Bootstrap Illustrator Template

This design template was created to help designers jumpstart their Bootstrap projects. Recently I’ve found myself relying on the many great features of Bootstrap when designing apps and have become growingly frustrated with having to create the default grid in Illustrator & Photoshop from scratch… I was very surprised to see that Bootstrap templates don’t already exist, so I created this one and am sharing it with the world. The grid layout is based on the default 12 column grid released in the 2.0 [...]

Delivering a Bunch of Mediocre Features – Why I Re-Designed an iPhone App

I was listening to the BoagWorld podcast, where his team at Headscape (his design  & development company) is in the process of redesigning the Buffer iOS app.

They identified a core issue with the current version of Buffer where the design of the App was trying to do too many things, this made the service feel like a Twitter client, which it’s not. The Headscape team realized that the app needed to focus on Managing your Buffer and only managing [...]

Rapid Prototyping with Bootstrap

Lately the BUZZ word in the web world has been Bootstrap, the HTML, CSS & JS framework for quickly designing & developing the front-end for any website or app. Bootstrap is the jumping off point that we’ve all been wanting for decades that would allow us to not have to worry about how we’re going to create a prototype/app and focus on solving the bigger issues like strategy, retention and getting that huge exit.

In the past designers & developers would [...]

How POW saved my Ruby on Rails Education

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a part of two winning ideas at Startup Weekend, the first having been built, scrapped, rebuilt and scrapped again only to be built over a weekend by the founder and various teams of developers and designers. The other was an idea I had around improving the wedding website space focussing on beautiful design and simplicity.

My plan was to build the application using Ruby on Rails to take advantage of the simplicity of the [...]

Designing a Responsive Website

The original title of this post was going to be

“How to get Damond Nollan to publish more Blog posts: An exercise in Responsive Webdesign”

but even I realize the drop in SEO value there kids

The other day I wrote a post about Responsive Web Design in Action, showcasing the Swedish Broadcaster’s new site. The process of designing a responsive site usually begins with the mobile view first and then addressing larger view such as a tablet or browser window [...]

Responsive Web Design in Action

There has been a lot of momentum for creating Responsive websites recently… With the rise of Mobile/Tablet device usage the Responsive  movement has been kicked into high gear. What’s a responsive website you ask? According to Wikipedia:

Responsive Web Design (RWD) encapsulates many different ideas and technologies, but essentially it indicates that a web site is crafted to use W3C CSS3 media queries to adapt the layout to the environment that it is being viewed in. As a result, mobile (smartphone/tablet) users will [...]

The @Grovemade iPad2 Bamboo Skin

I don’t normally write about products, however today I received my iPad2 Skin by a company out of Oregon called Grove; they hand-make Cases, Covers & Skins for Apple devices out of Bamboo. I dropped a whopping $20 USD on a skin for my new iPad2 and today it finally arrived. Below are the photos I took of the complete process, including captions.

I have to say that this is the coolest (not to mention eco-friendliest) product I’ve ever purchased. The [...]

Dealing with White Noise

Robert Scoble wrote a post on how G+ has killed Twitter (paraphrasing a bit) and how Twitter could fix their issues, the primary being help users distinguish the signal from all the noise. This is a big problem across Social Media platforms in general, most people create meaningful content, I’m talking truly unique/thought provoking words, when strung together make sentences.

When any social media platform (hell even games or virtual reality) starts to pick up traction all the mindless junk, buy [...]

How I won Startup Weekend Denver

This weekend (June 3-5 2011) I pitched an idea called ‘Elegant Wedde’, basically an update for wedding websites. Out of 28 pitches my idea was close to last and was not selected as an official group to be moved forward. I have to admit that I was really bummed that

I failed to deliver a killer pitch where everyone got it

 

Nobody wanted to work on my wedding website idea

 

I was a bit biased and felt [...]

Why I’m pitching at Startup Weekend.

Last year I attended Startup Weekend Denver and worked on a really good idea with some amazing people. We were building a disaster management solution so people could find housing and other items during say a Fire or Earthquake, the project is still up and running with a full-time team (http://sparkrelief.org).  Our team won first place over the weekend, however that was the least important thing to come out of SW for me.

If you don’t know about Startup Weekend, basically [...]