We’re at a time where technology is moving a lot faster than we can sometimes design for. That means we’ll make mistakes. We’ll have content that we don’t know how to deliver on every device.

I wrote my first article on the Lullabot Blog! It’s on Constructive Criticism. I find that this trend to publicly shame people about the work they’re doing is wrong and isn’t the way to make the web a better place. It’s a quick read; something small you can digest during a break in your work day. Hope you enjoy!

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There’s no need to sacrifice happiness for success. We believe that happiness, fun, and general silliness bring with them an energy which fuels creativity and innovation, creates a more open and communicative workplace, and makes for a more productive, more dedicated team. It’s also just more fun. We try to focus on the positive and downplay competition and negativism. We are grateful for our successes and celebrate them.

Lullabot Core Values

Isn’t that awesome? I love the sound of that and I’m so happy and excited to now be working with Lullabot. Lullabot is the world’s top Drupal consulting and education company. They’re responsible for creating websites for the Grammy’s, Martha Stewart, WWE and more.

This means I’m no longer working at WorkSimple and I’d like to take this time to thank the wonderful people there, for the opportunity to work with them. I learned so much from the team and I can’t wait to see the great things they’re in the process of releasing.

I’ll also be attending my first conference: DrupalCon Denver! I’ll be tweeting and checking in like crazy and if you’ll be there, let me know! I’d love to meet ya!

As always, thank you for reading and your support! I’m excited about this new opportunity at Lullabot and look forward to the projects I’ll be working on.

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I went to college for about two years yet, I didn’t learn as much as I would’ve liked or even what I needed to learn. Therefore, I’m mostly self taught. I’ve spent countless, non-billable hours, experimenting with HTML, CSS and other design and dev personal projects, in an effort to better myself and improve my craft.

Anyway, that’s quite a big intro into the real topic of this post. I’d like to give my thoughts on Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter.

Let’s start off by saying that it’s absolutely awesome. If you’ve read the other books that A Book Apart has published, you’d expect nothing less so, let me convince you why.

Content

The content of this book is great. Aarron know’s what he’s talking about and that comes across every sentence you read. The extensive research is evident and each statement, study and example convince you more that this is the right way of designing for the web.

After reading this book, as with a lot of the different articles I read, I realize how much I still have to learn and put into practice. For me, it’s exciting to see how I can improve and quickly implement these techniques into my work.

The prevalent theme is to inject personality into a website. Aarron emphasizes that a website is human too and offers logical ways to make this happen. Designing personas is an amazing idea and just one of many practical tips he offers. Anyone working on a product needs to read this. It’s guaranteed to bring the level of work you produce to the next level.

Something interesting to note about this book is the constant studies of psychology and the human brain. This was especially helpful as many of the studies are something I would’ve never imagined to research and have really helped me understand how we, as humans, respond and react to design. Aarron explains that we make decisions on emotion not logic; interestingly, making designing for emotion such a logical choice.

Surprise is always followed by a proportional emotional response[...] There’s not enough time for deep, intellectual contemplation, so the brain relies on emotion to provide a “gut reaction.”
Aarron Walter, Designing For Emotion

Tone

What I love about A Book Apart is the tone of the books published. I’ve read the other books in the collection and it’s easy to recognize the way that they want the reader to feel when reading these books.

Aarron’s writing style is witty and humorous in all the right places and he is able to explain complex design theory in terms that are understandable and easily applicable. I found myself laughing quite a few times and having lots of “Aha!” moments. He talks about reverse mullets and how that relates to design: party in the front, business in the back. C’mon now, that’s hilarious.

It’s truly amazing how Aarron not only is able to communicate excellently on these principles but, also putting them into practice in the book itself. The book is designed for emotional response, engaging you every step of the way and urging you to read more.

I want to extend a personal thank you to Aarron. Thank you for writing this book and thank you for helping me do my job better. I owe him much more than what I paid for this book. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.

Buy the Book

Just as a side note, these apps are in no particular order. I use most of these everyday and would be at a total loss without them (which is sad). Also, I’m not using any affliate links and I wasn’t paid to talk about any of these apps.

