Get in the Zone & Increase Productivity

April 13th, 2010

Trying to sit down and start working on a design can be a real challenge. Though if I have my ideas ready to go and can get “in the zone”, I am golden. When I say “in the zone”, I’m referring to being completely free of distractions and 100% devoted to what I am working on. I am going to share my simple process on how I get “in the zone” and increase productivity.

Before I start doing any pixel pushing in Photoshop or write any line of code, I make sure I have all the details needed to begin. Depending on the project, this usually means sketches I’ve drawn up or wireframes that have been handed off to me. If I don’t have these details laid out, I’ll most likely end up shooting in the dark and waste a bunch of time.

Design Critiques for Non-Designers

February 15th, 2010

You may have noticed that our society is becoming increasingly driven by visual communication. From billboards to magazines to websites to computer applications, people are more tuned in than ever to the aesthetic of the designs they encounter. Most of the time this visual processing is done sub-consciously, to the point where you might think that every day people aren’t sensitive to good and bad design. However, there is definitely a proven correlation between good design and the resulting trust and love of your product or service. This is why it’s important that people learn how to think about and talk about design to others even if they’re not a designer themselves.

Border Stylo's Making the Site

January 11th, 2010

It’s been just over a month now since we launched the latest redesign of borderstylo.com and to celebrate I am going to let you know a little about the design process behind it. When I say design, I don’t mean beautiful images and colors filling the page, instead I am referring to design as the organization of information and how the user interacts with this information.

When the average user interacts with a site they usually don’t pay attention to the design they are interacting with. They probably couldn’t tell you the difference between good and bad design outside the fact that they like one over the other. With that in mind, they probably have little understanding of what the design process is like, which is why I’m gonna share a little bit on the process I took with the borderstylo.com redesign.