Last night I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on Responsive Design to the Jersey Shore Tech Meetup group at Cowerks in Asbury Park, NJ. It was my first formal speaking gig and it went better then I expected. There were lots of good questions and I hope I was able to provide some good answers.
Here are the slides I presented.
“Worry about getting people interested in your work before you worry about them ripping it off.”
Rob Sheridan : Fan The Fire : Page 15“Working for portfolio fodder is the same as dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.”
Mike Monteiro : How To Pick the Right Clients
A little over a year ago I did a refresh of the Media-Hive company site. Based on the original design direction by Greg O’Keeffe, I set out to tie together loose ends of the previous site and simplify some of the information architecture. This resulted in redesigning the homepage to give more prominence to our recent work; re-architecting the About, Team and Contact pages into a single cohesive Company page; updating the layout of the Work page and creating a more user friendly layout for the individual project pages.
In addition, design flourishes were added to the navigation that utilized jQuery and CSS transitions. Restructuring of the WordPress templates and organization of content was also performed to provide easier site administration.
LiveView is an essential tool for designing interfaces for your iOS device. Comprised of software for both your desktop and iOS device, LiveVew allows you to work on your designs and view the results in realtime on you iPhone or iPad. Best of all, it’s free.
Renowned British photographer (and friend) David Sykes has branched out from client work and has begun selling prints of his personal projects. His Faux Food project has garnered attention from popular online sites such as swiss miss as well as several print publications. David decided to utilize Big Cartel to sell a limited run of his Faux Food prints, but wasn’t happy with the default template options.
David approached me for help in updating the existing template, but he didn’t want anything too drastic. He was looking for enough of a change so it didn’t resemble a cookie cutter ecommerce template and complemented the presentation of his prints. After a couple hours of CSS updates I was happy to present David what I thought was a good solution given time and scope of the project, and he agreed.
If you’re looking for some great prints to hang in your home or office, I highly recommend these (or anything David produces for that matter). As of this writing he’s currently running a Spring sale for 25% off all of his prints. Take advantage while you can.
It’s been two months since I released my first WordPress theme, Manifest. And in those two months the response has far exceeded my expectations. Since it’s release, Manifest has been listed on various WordPress theme blogs and used on countless personal blogs. It’s also enjoyed over 1100 downloads. Which still boggles my mind.
I’d like to say Thank You to everyone who’s commented, downloaded and enjoyed Manifest. I really do appreciate the support.
That being said, I’m considering making some updates to Manifest based on how I’ve seen it being used in the wild. While I have my own list, I’d like to hear from you as to what you would like to see (if anything) in an updated version.
I’m proud to announce my first publicly available WordPress theme, Manifest. Manifest is based on a previous design of my personal site. It’s a theme I rather liked and didn’t want to see go to waste. So instead of letting it die off in a folder on my hard drive, I decided to clean it off, polish it up and release it into the wild.
My goal with Manifest was to create a clean and streamlined theme that focused on the content and not the distractions. It utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout. No sidebars. No widgets.
Some highlights:
Feel free to use as you please, I just ask that you keep the Manifest link at the bottom. Thanks and enjoy.
It’s been a while since my last major redesign, so I figured now was as good a time as any to launch this one. I’ve ditched the single column stream of news format for a more traditional approach. With this design I was aiming to get a bit more organized in how I’m presenting content on the site. Two sections in particular that I wanted to break out were my photography and projects I’ve worked on. Each of these now have there own separate sections on the site.
I’m not going to go too much into detail with what’s changed visually or technically. I’ll just invite you to check it out and let me know what you think. I’m still cleaning up a bit of the code and will probably be making tweaks over the coming weeks, but overall I’m pretty happy with this one.
One thing I will mention though is that I’ve completely dropped support for IE6. So the 36 of you out there who are still using it to visit this site will get a completely unstyled experience. It’s time to upgrade people.
Beautifully designed letterpress Certificate of Record for filing with your local Tooth Fairy. I wonder what the ROI is on this.
I’m a big fan of Gmail but have never been a big fan of the design. My opinion my be changing with the release of Gmail Themes. It hasn’t been added to my account yet, but I’m checking regularly.
Great typographic overview of this fucking election.
Type Tweets is an interesting site that parses out the most recent twitter messages that contain type related comments. (via webmonkey)
Here it is, yet another redesign. Although I think this one will last a while since I’m getting a little burnt out on doing them. I’m going super simple this time. A single column layout with a clean aesthetic design.
I’m going to try and focus and posting more of my own content and less of the video embeds and random links that I’ve been posting lately. Which was a bit of an experiment on my part.
Anyway, here it is. I’ll be making tweaks here and there as I grow into the design and start adding content. Oh, and that photoblog I was all hyped up about a week ago? Yea, that’ll probably be taken down and supplemented with this new design. I’m not liking the feel of my content being spread on several sites so I’m bringing it back under one roof. Well, as of this week I am.
“I asked him if he’d come up with a few options. And he said “No, I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution; if you want options, go talk to other people.””
What? http://t.co/6H5npHzk 3 hrs ago
Follow @jbarraud
A little over a year ago I did a refresh of the Media-Hive company site. Based on the original design direction by Greg O’Keeffe, I set out to tie together loose ends of the previous site and simplify some of the information architecture.
Over the past few months I’ve been obsessed with a little app called Instagram. It’s an app for the iPhone that lets you take square format photos, apply a filter, then post to multiple services such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others.
This past Saturday I had pleasure of attending the NIN/JA (Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction) show at the PNC Bank Arts Center (Garden State Arts Center to those of use who know better) in Holmdel, NJ. It was a big day for me as I had been looking forward to this day ever since I purchased the tickets a couple of months ago.
It’s been two months since I released my first Wordpress theme, Manifest. And in those two months the response has far exceeded my expectations. Which honestly wasn’t that hard since I didn’t really have any. Since it’s release, Manifest has been listed on various Wordpress theme blogs and used on countless personal blogs. It’s also enjoyed over 1100 downloads. Which still boggles my mind.
One of the key features of my recently released Wordpress theme, Manifest, is that IE6 is unsupported. This hasn’t been an issue with the vast majority of people using the theme, but there have been a couple of comments and emails asking about IE6 support. I figured I’d clear the air on the subject.