Text Expander

If you don’t have Text Expander, you really need to get on this bandwagon. It’s an amazing app that saves me so much time everyday. I’ve programmed snippets that I use on a daily basis like my different email signatures, code snippets, my phone number, resume, etc. I save about an hour and a half of typing everyday; to me that’s enough to make it’s price of $34.95 worth it.

Rdio

I was a little late to this party but, Wow! I’m loving it. I just bought my subscription the other day and have found it extremely useful. I am at my desk most of the day and like any normal person, I love music. I’ve found most or all of my favorite music and the stream is excellent. I love it because, there’s always new music, playlists or friends stations that I can listen to. Also, iTunes is so bloated these days and it always runs super slow on my machine. Great alternative and beautiful UI.

TextMate

I was using Smultron in my amateur days and as I look back, I don’t know how I ever made do with it. I love TextMate. The themes that are included are great and it’s features are very useful. I’m no expert and I’m learning new features of the app all the time but, the one I have discovered like, bundles, line collapse and others have made this app just amazing to use. The great thing is, you can add more functionality too! If you’re writing SCSS, you can find extentions to properly color the code.

iA Writer

Absolutely love this app. I wrote this post in iA Writer. It’s such a beautiful app with such a simple interface; it’s hard not to like it. I do have to credit Adelle for pointing me to this app and I’m glad she did. What I love about it is the seamless integration with iCloud. I can be working on a document on my Mac and then move to the couch and work on it from my iPad. Also, no formatting! The truth is, formatting takes up time and space and you don’t need it to write. Writer does this excellently.

Sparrow

This is actually a new app I just got into. I had heard such great things about it for a while. However, I didn’t have my email set up with Google so, I hadn’t moved over. What a mistake! I was using Postbox and although I was a loyal user for about two years, their app is a bit bloated and slows down my machine quite a bit. I run four different email accounts and not being able to switch between these effortlessly through out the day is a big downer. I’m now proud to say I’m using Sparrow and I love it. Beautiful UI, you can feel the attention to detail and very lightweight.

Reeder

For the longest time, I was using my email to receive RSS feeds. Big mistake. Not only did it clutter my inbox but, I would tend to delete articles in an effort of bringing my inbox to zero. It was an absolute mess and I wasn’t reading like I would want to. Reeder is an excellent solution for me. I’ve added all or most of my feeds over to Reeder and now enjoy some reading before starting the work day. It’s integration with Readability make the app that more useful. I can go through the day and bookmark an article in Readability knowing that it’ll be there, waiting for me in Reeder.

Harvest

Every contractor needs this. Actually, even if you’re not a contractor, you need this. Harvest is actually a web app but, since I use the Mac App, I’ll include it into this list. Harvest has simplified my life in so many ways. I can keep track of my time, easily sumbit invoices and provide estimates and it keeps track of my monthly and yearly earnings, making tax time that much easier.

Cloud App

This app is amazing! I use this everyday. Yet, I believe I only use half of it’s great features. I use it’s Photoshop and Chrome raindrops the most. Through out the day, I’ll be working on a comp and can easily upload my work and send it for feedback. Not to mention, it’s a great way for me to see the progress I make on a certain interface. Also, when I go to share useful links on Twitter, I use CloudApp to shorten them. It also has Sparrow integration, allowing me to send lightweight emails with attachments in the cloud.

Audio Hijack Pro

Let’s make it clear from the beginning, I love this app because of the functionality not because of the design. If you have a better alternative, please let me know. It’s a great app though. I use it to record the audio from Skype which is really useful when recording episodes for the podcasts I host. You can record any audio really. However, my critique about this app is it’s usability. It was a bit difficult to figure out how to use the first time but, thanks to Niki, I was able to set up a bit quicker.

MAMP

Last but definitely not least, MAMP. If you’re writing PHP or developing WordPress themes, you need this. Setting up is quite easy but, if you need some help, watch this great video by Chris Coyier. I always love the way he teaches, it’s so personal. Love that. I owe him for a lot of the things I know now. Anyway, this isn’t about Chris, it’s about MAMP. It’s a great app that will allow you to work locally which is good practice. I know most of us will work directly on the server and refresh but, you’ll notice quickly this isn’t the right way of doing things when you break everything because of an incorrectly placed “=” sign. Work locally with MAMP and then push up to your server. A lot easier and faster.

