For the last few months we’ve been working hard with Ryan Battles on the design and development of a new service called Share the Shelf. The service provides an easy and elegant way for book lovers to trade their used books with one another. If you’re interested in taking Share the Shelf for a test drive don’t hesitate to sign up on our landing page. We’ll be sending out beta invites soon!
Posted on January 8, 2012 | Permalink
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you.
Jonathan Ive
Posted on January 8, 2012 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
I've been thinking a lot about the web design community's longing for a new web design application. In this new era of responsive design, multiple view ports, web fonts, CSS animations, etc., traditional applications like Photoshop just aren't cutting it. The static nature of our current tools doesn't cater to the fluid and flexible designs we're trying to build. We all know this. We joke and complain about it on Twitter. We write blog posts about it. Read More…
Posted on December 30, 2011 | Permalink
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve Jobs, 1955–2011
Posted on October 5, 2011 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
Raise your hand if you're a long time Photoshop user, have always been curious about Fireworks, but have never had the time to give it a fair try. That was me until earlier this year. Over the last ten years my design projects have moved from mainly print-focused to almost 100% interactive in nature. And despite my love for Photoshop as a photo-manipulating, special effects powerhouse, it's apparent that Photoshop was never intended to be the interactive layout and design tool that so many of us force it to be. Read More…
Posted on August 10, 2011 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
I enjoy using a variety of RSS readers on the Mac, but the power user in me keeps coming back to NetNewsWire. It's recent acquisition seems to promise a bright future for the app on both the Mac and iOS platforms. If you're a fellow NNW user you might enjoy this Swiss-inspired theme we whipped up for the app. Read More…
Posted on June 7, 2011 | Permalink
We’ve been working hard together with Ryan Battles to launch a new Job Board over at Director-ee. Our goal is to give Director-ee members (and outside companies) an easier way to make their needs known to the rest of the Director-ee community right on the site. Check it out!
Posted on April 1, 2011 | Permalink
Compact, clever, and convenient, the Zoomable Map provides the benefits of a digital zoom in a traditional analog package. Giving a bird’s eye view of the city when first opened, the map can be opened further to zoom in on individual quadrants. Brilliant.
Posted on January 18, 2011 | Permalink
The world has its fair share of task management and to-do apps, but Thoughtboxes stands out as a winner. The UI is clean and quick, and its “box” metaphor puts a fresh spin on organizing your thoughts, lists, and tasks. Lots of polish and attention to details throughout the app give evidence to the care and thoughtfulness behind it. I just wish the About Us page provided more information about the human behind the app. Give Thoughtboxes a spin.
Posted on January 11, 2011 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
Like certain songs can drum up memories of a bygone era, seeing a typeface in use can be a reminder of the fashion, design trends, and even social climate of those years the type was in heavy use. And since we're wrapping up another decade of design (please withhold any arguments of whether or not 2010 is the "true" end of the decade), I began to wonder: What typefaces will end up reminding me of this first decade of the century? Read More…
Posted on January 2, 2011 | Permalink
Swatch by Fuel Collective is a global color picker for Mac OS X. Available from any application, Swatch lives in the menu bar and mimics many of the features you’ll find in the native OS color picker. But besides the obvious advantage of being globally available, Swatch adds the ability to group and save individual “collections” of color swatches. This is a feature I’ve often longed for over the years, and Swatch delivers.
Posted on December 18, 2010 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
Kiwi is a desktop Twitter client for the Mac, and I've been using it since version 2.0 was recently released. One of the unique "features" of Kiwi is the ability to customize the interface with themes. The Theme API is quite flexible, and uses standard HTML and CSS to control the look of your Twitter timelines. We couldn't resist designing our own theme, and our first one is called Swiss. Read More…
Posted on November 28, 2010 | Permalink
U&lc Magazine was published for 26 years, ending in 1999. It was one of my all-time favorite print publications, and its demise signified the end of an era. Allan Haley calls U&lc “the most important typographic publication of its time.” But the good news is Monotype is releasing back issues of U&lc as PDFs, starting with a set of issues from the early 1970s. Load these PDFs onto your iPad, set aside a quiet evening of reading, and be inspired by the genius of yesteryear that is U&lc.
Posted on November 20, 2010 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
This is a short tutorial explaining how to use ExpressionEngine to build a simple Tumblr blog, similar to the Journal we use on Shaping the Page. If you have even a foundational knowledge of ExpressionEngine, and know the difference between a channel, a template, and a field group, you should be able to follow along just fine. Read More…
Posted on November 20, 2010 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
Since Director-ee was launched earlier this year, Ryan Battles and I have been keeping a list of features and improvements we've been wanting to add to the site. But client work has kept us too busy to give Director-ee the attention it deserves. So we finally decided to pull an all-nighter, locking ourselves in the office, turning off email, chat, etc., and focusing uninterrupted on Director-ee. As a result we were able to knock out a few of the items on our list, and I'm excited to tell you about some of those updates here. Read More…
Posted on October 28, 2010 | Permalink
Maki is a neat web app by Bearded Studio that allows you to overlay your static design comp as a transparency on top of your live web page. This helps in making those fine CSS adjustments, so your design comp and live page can be a match made in heaven.
