In comes Unique Business Cards. I spent a good deal of time going through the collection, and there is no shortage of creative inspiration to draw from. So, I wanted to share the resource I found, and hope that it will be useful and/or inspiring to others.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Graphic Design Ninja

Intoto

Queen of Diamonds Makeup Artist

Box Office

VDJ Gaurav

There’s much more to see, but don’t take my word for it. Go look for yourself. What other places do you find business card design inspiration?

Not only is the packaging very clean and straight to the point, but it immediately tells the consumer to choose a path. There is little room for confusion. This concept should be used on the web, and is very important in 1.) keeping users on your site, and 2.) guiding/helping them find relevant information before leaving.

See more of this packaging at The Dieline.

The web needs more of this. Can you think of good examples of this concept on the web? Please share.

So, what’s new?

The past few months have been swamped with wedding planning. Before being engaged, I never considered how much of my life would be consumed by it, but it isn’t bad, and actually kind of fun at times. You never realize how much creativity comes into planning until you’re actually in it, but I got a chance to design our website, as well as the invitation identity, with some assistance from Victoria Pater. It was the first print project I’ve ever done, and though it was fun and challenging, I’m glad that I work on the web. Once the full package arrives for the invites, I will post pictures.

In addition to wedding planning, there is still Tridea, which got really busy at one point earlier this year, which brings me to my next point.

When you’re burned out, you know it. You can feel it and taste it, but in order to get past, it you have to acknowledge it and fight to restore your internal equilibrium. Stop, decompress, communicate, and focus. That process often begins with a look inward to learn what gives your life balance, such as family, friends, personal interests, and hobbies—the things that counterbalance your life on the web. via

Freelancing on the side

Not that I’m old or anything, but I’ve been doing the fulltime job/freelance on the side thing for roughly 5 years and it finally caught up to me in the form of mental exhaustion. Between a fulltime job, wedding planning, and freelancing, I was stretched pretty thin. Something had to go, and the best decision was to take a break from freelancing for a while. I will say that it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made recently and it’s nice to not only have my evenings back, but I feel much more refreshed.

My point here is don’t work yourself too hard. Step away from your computer/work sometimes and enjoy life because it only happens once. It’s ok to not be a workaholic, which I’ve had to tell myself quite a bit. And since not working all the time, I’ve come up with a few creative ideas/projects that I would like to work on in the near future, that I can do at my own pace.

So what about Tales of a Designer?

Many times in the last few months I’ve thought about giving up this blog, not because I didn’t want to write anymore, but because I haven’t been inspired by design on the web lately. So I’m throwing around ideas to slightly change the direction in the types of posts that go up here. It would still be design/development related, as it always has been. I am open for ideas though, so if you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment.

So that is my life update. Lots going on, but I would love to hear your thoughts, and/or ideas on what kind of stuff you would like to see posted here.

It seems, though, that there are less interesting panel selections this year, than last year. I’ve picked out a few that I plan on attending, but I more look forward to meeting and conversing with new creative/business minds.

I also plan on tweeting quite a bit, so if you’re on Twitter, let me know if you’re down there so we can connect! I’d love to meet you, if I haven’t already.

I have to cut this blog post short because I need to go register and such. So if you see me, say hi.

Of course the hard part, like any other personal project, is finding the time to get the site done. Well finally, with some free time and inspiration, I got it done.

Enter, johnphillips.me. The goal of this site is simple, to give you a quick glimpse of who I am, link out to my sites, and give you my contact information. I needed the design to do just that, and not get in the way. I only spent a few hours in Photoshop before I was ready to start coding it up. After a few days, it was all done and live.

Inspiration

Over the past 6(ish) months, I stumbled across some very nice one-page sites that gave me a lot of ideas on how I wanted to approach doing a site for myself. The biggest inspiration was from, both, Tim Van Damme, and Rogie King. I think both of their sites are absolutely stunning, and both accomplish exactly what I was looking to do with my own site. So, from an IA standpoint, it made sense to do something similar. So I’d like to thank them for inspiring me.

Browsers

When I was done designing the site, I had a feeling that it might be a pain getting everything to look how I wanted it to in all the browsers. Turned out that it went pretty smoothly… sort of. I chose to not spend much time worrying about IE6. Now, normally I don’t do this, especially for client sites. But this is no client site, nor is it an end destination. It’s meant to send you elsewhere.

As long as the content displays in IE6, which it does, I did not want to invest anymore time in it. It’s really time for people to upgrade their browsers to something modern… but I’ll save that debate for another blog post.

So, go visit the new site, and let me know what you think about it. Also, let me know if you find any issues or if anything is broken. Thanks!