: a few designs that motivated my choosing and customization of this theme.
The recently launched blog by Gina Trapani, Smarterware, is probably the biggest influencer. The similarities here should be obvious. The simple title, excellent use of white space, and large reading area make clicking over to Smarterware a cinch. Gina’s conversational tone and pleasantness make her writing very pleasing.
A site that I actually rarely read, Boing Boing has a similarly plain design with a strong emphasis on readability and plenty of white space.
Telematics Weekly is an industry publication that I enjoy. What makes this design so inspiring is the strong organizational principles with seamless ad integration. I also like that the entire design contains no images–I guess that’s how much I love typography!
With the cap adequately tipped to those that came before me. I’ve got a few more thoughts I’d like to share about the specific design customizations I made on this site for you. Yes–you the reader.
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I’ve been on hiatus from blogging for about two years. For those with good memories, you may remember me from CodeJacked.com, Lifehack.org, and/or Lifehacker.com. I’ve used the time off to focus my energy on completing an MBA. With just 11 months remaining, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel! I’ve had an itch for the past year or so to do more formal writing (I can’t fit everything in 140 characters on Twitter) and decided to redesign my “professional portfolio” to do so.
What can you expect from this blog? I’m not planning on typecasting or commercializing this blog. Which means I will make no guarantees about the specific content or the frequency of the posts. What I am looking to do is keep the format casual and the content a little bit more personal than I have in the past. I am still going to focus quite a bit of content on “life hacking,” technology, design, and health with a personal twist. I’m glad to be putting pen to paper (or rather fingers to keys). Thanks for sticking around and hope you find the content worth your time. Enjoy!!