Trying to maintain a blog seems like a catch 22. When I have time to update it, I rarely have anything worth noting; and when I have stuff worth posting, I’m usually too busy to write about it. Oh well. Here’s a quick recap on some highlights from the last 12 months:

• Not For Sale has kept me very busy with a lot of fun and challenging projects.
• Launched a new site for Just Business. (Design props to Tiffany Morgan Design.)
• Worked with Hume Lake on some mockups for a website redesign, developed mobile-friendly pages for their new mobile app, and we’re getting ready to launch a redesigned site for the Joshua Wilderness Institute.
• Started redesigning the website for The Everglades Foundation in Florida, scheduled to launch next year. (Fun fact for those who like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, Jimmy Buffett is one of their board members.)
• Been working on a wonderful portfolio site for Josh Smith, due to launch early next year.
• Almost all the sites I’ve worked on this year use custom web fonts from TypeKit.
• WordPress has continued to prove to be a great platform to develop websites on, and I’ve been able to customize the CMS more and more, allowing clients to easily produce more content with less formatting, displayed in more complex layouts, with less chance of breaking the original design. This is good for everyone.
• The world of mobile-first responsive web design is permeating my approach to design, albeit slower than I would like. Getting an iPad last month has certainly helped this along.

This month marks 3 years in business. I’m thankful for the Lord’s faithfulness and earthly provision, which reminds me of the eternal provision found in Christ, whose incarnation we celebrate. Merry Christmas.

Not For Sale Campaign has been delightful to work with. They have a noble cause, and they think outside the box with everything they do. Back in 2009 I helped them redesign their website from the ground up, and since then, they’ve continued to harness the web as an effective means of communication. In doing so, we’ve faced all sorts of issues pertaining to content management. As a designer and developer, there is always tension between giving complete control to the user, risking formatting faux-pas; and giving them too little control, sometimes paralyzing the content. Thankfully, technology continues to advance, and good businesses continue to refine their goals and objectives. With both of these factors in play for any given website, it is typical to refresh the look and functionality every 2-3 years.

This time around, we were able to implement a slew of improvements with respect to content management, functionality, social media integration, and overall aesthetics. So, under the direction of Allison Trowbridge (Director of Communication) and Gabe Brown (Director of Technology) at Not For Sale, and the elegant design by Tiffany Morgan Design, I was pleased to develop their new and improved website this past spring.

Dig the new notforsalecampaign.org.

I recently had the privilege of working with a couple of my friends from Hume on a redesign for GTI Study Tours. GTI offers all-inclusive, Bible-based, guided experiences through the holy land and middle east. Their focus is not to merely show off touristy landmarks, but to view the land through the lens of scripture.

Working with Rich Ferreira and Chester McLaughlin is always a joy. They took care of the difficult job of wrangling and organizing the content, and helping the folks at GTI refine the messaging they wanted to communicate, which made my job a lot easier. The new site also boasts some beautifully-produced videos by Kyle White.

Enjoy gtitours.org.

Which is better, a Corvette or a semi truck? Although a few might spout off an answer, most people would need to know more information. Namely, “for what?” If the comparison were based on driving to the local coffee shop, the Corvette would be the obvious choice. However, if the job at hand was hauling thousands of two-by-fours hundreds of miles, most sober-minded people would choose the semi. In both cases, each vehicle at hand could perform each task, but neither can do both well.

Such is true with web technologies. There is no silver bullet platform or technology that can to all things best. It takes discernment to choose the right tool for the job at hand.

Mark Janzen is a seasoned and well-respected photographer based here in the valley. I met Mark through Mariano Friginal, and I was privileged to recently redesign his site. After designing quite a few sites for different photographers, I’ve noticed that I tend to find the time slipping away as I get caught up in browsing through their photos. I really dig great photography. Partly because I’m not a great photographer myself, but also because it makes my job that much more fun. Such was the case as I was designing this one. Mark’s photography is just splendid, and I really didn’t want to distract Mark’s visitors with a fancy user interface. Minimalism was essential.

Another key ingredient to this site was typography. I was again thrilled to use TypeKit to serve up some beautiful fonts, which allowed for more creative flexibility, particularly in the titling.

So go check out markjanzenphotography.com and check out his brilliant work. Be careful, you may find yourself distracted from your regular responsibilities like work, childcare, or Facebook.

Just over three years ago I resigned from the creative department at Hume Lake Christian Camps and moved back down to the valley. My family and I loved the 4+ years we lived up there, and still dream about the beautiful scenery, good friends, and delicious tap water we left behind. I also dearly miss the team I worked with, so I was stoked to have the opportunity to take on a contract job in the midst of their overflowing workload.

Although I’ve focused my business primarily on web design and development, I was happy accept this print job to promote Hume’s camps and reatreat. There were a few main objectives: 1) communicate the year-round schedule of the programs 2) keep the information concise, driving the users to the website for more information 3) make the life span of the piece one year.

