As I venture out onto the Internet to learn more about my favorite comic book artists, I keep coming across websites that look unprofessional, outdated, or some that are just plain terrible. (Say what you will about Rob Liefeld’s artwork, but he at least has a pretty professional looking website — pictured above.)These artists clearly have more talent in their little finger than I have in my entire body and I think that they should have a web presence that appropriately showcases their talents. This could be something as simple as James Jean’s minimalist portfolio, in which he lets the work speak for itself, or something more like Marvel or DC‘s sites, where they have the art take up the majority of the page. After the jump is a list of some of my favorite comic book artists and screenshots of their websites. Are there any that I missed?!
Read more…
New Balance wanted to create an iPad app to share some of their new products with their customers by creating this simplified, interactive catalog. For more information on this project, go here!
Our product team at Cengage Learning was exploring the idea of creating a product for Latin America Area Studies. My job was to create a mockup to help the team visualize what something like that might look and feel like. I wanted to capture the flavor and essence of the Latin American culture and what I created is one of my favorite designs I have ever done!
I designed this Facebook application for Playskool in which their users could upload and edit photos and create Play Snaps, or fun playtime tips, to share with their friends. The UI was built completely from scratch, so I started with doing some fairly in-depth, interactive wireframes to help translate the functionality to the developers that were building the app. For more information on this project, go here!
Nerf was interested in creating an iPhone app and I was approached by their agency to create some screens for this concept app. While most people are used to Nerf’s typical orange, yellow, and blue color scheme, they were interested in exploring the use of a more sleek and futuristic aesthetic to appeal to a more mature user group.
UPDATE: AIGA Detroit posted my review on their blog. Neat!
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a talk, entitled “Tall Tales From A Large Man,” given by designer and entrepreneur Aaron Draplin. Draplin is a Michigan native, but now resides in the Pacific Northwest where he runs his very successful design firm Draplin Design Co. I hate to admit it, but I was not too familiar with Mr. Draplin’s amazing catalog of work until my buddy Nate clued me in. After watching this video and browsing through his portfolio, I knew this talk was something I could not miss.
Read more…
Earlier this year, Google introduced the Google Font Directory, which offers users a selection of open source fonts to use online as web-friendly fonts. I finally set aside some time to find out more about it… only to realize that it takes about 5 minutes to integrate the fonts into your site! I used the Reenie Beanie font on some of the headers throughout my site. I initially was using it on more text, but quickly realized that getting too crazy with some of these fonts could result in very unreadable text. So, while this new free resource is very cool, best usability practices should still be kept in mind when designing your site!
Has anyone seen any other websites integrating these fonts?
Resources:
Where to download the Google fonts to use in Photoshop comps
After nailing down the scope and requirements of a project, I always start my designs with a wireframe of the homepage. In the past, this usually started with some dry erase markers on a whiteboard and then I would recreate those drawings using Photoshop. This is not always the fastest and most efficient way to work. My friend @schusterbauer, however, recently introduced me to Mockingbird, an online wireframing application, and it has completely changed the way I work.
Mockingbird’s simple UI and library of web elements makes it easy to rapidly mock up your designs and outline the basic functionality of the site or application. The user’s ability to quickly update the mock ups make it an ideal tool for brainstorming and “sharing” your projects is a great way to collaborate and get feedback from clients. I would highly recommend using this tool to anyone!
Other wireframing tools worth checking out are Hot Gloo and Balsamiq. Are there any others worth checking out?
Grzimek’s (pronounced “chi-mix”) Animal Life was the first project I worked on at Gale/Cengage Learning. We took an existing animal encyclopedia and turned in to a website. I had a lot of freedom with this design and was really pleased with how the header turned out. I was also responsible for creating the HTML/CSS for the website templates.
Hasbro launched a new line of toys and this game to coincide with the release of the live-action G.I. Joe movie. I worked on pretty much all the screens in the game and we did G.I. Joe and Cobra versions to match up with the two different story lines. What a great project! G.I. Joes were one of my favorite toys when I was a kid (it was hard for me to not just put Snake Eyes on every screen). Definitely the coolest project I’ve art directed for Kunoichi. For more information on this project, go here!
