23 Amusing Signs You’ve Become a Design Geek
Couretsy of www.crestock.com- You smile that spanking-kind-of-smile when you use the CSS property: padding-bottom.
- You know exactly what I'm referring to when I say "Make my logo bigger".
- Every now and then you go through a ‘herbal tea’ phase to try and reduce your dependence to coffee, but you always go back to the inky demon eventually.
- You've caught yourself more than once hitting CTRL or CMD+N when you need a coffee refill...
- Sleep and nighttime are no longer irrevocably linked.
- You have woken up in the middle of the night your sleep and started recreating the dream you just had in Photoshop.
- When getting up, you wish you had a healing brush/patch tool for those unsightly blemishes and undereye luggage.
- Your keyboard could definitely be someone’s grocery list - you're eating there constantly.
- You know several Photoshop shortcuts that require 4 fingers (Shift+Ctrl+Alt+K anyone?).
- Whenever you see fog on a forested hillside, you think, nature is making a gaussian blur.
- You're sitting in the movie theater watching the movie titles, shaking your head at how badly they're kerned.
- Your biggest fear is Papyrus becoming the new Comic Sans.
- If you could go back in time you wouldn't go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you'd go back in time to destroy Comic Sans and Papyrus.
- Your most romantic date was when you went to see Helvetica by Gary Hustwit.
- You've considered naming your children things like 'Kern', 'Pica', 'Bézier', 'Nyala', and 'Serif'.
- You are trying catch the post-it notes at your monitor with your cursor.
- You know that, by default, if three designs are shown to a client, your least favorite will be chosen - or any combination of worst components of each.
- You also know that if you ask for more copy it will be sent as a Jpeg; If you ask for images they will be sent as PowerPoint presentations; if you ask for a vector logo, it'll come in the form of a Gif – from their website.
- You have an uncanny ability to automatically see when something is lined up properly without the need for tools or devices, for instance if a shelf is straight, and where the center of the wall is to hang a picture.
- And as a direct cause, get an almost uncontrollable urge to adjust a painting that's tilted ever so slightly.
- And when in doubt, you automatically think CTRL or CMD+;
- When girls are picking up Vogue and Cosmopolitan drooling over the latest trend in eye makeup and trying to figure out how to accomplish the the same effect, you're drooling over the most amazing 2 page advertising spread you've ever seen - trying to figure out how to accomplish the the same Photoshop effect...
- You actually understand this post and pass it on to your fellow geeks friends.
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Keep It Simple… the difficult task of paring things down
I spend my days working hard to keep things simple: gathering all the ideas that could go into a product (good and bad) and paring these down to the most effective and usable user experience possible. So, Mark Twain's quote resonates:
So whether it applies to a letter to your best friend, the model of an interaction with the world around you, the flow of a process, or the way you set up your living room, simplicity rules. Thanks to the folks at Zen Habits for addressing the subject directly. Here's a great nugget from Pare It Down: Cut Away the Extraneous to Leave the Awesome on things to consider when paring down:I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
- Spend a few minutes thinking about what is really essential. What is it that you really want above all else? What is it about your product or service that the customer really wants? What is it you are really trying to communicate? If you had to pick one thing about whatever you’re doing, what would it be?
- Be bold. Don’t be afraid to throw stuff out. You can always add stuff back in later — remember that less is better as long as you’re leaving in the essentials.
- What is blocking the essentials? Sometimes the awesome in something is being blocked by other things — can you remove those things to show the awesome and let it shine? Remove the noise to let the music be heard.
- Come back to it. Sometimes you can’t see the extraneous the first time you start paring down. So do your best, and then come back later and try again. You might be able to pare down even more this time. Keep coming back as long as you can — the more you pare, the better in most cases.
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The Battle of the Smart Phones
I've been biding my time. Waiting... You know when someone tells you that your cell phone looks like it belongs to a construction worker, something is wrong. Not that I have anything against construction workers, but I do fancy myself a bit of a geek. It's difficult to walk around with a bulky, grungy, big hunk of plastic that I speak into from time to time. I operate methodically, though. I don't jump on the bandwagon and buy into the next big thing. I wait.
I've been very tempted to purchase an iPhone. Must wait to see and touch the Android and the Storm first.
Luckily Gizmodo has broken down the Smartphones OSes for us. I'm a step closer to making the decision.
