Visit this site at: www.swervepress.com

Just fininshed launching a site, swervepress.com for my friends at Sharp Seven Design.Had some fun with photoshop on this project creating rough textures and repeating backgrounds.

SwervePress is a new, small book publisher that has a new book, AS IS, coming out that looks like an interesting read. If you sign-up for their e-newsletter you can get a free sample.

Since going fulltime as a freelancer in 2007, I’ve been using the excellent Cashboard service to track estimates, time, invoices, and payments for all my clients projects. I love the app, it integrates well with Basecamp, has a great workflow from going from estimation to the final invoice, and most of all keeps my ADD brain organized when it comes to dealing with clients and their money.

However, I did have issue with some of the UI design choices that were made. Through Cashboard’s feedback systems, including a feedback forum and a survey sent out by the developer, I voiced my opinion about the UI design. Seth, the Cashboard developer, listened to my (and others) feedback and asked me to come up with a few mockups of how I might like the Cashboard design to look like. I went to work and created a few different page mockups. Here are the results:

Original Cashboard Navigation Design

To me the inactive tabs were too bold, competing with the active tab.

My proposed Cashboard Navigation UI Design

My approach was to remove the tabs from the inactive links, and just make them text links. This helps clean up the UI and gives you eye fewer distracting elements.

The New and Improved Cashboard Navigation

Liking the new approach, Seth implemented a variation of that idea implementing a new Cashboard navigation bar.

This is a great example illustrating that customer feedback actually works. If you have something to say about an application or service that you use, whether it be on the web or your local plumber, then let them know. If they are great at something, tell them! If you have thoughts on improving their service, tell them! You never know how your feedback can be helpful. A fresh set of eyes can help the developer or service provider see thing in a new way, if they are receptive.

Checkout Seth’s post on the Cashboard blog about the navigation change.

Every year my wife, Jamie, makes candy and other edible delicious goodies as gifts. This year I had the distinct honor of making the labels for them. Here are a selection of the label designs.

As an Art major with a graphics concentration, we had to take a video production class. We were at the beginnings of affordable desktop computers with digital video edting capabilities, but not quite there. So we had a “Speedy” dual-processor 500 mhz, Window NT machine with Matrox Digisuite software. We shot everything on a Sony MiniDV cam, can’t remember the model. The video effects that we did, even simple transitions took forever to render, that is if the computer didn’t crash first. It was really fun and great to be working with video creation a few years before it really exploded and became a staple on the internet.

I apologize for he quality of these, they were encoded and compressed about 6 years ago. I really need to recompress the DV tapes with a better codec. Anyway, enjoy!

Windfall

A SonVolt music video, featuring Jon Carlson as the man.

An Evening at Sodexho

Instructional Training Video of how to use our school cafeteria. Directed and edited by myself and Corey T. Wilson, Assignment: Take crappy footage and make something of it.

Paranoia and the Gentleman

Again Corey T. Wilson and I at it again. I was the videographer on this one. staring my friend Buddy Denny.

The Shave

Music: Jimmy Smith; Unshaven man: Josh Meo; Concept, Direction, Shooting and Editing myself.

Teacher shares sweet Halloween treat by Jamie Soper.

We just found out that we’re having a girl! We’re thrilled…mostly because we only had a girl’s name picked out: Amelia Jane.

Obama & Biden held a rally in Fredericksburg yesterday. According to reports about 26,000 people showed up…and about 26 billion raindrops.

Jamie & I arrived at about 2:30, waiting in line for about and hour and a half and made our way into Ball Circle at the University of Mary Washington. Obama spoke about 7:00pm…it rained pretty much his entire speech. Needless to say, we were soaked, but the rally was good despite that. Below are some photos from this inspiring event.

Yep, it’s happening, we’re having a baby. According to the estimates, he/she should be entering this new and crazy world on February 15, 2009.

Keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we enter into this adventure together, and are joined by a little one in our own adventure.

Ian & Jamie

The Desktop

So, back to the desktop. I love a good desktop app. They are fast, feature rich, and integrated into the desktop experience better (try downloading a 2GB photoshop file vs. trying to open one locally). The problem is that over time the simple, user friendly desktop apps get feature creep, meaning that they get more an more features every version to please customers wanting to drop down a few hundred bucks on an upgrade and feel like they are getting something for it.

Honestly, I love the bloated new features of desktop apps. I really do. I don’t want a stripped down version of a desktop app that really limits my functionality. But, on my two year old MacBook Pro Adobe’s CS3 Apps can be a bear to work with. They are slow to launch, and take up too much memory at the get go.

A Modest Solution

What if all desktop apps had selectable features? What if you could choose in the preferences what features you wanted included when you launched the app? What if you could create profiles for yourself that launched the app with different features enabled, much like Adobe already does for workspaces in many of their apps.

Photoshop: What if I only need a few sets of tools for doing simple tasks like mild photo editing, resizing and saving for a website. But I needed a larger set of features for designing a UI or creating a web site comp.

Illustrator: What if I’m only doing a simple vinyl banner design and I don’t need live trace or live paint, mesh warp, etc…I just need to use some of the basic tools.

InDesign: What if I’m creating simple wedding program and I know I won’t need any extra plugins, nor the more advanced searching features, nor transparency or effects, etc.

I assume to have flexible applications like this would require a huge shift in how applications are developed and how UIs are designed (i.e. How does a customer enable or disable these features or choose the proper set of features on startup with out it being completely confusing).

With the rise of mini-portable computing, desktop apps are soon to be left in the dust. They need to adapt or die. I hope they adapt, I really do. I love the desktop too much to let that experience die.

I just recently launched a website for the band, Tereu Tereu. Built on WordPress, it features a clean, simple design and allows them to maintain all the content themselves.

Visit the new site and check out their music at TereuTereu.com