And that’s my list of apps I love! If you have any recommendations or suggestions of better apps, let me know! I’d love to hear about them!

I’d also like to give my sincerest thank you to Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks for this screencast. He goes into detail on how to move a domain’s DNS to point to Media Temple and how to setup email with Google Apps. It only took me a couple of hours to move everything and get the sites up and running. Real time saver!

I Have a Job

I’m really excited to announce that I’m now happily pushing pixels at WorkSimple, Inc. I found them in late December via Authentic Jobs and really fell in love with the company and the product. I’ve been working with them a couple days shy of a month now and it’s been an awesome ride. The work I’ve been involved with has been really challenging and exciting and I also have the privilege of working with a great team that I’m learning a lot from.

For example, this week I’m learning HAML and SCSS. If you haven’t looked into it, it’s revolutionary. It’ll change the way you code forever. Now, I might be late to the party on this one but, I was completely geeking out the other day when Ken, one of our front-end devs, was giving me a crash course. I owe him tons of money now for allowing me to pick his brain. I highly recommend reading this article if you’re interested in Sass. I’m telling you, it’s absolutely revolutionary.

The East Wing

People, keep an eye out for The East Wing. Things are really revving up for this. I’m really excited and hope you are too. At the moment we have guests lined up for Episodes 1-5 and trust me, we’ll be talking to some awesome people, like Ben Moore, Chris Kennedy, Niki Brown and Justin Style, just to name a few. It’d be a real shame for you to miss out on this so, head on over to the website and sign up for our newsletter. We’ll be launching February 15th so, put it in your calendars!

If you’re interested on being on the show and you’re working on an interesting product or project, email us at hello@theeastwing.net and I promise to respond as soon as possible.

As always, thank you for reading and if you have thoughts you’d like to share, give me a shout on Twitter.

My Work

Unfortunately, a lot of work that I’ve done is restricted by NDA’s and that’s all great when you’re working on these exciting projects but, when it comes time to display them, it’s horrible. Therefore, at the moment I can only show snippets of my work for which Dribbble has been super useful. For now, that won’t change. But the truth is though, my design isn’t the only thing I’m working on at the moment. I have a pretty cool podcast called Laugh If You Want Too and a soon to be podcast called The East Wing which is going to be awesome.

Having said that, I wanted this new design to give people the opportunity to see all of my stuff. I know I’m no internet celebrity but, if you’re interested, now you can find it. Which reminds me <rant>I’m no internet celebrity and I probably will never be but, why can’t people reply to tweets of us unknown peeps? I don’t get it. Maybe you’re too busy or you don’t care for the people that admire your work. Who knows. One thing is true though, if you want to talk and interact with me, I’ll always reply. To know who you are, you gotta know where you came from. </rant>

Writing Again

I’m happy to report that my writing juices seem to be flowing again which is why I dedicated more time to the design of this site. I want to have somewhere to pour some of my thoughts. As I grow as a designer and a person, I find it essential to share the small bits of wisdom you find along the way. Again, it may not be a lot; I still have much to learn in design and in life but, I’ll always be thankful to those that helped me when I was starting out. It’s about time I pay that forward.

Thank You

I just want to extend a huge thank you to those whom have supported me and have been interested in the different things I do. I also want to extend a thank you to Andy Taylor, the creator of the 1140px CSS Grid; it’s the reason why making this site responsive was a cinch! Check it out if you haven’t already! Also, I big thank you to Kennedy, who took me out of a bind and helped me figure out how to change the color of a placeholder in a form. For those of you who don’t know:

:-moz-placeholder {
    color: #bfbfbf;
}

::-webkit-input-placeholder {
    color: #bfbfbf;
}

Also, you’ll notice that this blog is proudly brought to you by Carbon Ads. Adelle and her team are awesome and always on the look out for great companies for their network. Do yourself a favor and click on some of these ads. Yes, you’d be helping me make some money, but you’d be getting in some awesome products as well.

As always, thank you for reading and if you have thoughts you’d like to share, give me a shout on Twitter.