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52 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Google
- Browse the classics without opening a book
- Never wake up your Australian relatives at 3am again
- Convert £ to Yuan instantly
- See the Cerne Giant in your bedroom
- Automatically save every draft of your wedding list/seating plan
- Flight arrival and departure times in real time
- Say 'I don't speak Italian', in Italian
- Are you big in Uzbekistan?
- Settle trivia disputes in the pub
- Watch your favourite YouTube clips in high-resolution
- Stargaze on a bright sunny day, or on a cloudy afternoon
- Get directions when you're on the move
- Find out who's free for lunch without asking
- Keep your family videos in the family
- Know not only when the FTSE moves, but why
- Find local cinema times
- Make your homepage YOUR homepage
- Inspiration, insight or information for your essay, dissertation or thesis
- Turn your email into a conversation
- Show your kid where the Komodo dragon lives
- Go back to work without going back to the office
- What Coleridge actually wrote was…
- Have your daily schedule sent to you every morning
- Map out the local sights for visiting friends
- Share your YouTube favorites on the bus
- Get the latest weather forecast for Hyderabad, or anywhere else on Earth
- Search the web Elmer Fudd style
- Fill in web forms with one click
- Add comments directly into your videos
- Star or label important emails for easy reference
- See tomorrow's storm coming a thousand miles off
- Multiply 27,334.56 by 21.3 without a calculator
- Tart up your holiday snaps before sending them out to mates
- Read a newspaper written in a language you don't speak
- Learn a new skill in a minute
- You are here. The pub you want is there
- Work on the same document from four corners of the Earth
- Know when to take the high road or the low road
- Make yourself feel better - convert your weight from pounds to kilos
- Translate your website into 13 languages with a single line of code
- Glam up your YouTube channel
- Find the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything
- Find the email in the haystack
- DJ at your friend's party...take your playlist with you
- See the effects of climate change for yourself
- Survey your mates to conclusively agree on the best film of all time
- Be famous for 15 seconds, minutes or days
- Travel as the crow flies, or go right around the houses
- Work on your online documents even when you're offline
- Love this video? Don't miss the sequel
- Preserve instant message conversations
- Add a YouTube player to your website
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Adobe CS4 - Content Aware Scaling
I'm really looking forward to CS4. Audio Transcription in Premiere, importing 3D layers from Photoshop into After Effects, new motion editor in Flash (thank you!), an my fav - Content aware scaling.
Content Aware Scaling in Photoshop CS4 from arturogoga on Vimeo.
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There’s Something in the Air?
The rumor-mill is working overtime today. Tomorrow, Apple will announce exactly what is in the air. Is it the Macbook Air? Is Apple gobbling up Adobe? It should be an interesting Macworld Expo tomorrow.
I personally hope the rumor is true that Apple will be releasing the Macbook Air, which is said to be an ultra-portable laptop driven by flash memory and as cute as a button. Okay, I added the last part but it's Apple. What else would you expect? I'd be glad to have a small, lightweight machine to carry around and leave my hefty Macbook Pro at home. Probably most useful for surfing the web. Of course the price will have to be right. And it will have to be real. Some folks are pointing out bogus specs, claiming the Airbook's a hoax.
This is what Macrumors is reporting:
- A slim notebook, but not a "sub notebook"
- 13.3" screen
- Not a "Pro" machine
- External Optical Drive
- It will be called the MacBook Air
And if Apple's buying Adobe and it's AIR platform... that works for me too. Somehow everything Steve Job's touches turns to gold (wait, what about the Apple Cube?), so I'd guess we'd see some out-of-the-box improvements. I guess we'll see tomorrow.
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Collection: Design Patterns
For those of us who daily design and build the things that work on the web, a great deal of our time is spent seeing how other folks do things, whether we like to admit it or not. A lot of the great ideas have already been done (not all, but a lot), so it often helps to take a look at those ideas, evaluate what you like and what you don't like, evaluate what you need and what you don't need, and determine what nuggets of beautiful design wisdom you can glean for your own project.
I know I've spent many hours surfing the web (billed as "competitive analysis"), looking at who does what well. So I ran across factoryjoe's Flickr account where he has compiled a valuable collection of interface and design elements found across the web. You could also call these elements "design patterns". So next time you're mulling over the perfect tagging interface - take a look at ways other folks have blazed that trail.
I do like the mantra factoryjoe has included with this collection - "Reuse, recycle, but don’t reinvent the wheel unless necessary." Thanks factoryjoe. You've just made life a little bit more fun for me, in a disturbingly geeky way.
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