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How Chess Makes Me A Better Designer
Our industry hinges on great ideas. And, while the design community is great at talking about technique, I don’t often find advice on critical thinking and problem solving skills—the very skills that,...
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Comic Con and Creativity
Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to take some time off to attend the New York Comic Con. While I considered my trip a mini-vacation, it taught me a few important lessons in creativity....
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Purpose, Then Product: A Place For Emotional Design in Ecommerce
Look at any really successful product brand and you’ll see that they build their brand around a purpose, not a product. Our decision making is largely guided by our primitive brain, and that’s what we...
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Just “UX” It – How To Apply UX Thinking to Real Life Projects (and Karaoke)
Oftentimes, I find myself starting a project at home by saying I need to “UX” something – my room redesign, my weekend plans – you name it, I’ll “UX” it. This is just my way of saying that I’m going...
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Creative Workshops: Think Differently
Last year Leo Burnett Worldwide wrote about their experience with Farmhouse Lab during Chicago Ideas Week. They assembled a group of innovators and big thinkers for a workshop titled Reinventing the...
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Designing Device Assets: Templates and Tips
In olden times, as long as you remembered to create a favicon you were golden. Now, between phones, tablets, retina screens, iOS 7, Windows 8, everything and the kitchen sink, there are literally...
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Behind the Design: Khan Academy Avatars
About two months ago, Khan Academy asked us to create avatars for the new Learning Dashboard which launched in August. We thought it would be a fun experience for students to see their avatars evolve...
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Behind the Design: Cheetah Day Poster
In October, the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) asked us to design posters for International Cheetah Day (December 4). The purpose of this event is to spread awareness about the rapid decline and near...
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Creating a Film Grain Effect with CSS3
We were thrilled to work with the Wildlife Conservation Society on 96elephants.org. The site tells the story of ivory poaching through maps, infographics, and photos, urging users to take action on...
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Power Tools for Content Inventories
Spreadsheets, strong coffee, and good ol’ fashioned clicking, cutting, and pasting are tried-and-true tools for conducting content inventories. And despite how pedestrian they are, they do the trick...
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Words Matter
Words matter. They are abstractions, too—an interface to thought and understanding by communication. The words we use mold our perception of our work and the world around us. They become a frame, just...
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The Path of Humility
When we make New Year's resolutions, we're defining limits around ourselves. We reflect on our strengths, our weaknesses and from there determine who we hope to become within the year. The problem is,...
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Decisive Action
A hallmark of good design is the prioritization of the right things. I’ve been thinking about this as it relates to some interactive design patterns which seem to be gaining traction. What I’m calling...
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Using Word Association to Select Brand Colors
A mural of business cards at Viget headquarters in Falls Church, VA.A Discovery News article states that we “like colors that are tied to things that are healthy and promote survival”. In other words,...
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Creating Design Thinkers
My wife, Amy, is a high school architecture teacher. I recently went with her on a trip to Boston where she attended a conference on Design Thinking for Educators. While she was at the conference, I...
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How to Run Quick, Cheap, Usability Tests Using Mechanical Turk
On a recent project, I wanted to quickly evaluate multiple navigation concepts for a site. Setting up the tests in Treejack was easy enough, but I was faced with the usual problem of quickly getting an...
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Twitter Bootstrap 3.0 Stencils for Omnigraffle
A little while ago, Elliott, Lance, and I put together an Omnigraffle stencil set for Twitter Bootstrap. That was back in the days of yore, when buttons had gloss, bevels, and drop shadows. But times...
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Make a Flippin’ 3D Countdown with CSS & JavaScript
In January, we worked with Dick’s Sporting Goods to launch Gear in Action, an interactive lookbook featuring new products for the 2014 Baseball season. During the video presentation, users have the...
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Frosted Glass Effect with Blur Filters and Masks
Combining a blur effect and a mask to achieve a frosted glass effect is fairly straightforward in Photoshop.However, achieving this frosted glass effect on the front-end using using a single image file...
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Dissecting a Design: Viget SpotsYou
We recently built SpotsYou, a tool those of us at Viget can use to get rewarded for hitting the gym. Go read Kevin’s breakdown of what it is and why it exists. Okay, back? Cool. Even though Viget...
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