The final product was a hybrid booklet/calendar, which was dreamed up by Lenny Harris, Hume’s program director. My goal as the designer was to make the calendar attractive and usable enough that people would actually hang it on their wall, refrigerator, or wherever else calendars are typically hung, while unobtrusively letting the users know what’s currently going on at the camp and what’s coming up. Here’s a little taste of how it turned out:

This is post is part of a series of articles aimed at helping users understand how content behaves inside a web browser.

In this post, we’ll be exploring full-screen images; when they work well and when they don’t. I’ve often found that it is difficult to concisely explain this kind of thing, particularly as it compares to print, which always has fixed dimensions. Hopefully, the examples given here will shed some light on the subject.

Let’s first make a few assumptions:

• We want the images to display as large as possible.
• We don’t want the image to be distorted (stretched or squished).
• The term “full-screen” will refer to the browser window, as opposed to the entire computer screen, which would hide the start menu, icons, dock, etc.
• I’ll use the following photo (which happens to illustrate an unrelated phenomenon of physical attractiveness skipping the 3rd generation of males in a family):

  

The trouble we face with making an image fill the browser window is that the dimensions of the image and the web browser rarely match. It is therefore necessary to decide how to remedy this. For the most part, there are 2 viable options:

Option 1: “Letterbox” the image

Create blank space in the browser around the image, thus keeping the entire image viewable. (We see this same type of thing when we watch wide-screen movies on an old television when black bars appear at the top and bottom of the picture.) Observe:

As you can see, the blank space in the second and third instances aren’t exactly complimentary to the image. To get rid of these, we can try a different technique.

Option 2: Crop the image

Let the image fill either the height or width of the browser and let the remaining portions of the image get cropped.

We see here that the images fill the browser window completely, but in the latter two instances crop important parts of the photo (although you might be thinking that the third instance looks the best based on those being beheaded).

Granted, not all photos have relevant content filling the entire canvas, such as the following:

The reason this photo works well in the given environments is that there is sufficient negative space surrounding the relevant content. No one will bat an eye when they can’t see all the bark on the tree, as long as the boy’s smiling face is viewable.

Conclusion:

If you want to use full-screen images on your website, just make sure you’re using photos that have a good amount of negative space on all four edges of the photo. Otherwise, the photos will be cropped inappropriately for some users. If cropping is not an option, the Letterbox example can work satisfactorily, but I’d recommend having the empty space be filled with a complimentary color or background image.

Additional Options:

There are a number of other options for displaying images and galleries on the web, such as lightbox overlays (like the popup boxes that show up when you click on any of the images in this post), but I’ll save those options for another time.

A few months ago, I started doing contract work for Personify, a boutique graphic design studio in the bay area. Not long after working with Krista, she decided it was time to rebrand her own business and with it came the need for an overhauled website.

The new site is an extension of the new identity that Krista created. Through her art direction, the site was designed and developed to communicate the wide array of design services she offers and provide an engaging experience for her visitors.

Check out the new personify.us.

I recently had the privilege of working on a new website with Nick Gundry and Lisa Alvey from Fresno Pacific University. They produced a campus tour video and wanted a simple, engaging website to house it. With a focus on social interaction, users are encouraged to leave comments, create and post their own video tours on YouTube, and upload related photos to Flickr.

It was fun to work on a project with a playful, lighthearted theme. The FPU folks supplied the character illustrations, I which I integrated into the rest of the design.

Check out tour.fpulife.com.

I just realized that I haven’t used my bookmarks (either saved in the browser or Delicious) for a good many months. Although I’ve been very protective of my fav’ed sites in the past, I’ve recently found myself simply googling what I’m looking for, rather than combing through my bookmarks trying to find that gem buried in a pile of links that were probably only relevant 5 years ago.

A lot of my old bookmarks are either design inspiration or coding helpers, both of which have proved to be short lived with the way technology, trends, and the definition of “cool” change so quickly. Another factor that has effected this is the ridiculous amount of content being published now days. According to a dude who went to SXSW, “The amount of data created by humans in 2009 exceeded that of all data created by humans prior to 2009″. That’s crazy. I can’t consume that much. The struggle along with that is the fact that there is a lot of good content being published. Five years ago, I would have bookmarked a lot of the blog articles I’ve read recently, but I’ve come to realize that I’m simply not going to go back and re-read anything that is good because tomorrow there will be 10 more articles that are just as good.

The closest thing that I’ve done to bookmarking recently is “starring” articles in Google Reader. I actually have gone back occasionally to review those articles. It helps that the articles are sorted by date because, for the most part, the newer ones are more relevant than the old ones. At this point, I think this is my best bet to keep up.

Am I alone in this shift?