Or the working title:

Sorry Portland, I’m Breaking Up with You For the Hot, Tanned, Busty Blonde that is Los Angeles, Although I Typically Go For Wavy Haired, Glasses-Wearing, Tatted Up, Scarf-Wearing, Intellectual Brunettes Like You, Portland, the Thing is It’s Been 4 Years and This Relationship isn’t Going Anywhere, Time to Move On, Smooch Smooch, Love You, Bye

Spring of 2005, I decided that I needed to leave Florida. Living there my whole life, I felt life there became rather stagnant for me. I love my Florida friends, most of whom I have remained in contact with, but I wanted to experience something completely different — something that would be impossible to do in Orlando, a cultural wasteland centered around family-friendly fun. Fresh off of dropping out from the University of Central Florida, I thought this was a good opportunity as ever to live up to my already nomadic lifestyle by leaving Florida and moving to the West Coast.

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Excellent compilation of all the interface design patterns & libraries out there.

Pardon the meta-post, but I wanted to share a few improvements I made here on the blog:

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An excellent write-up on the difference between control and intelligent user interfaces, the failure of natural language search in Wolfram Alpha, and the “demo illusion” (i.e. a person having success with a system they have created may not lead to success among the masses).

(via Signal vs Noise)

20 user experience deliverables, along with resources and examples. These deliverables are only a means to an end, but user experience designers spend a good chunk of their time creating these artifacts.

I love seeing how other designers present information and ideas in a easy to digest format.

Andrew Crow of Adaptive Path explains why we should do away with the phrase, “look and feel” when referring to visual aspects of a design:

Visual design is often subjective and can be difficult to describe or judge. Often, people lack the language or understanding of the work to accurately express their opinions. Consequently, we use simple terms of the way an object “looks” or how it “feels”.

Speaking in terms of these qualities does a disservice to the design. We cheapen the value of the work by paying attention only to the superficial aspects.

When I refer to the visual design of a website or a web application, I tend to use “aesthetics” or “style layer” but those words don’t do visual design any more justice than “look and feel”.

Also, don’t forget to read the comments.

Robert Hoekman writes:

I recently began working with a client whose staff doesn’t design together. When they walk into the office in the morning, they plug in their headphones and stare at their screens, hardly speak to each other, and forge product plans by way of short, infrequent conversations about what needs to be implemented next and when. The conference room has only a table and a projector. The front room is filled with broken-down boxes, presumably leftover from setting up shop in a new place, but the company has been in the space for months.

The people on this team are smart and engaged, but they’re nowhere near doing their best work. They’re not taking advantage of each other’s ideas and passions. They’re not having any fun.

I’ve worked in a couple of environments similar to what Robert describes here. In both environments, I did not work at an efficiency I would consider to be productive. More importantly, I did not produce what I would consider to be my best work.

What I’ve taken away from both experiences is the work environment of any job will always set a threshold on the potential enthusiasm (and fun) you will have for the duration of your time at said job. In other words, focus on evaluating the team you will be working with, not the work you will be doing. Enthusiasm and attitude is contagious.

A bit of a tangential thought from Hoekman’s point, but thought it was worth noting.

Once upon a time, when I started a design project with a monochromatic color palette, I would choose colors based on instinct. I would pick a base color, and if I needed a different shade of said color, I would “eyeball” it in the Photoshop color picker by moving the eyedropper slightly in a direction that would give me the result I needed. This approach worked well enough, but the more detail-oriented perfectionist side of me was put off by the arbitrariness. There had to be a more systematic approach to a monochromatic color palette than just picking and choosing. There is, and with a basic understanding of color theory, specifically, how saturation and brightness works, you’ll be creating monochromatic color palettes in no time.

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I’ve been debating internally for the last few months whether to downgrade my digital cable to basic cable, so this is particularly interesting to me.

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Since the end of 2003, I’ve worked under the alias Griffin Webworks. The whole reason I chose this name just over 5 years ago was sort of out of ignorance. I was under the assumption (after reading up on business names on the internet) that since the business name encompassed my last name, I wouldn’t be required to file any paperwork to run as a business, which is something that mattered very much to me as a poor college student. I found out months later that I assumed wrong and spent big bucks ($50) to register it as a DBA. I did freelance work under this name until the beginning of 2007 when I decided to stop all together, as I had a full-time job. With my decision to come back to it 2 years later, I decided it was time for a change.

Enter Deadbolt. I’ve owned this domain name for just over 3 years with the intentions to rebrand myself, and with my current situation, I decided it was time to do just that. Griffin Webworks is now officially retired.

And with that, I’m open for business.