Was it worth it? I learned more in 3 months than I did the previous year. I learned javascript; just a few months back I was incapable of writing a click event if my life depended on it. I learned to design, code and launch a web application; all of which I had done before but never at this scale. I learned how the paypal payment data transfer works; a mountain of pain for a frontend developer. I gained a working knowledge of php and mysql. I learned how not to price an app. During all this I had the support of some very talented developers, I owe them a hug.

Was it a success? I called it a success the day I learned javascript, something I had been trying to learn for a very long time. It was also a success when users told me how much they loved it. I almost fell of my chair when I got my first customer.

Where now? This is just the beginning. Its going to be tough and I have some sleepless nights ahead of me. I look forward to them. They give me joy.

Let me ask you this – are you stalling on your dreams? Afraid of sleepless nights? When you get that unexpected email in your inbox humbly informing you – ”payment received”, it will all make sense.

I know many designers, developers and thinkers who never advance from sketching their idea in their moleskin notebook. Want my advice? get to work! If anything, you might just learn a new language.

The application I launched is FormBakery - the simplest way to make a web form.

I can no longer remember Ubuntu’s release names and numbers. I had to look it up for this article, apparently its at 11.10. I gave it a spin and hated it. It was slow, unproductive & buggy. I spotted around ten bugs in the two hours I played with it. This wasnt a stable release to say the least.

Not all was bad though, some areas of the user interface were incredibly improved and refined. The settings, file browser, login screen, software center, buttons, workspaces, icons and a few others things were improved impressively. As for Unity; its incomplete, buggy and complicated. Gnome took its own sweet time to mature, so did the things I mentioned above such as the file browser. Unity on the other hand has not had a chance to prove itself. Given a few years to iron out its kinks and simplify the interface, I think Unity will be the best thing that will ever happen to Linux. The non geek will love Unity. Its simple to use, it feels fresh and although naive they will love the gloss that Unity brings to Ubuntu.

I for one cannot sacrifice productivity for glitz. Geeks are coding away at some application feature, managing servers, updating designs, watching some TV show, browsing the web, discussing project goals over skype with team members and other mundane things – all this on a slow day. Unity gets in the way when getting things done.
The average Joe cares about checking his facebook, managing his spreadsheets, listening to music, twittering and making a skype call – all of which Ubuntu with Unity does extremely well. This helps Linux gain traction with real everyday people – the dream that we all talked about for 10+ years.

What about us geeks? We have Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Mint, RedHat, Arch, Gentoo, Mandriva, do i really need to go on?

As a designer and front-end developer I care very much about the typographic scale, responsive grid, user experience or writing perfectly semantic markup. What I don’t care for is writing validation code for that lone form on the contact page. A decent form can easily suck hours in billable time.

FormBakery solves a real problem. It helps you make web forms that are not just instantly deployable but also semantically coded, human readable, extensible and best of all – yours to keep.

A gripe I have with many of the form creators out there is that they keep part of your code on their servers. I don’t like the idea of relying on a third party for the forms on all my websites to work. With FormBakery I decided to provide every bit of code that makes your form sing.

I greatly enjoyed building FormBakery and hope you enjoy using it. Go check it out at www.formbakery.com – happy baking!

This worked fine. It’s vagueness however was creeping up on productivity.

Information, grids, hierarchy, color, contrast etcetera are common to most design projects. This made me rethink the way I design web and application interfaces.

The updated process I use is independent of the website. It can be used on a single page; any page. You should probably start with the homepage and set guidelines for the rest of the website. Enough talk, let’s look at the process.

Collect

Harvest content that could possibly warrant being added to the website. Place them on a blank document one after the other. Any application may be used, even MS word. All content should be in it’s raw form — no grids, color, fonts or styling. All text should be black.

Simplify

Brutally remove content that can be removed. Simplify any text if possible. What you are left with will make the website.

Prioritize

Sort your content list by importance.

Dimension

Turn your linear list of content to a 2d grid of content. Priority decides where an object goes. Important stuff goes higher up the page. You can also play with size to reflect priority.

Typography & color

Define a typographic scale and select your typefaces. Set type sizes based on priority. Headlines might carry a weighted sans-serif while body text is set to 16 pixels in Garamond. Also define and apply a color palette.

Don’t mistake definition for automation. Iterate, improve and rethink your design because the refined process will only take you so far.

If you give it a try, I would love to know how it went at contact@kumailht.com.

A poor herdsman once was gifted a valuable robe. The robe wasn’t of much use to him. This reflected in his treatment towards it. One day he asked upon the king a favor. He admired the robe the man so carelessly handled. The king asked him what he thought the value of the robe to be. “This robe was a gift and I am clueless as to it’s exact value” he claimed. The king granted his favor in exchange for that robe.

One such robe exists today. It’s the Linux operating system. It’s got 200 million lines of code. It would cost 10 billion dollars to recreate.

Why? Let’s answer that with a question—what is web design?

Web refers to a network of pages. Pages hold information. Web design could rightly be called information design; because it is. How can you design information that doesn’t exist? How can you design lorem ipsum?

The light switch performs a task – it acts as an interface to the bulb itself. Much like the light switch, a computer also performs tasks; unlike the light switch, the computer is taking over our lives.

Casual users are increasingly occupying themselves with technology. They live and breathe their iPhones, laptops and xbox’s just as we do. This is a problem.

Life is not meant to be lived over a screen. It’s unnatural and harmful. The real world, the one you see when you look away from this screen is far greater than the experience any gadget will offer. Why then are we mass migrating to the screen?

Computers might have changed our lives for the better but they have not matured just yet. Over the years, they have become smaller in size to the point of fitting into our palms.

Technology will one day mature. It will become the light switch; it will hardly even exist.

I design interfaces for fun and money, have a look at my work and current ventures, follow my ramblings on Twitter if you wish and shoot me an email if I can be of help on a project of yours!

Comments bring a lot of spam and very little conversation, thus the decision to disable comments. A better way to start a dialogue is to blog in reply. WordPress tracks back links and one can easily see a blog reply in their admin panel. If you are not a blogger or don’t want to blog in reply, emails are welcome and appreciated.

Looking forward to exploring new ideas and making some friends in the process.