For all those cowboys and cowgirls, sailors, rock climber or adventurers trapped in a type lover’s body. This rope laden ampersand, also known as “Ropersand”, is for you. Letterpressed on 8×8″, 55pt laminated chip from the fine folks at Vahalla Studios. Limited Edition of 200

View it now on Fine Goods »

The Great Discontent is this amazingly designed and written interview site ran by Ryan and Tina Essmaker, featuring creatives such as artists, illustrators, photographers and musicians. If learning about my story is your bag, head on over to the site to read the interview.

It’s been about a year coming. I’m glad to finally announce that my personal goods marketplace, Fine Goods Market, is here! Not only is is sporting icons, overlays and scripts, but to make Fine Goods a thing truly special, it’s sporting some goods to wear — that’s right, it’s sporting premium tee shirts. Be expecting many more icon sets and digital resources to come! Also, pick up the new Basic Social Media free icons here.

I’m sure I’ll have more to share about the process of making Fine Goods, but the proof should be in the pudding, as the store has a few schnazzy design tricks up it’s sleeves, including CSS3 animations, custom scrollbars and more!

Check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks for all the support in getting this project live, fellow interwebbians.

Last week, I made and released View.js — a simple, lightweight, jQuery photo viewer for the web. View was created as an answer to all of those massive, bloated lightbox plugins with a load of buttons and styles. I wanted View to be simple, almost zero images and buttons and be customizable not through JavaScript, but through CSS. Thus, View was born.

Head on over to the View website and click on the thumbnails to give it a whirl. If you like it, snatch it up. It’s only ten bucks.

Here are the new additions:

View on light background • View on dark background

• Google Plus
• Rdio
• Steam

Download?

Ok, head on over to the downloads area to click on your download link to get the updated icon pack and that’s it!

Hope you enjoy the new additions and thank you all for loving my icons!

It was an incredible honor to speak for the very first time, at Valiocon. I spoke on the art of loving your clients and how sacrifice, selflessness and commitment can take you far and help you create lasting friendships with your clients.

Hey peeps, yesterday I made a sackboy icon and today, yes today, you get to watch it all happening! Have fun!

View the Tutorial

So many people gave to Project:Love Kristina and I thank all of you, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for blessing my family.

I ran a contest on Dribbble to raise awareness for her need. Of all the amazing artistic submissions out there, three stood out to me. One, because it was the winner by lead in votes (not to say it wasn’t great as well), one because of it’s artistic style and another because it went above and beyond a 400×300 piece: the artist made a print piece that will be framed and hung on my sister’s wall in her new home. First place goes to the winner by votes, second to the one of my choosing, and the third place I added because I felt the artist’s piece to be so good, I needed to make a third place.

Without further ado, I’d like to announce the two winners, and surprise third place winner :)

First Place: Jake Dugard

Second Place: Tim Boelaars

Third Place: MC Baldassari

Check out all of the other entries

You can see all of the other amazing entries here. Mad props to Matthias Dietrich of Rainboxx for building the page to aggregate all of the contest entries.

Prizes are announced on Dribbble here. Feel free to at reply or DM me on Twitter to receive your prizes!

Tonight, February 21, 2011 my sister’s home was completely burned to the ground. Thankfully, even though most of her five children were sleeping and sick, she was able to get them out of the house and to safety. Unfortunately, they lost nearly everything, except for a few photos and a computer.

Her situation is tough. They were building a home and had it about half completed, but had no fire insurance. I happen to know they were putting every penny they had coming in, into the building of their home, paycheck to paycheck. Their four girls and son currently are in snowy Idaho in pyjamas. My sister, Kristina is nearly 9 months pregnant. They’re definitely in need of some immediate cash.

They’ll definitely make it and be fine. They are surrounded by family that loves them and will help them through this, however, I felt that I wanted to do my part to make their need known. Without a doubt, they are in immediate need of some funds, so I figured I would turn to my community, the community I love, the web community.

Please feel no pressure to give. Your love, support, kindness and prayers have already been amazing. However, if this is something that you’d like to give to, then I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I’m sure that it will help make this time just a bit easier for my sister and her family.

A Contest to Raise Awareness

I’ve started a contest to raise awareness on the design community website, Dribbble. You can view the contest here.

If you’d like to see the amazing pieces of artwork that the design community has done to raise awareness for my sister, you can see those here.

Cash Donations

If you have a large donation that you’d like to be tax deductible, you donate to our church, who will then cut Kristina a check. Be sure to put “Kristina” in the donor code input on the second step.

Donate Now (Tax Deductible)

If you don’t care about your donation being tax deductible, you can donate quickly via paypal using the following button:

Thanks to all of you for your prayers and kindness once again.