Posted on October 22, 2010 | Permalink
While marking up the splendid Lost World’s Fairs for a recent IE9 demo, Dave Rupert and Trent Walton developed a handy little jQuery plugin called Lettering Dot JS. If you’ve visited the Lost World’s Fairs you’ll notice the purposefully intense use of web type throughout the designs. Within a given element, Dave and Trent’s plugin essentially auto-wraps each letter with a custom span and class, making it easy to target each letter for individual styling. Besides easy maintenance and keeping your working markup clean, there are some other benefits of the script worth checking out on Dave’s site.
Posted on October 20, 2010 | Permalink
This Firefox add-on has saved us so much time. It extracts all the selectors from all the stylesheets on the page you’re viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those selectors are not used. Would love to see this feature built into Coda, Espresso, etc.
Posted on October 3, 2010 | Permalink
Saw this one on the BIS Publishers site. It’s a memory card game with the goal of recognizing and matching typefaces. This would be perfect for our kids, especially since I already quiz them on what typefaces are used in their children’s books. I think they might grow up hating type because of me.
Posted on October 2, 2010 | Permalink
Author Ellen Lupton has released her already classic book Thinking with Type as a website. And it’s not simply a catalog of PDF files. The book has been completely repurposed for the web, with a user-friendly navigation system and layout. And of course the typesetting is beautifully done, using Fedra Serif as the live web type throughout. Check it out.
Posted on October 1, 2010 | Permalink
Type geeks rejoice! Linotype: The Film is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler’s amazing Linotype typesetting machine and the people who own and love these machines today. Can’t wait until this one is released.
Posted on September 21, 2010 | Permalink
It seems like a long time since tools like CSSEdit, or even Coda’s native CSS editor, have received any major feature updates. But CSS3 Machine is like a CSS editor from the future. Still trying to wrap my head around the iPad/desktop workflow, but the simplicity of the UI for generating CSS3 effects looks exciting. Building some of these features into CSSEdit or Coda could be a dream come true.
Posted on September 19, 2010 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
The redesign of Shaping the Page is the first full site we've marked up using HTML5. The new site actually started as XHTML because we didn't think we'd have the time to really get our heads into learning something new, and couldn't afford to have HTML5 slow us down. But after reading Jeremy Keith's tiny book HTML5 for Web Designers, we had a new boost of confidence. And what better place to practice than on our own site? Read More…
Posted on September 15, 2010 | Permalink
Here’s a quick plug for an ExpressionEngine add-on that’s really come in handy. We were looking for a way to manage our Shaping the Page portfolio entries for quick and easy reordering. The traditional way is to edit the individual entry dates, or edit a custom field, for each entry. That works, but is time-consuming. Low Reorder provides a drag and drop UI to reorder the display of your channel entries. It’s quick and slick, and works perfectly.
Posted on September 15, 2010 | Permalink
Written by Andy Johnson
After weeks of sneaking in moments late at night and in between client projects, we've finally launched our new site design! We're quite excited about the results. We'll have a full journal post soon explaining some of the details of the new design. But for now you might be interested to know that this is our first site marked up in HTML5, and it's our first site built on the newly released ExpressionEngine 2. Lots more to share coming soon, so enjoy browsing around as we clean up some of the remaining rough edges. Read More…
Posted on September 15, 2010 | Permalink
I listen to a lot of podcasts, but rarely do I have time to sit down and watch one. But lately I’ve gone out of my way to catch the The Kick Awesome Show. Jonathan Longnecker and Nate Croft over at FortySeven Media produce the show, and do a dang good job. Some nice tech tidbits, ExpressionEngine conversation, and music picks make the show worthwhile. But their personality and humor are what keep me coming back for more. Keep up the good work guys.
Posted on September 8, 2010 | Permalink
I’m always keeping an eye on Bohemian Coding and their design software. Being the little guy they aren’t afraid to experiment with new approaches to UI for desktop design apps. Sketch, a new vector drawing tool, has been released, and delivers some nice surprises, including one of the slickest grid settings I’ve seen in a design app.
Posted on September 7, 2010 | Permalink
On a recent trip to Maine I snapped this photo of my faithful 16 year old Birkenstocks resting on the beach. It was completely spontaneous. I looked up, there they were, pulled out the iPhone, and took the shot. The photo is untouched, and the highlights are a bit blown, but I love the feel of this scene. If you’ve ever been to a beach in Maine then feel free to insert the appropriate sounds and smells.
Posted on September 6, 2010 | Permalink
We’ve been working hard with the team at Grasshopper Group Labs on their newest product, Spreadable. It’s an online tool designed to generate buzz about your brand and increase word of mouth referrals. Spreadable is now in beta, and they’re collecting beta signups at this very moment. A big congratulations to Grasshopper Group. Now go get in on the action and give Spreadable a test drive!
Posted on September 6, 2010 | Permalink