Tales of a Designer

Redesigned Portfolio

A little over a year ago, I moved my portfolio over to Carbonmade, which makes it easy to post your portfolio. At the time it worked out well, and it was convenient due to the fact that I was very busy. But over the last 6 months, I’ve been thinking about it more and more, and one question stood out that has been nagging me since I first thought about it…

As a web designer, shouldn’t I design and build my own portfolio?

I finally decided to address that question and go back to designing and managing my own portfolio, and I think it was a good decision. I wanted to design something that was easy to update and manage, so I designed a simple solution that meets that need.

Portfolio of John Phillips

The design isn’t groundbreaking, but for only spending a couple hours on the design, I think it turned out pretty well. For the image popups, I used Fancy Zoom, which not only looks great, but is dead simple to use. Overall, I am pleased with how it turned out, and now I don’t have a guilty conscience about not having a portfolio designed by myself. So check it out, and let me know what you think. All comments are welcome.

Recently Found Resources & Inspiration

I’ve been very busy this summer, both in doing Tridea work, travelling, and trying to get away from the computer a bit and enjoy the good weather while we have it. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been offline, in fact I’ve found some pretty nice resources and sources of inspiration lately that I’d like to share.

Cheat Sheet for Web Developers is my most recent find, which is an excellent resource for those of us that code websites. There are tons of PDF’s to download ranging from XHTML markup to CSS shorthand cheat sheets. This is definitely worth a bookmark.

Snipplr is a public source code repository ranging from front-end code to back-end code as well. I love this site and always refer to it when I hit a snag is trying to figure out some code problems. It also works with Textmate, my editor of choice.

Handwritten Typographers isn’t exactly a resource, but rather an interesting look at the handwriting of some well known typographers. There are some great fonts there too, that I’m looking forward to using in the future.

Graphic Exchange is an amazing source for inspiration. Here you’ll find anything from print, web, interior design, etc. The list goes on, but there is much to see here, and very easy to blow a lot of time looking at the great graphic design work.

And last but not least, The Dieline is another source of inspiration for looking at great packaging design. As a designer on the web, it’s always important to look at great design on other mediums outside the web to get inspiration, and this is another resource for just that.

So those are the recent resources that I’ve found, and I’m always looking for more. What are some recent resources you’ve found?

Startup Weekend Ann Arbor and Nudge

This past weekend, Startup Weekend came to town and I was very excited to see what the event would bring. I tried to make sure that I didn’t set too high of expectations, so the only thing that I expected was to have a great experience and do some networking. Well, the great experience happened and more.

The first evening started off with everyone giving their business pitches who had ideas for companies/products. Once that was over, people went around to scout what projects they would be interested in working on for the weekend. This was the beginning of Team Nudge.

Nudge is a simple text and email platform to help small businesses remind clients of appointments. The idea is very simple and the team is very confident that the business idea will be successful. One thing I feel that makes or breaks businesses is if the service is needed. Most of our team, as well as others at SW said that this kind of service would be useful for them to remember appointments. So imagine how many others could use this type of service?

So the whole weekend was spent fleshing out this idea, coming up with a marketing/business plan, building the application, and branding the whole thing. The logo was done my Victoria Pater, and the team really loved the logo she came up with. When we had our logo nailed down, I went ahead and designed the UI for the site that compliments the logo, as well as the simplicity of our service. I feel that it represents the company very well, from a service standpoint, and from an ease of use to our clients that will use the site.

Our programmers put in a ton of work cranking out the application, which works great, and we’re in the process of making our final tweaks to fully launch this service. One very cool application that we came up with, and quickly put together, was our No Show Calculator. It’s a way for a business to quickly assess how much money they lose a month from missed appointments. In other words, we give them a way to show how much money they lose to convince them that Nudge could prevent missed appointments. Great idea that took about 20 minutes to put together, and I think it will be an essential tool for our business.

Overall, the weekend was great, but the reason it was so great was the amazing team that I was on. A formal thanks goes out to those that were on Team Nudge, and I was highly impressed with the collaboration that happened this past weekend. We had a lot of fun, took lots of pics, and worked hard on something we think will be useful for businesses. We plan on officially launching this any day now, so signup to be notified and I hope you find it useful.

Update: I’ve uploaded a video of the final presentation on our product, so check it out of you’re interested. And check out Victoria’s recap as well, with more video.