Posts in the Design Category

5

Inspiration is Overrated

I recently found a bit of wisdom on the Drawn blog that I’d like to share because I found it chock full of truthy goodness. In a nutshell, the post asserts that good old-fashioned work trumps inspiration every time. And I have to say I concur. I admit that technically I was “inspired” to write this post after reading the paragraph below, but research is part and parcel of the work involved to keep a blog current and relevant. So that means my work on this blog led to the inspiration for this post. Overall, I feel discipline leads to ideas as much or more than passively waiting for the inspiration fairy to pay a visit. Has your experience been different? Let me know in Comments.

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work and that’s almost never the case.”

Bookmark and Share

Stuck? Try Thinking Like a 7-Year-Old

One of the challenges we face as creative problem solvers is dropping our challenge-focused baggage and opening our minds to unique solutions. We all know the rules of a good brainstorm:

• Lots of ideas – quantity, not quality
• No judging!
• Odd, weird, unrealistic ideas welcome
• Combining ideas into new ideas also handy

Sounds easy, but often our creativity is held back by an all-too-adult awareness of the cold, hard reality our projects live in. The answer? Think like a kid.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark and Share
1

Web Designers vs. Web Developers

Need to understand the subtle differences between web designers and web developers? Their hopes, their dreams, their fears? Check out this helpful infographic from Wix.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark and Share
1

CSS3 – The Third Dimension

Looking for a creative new way to make your website stand out?

Additions to Safari now make it possible to do 3D transformations of HTML elements. To give these transformations a whirl, I made this slideshow.

CSS3d SlideviewNot all browsers support these features. But Webkit does, which means that all iOS devices can take advantage of them. The technical aspects of CSS 3D are more than I want to get into here. The key point is that websites on these devices can now be much more visually creative.

Somewhere along the line it became clear that not all Safaris are alike.  For instance, mobile Safari on the iPad (iOS 3.2.2) does not render reflections when a 3D transformation is applied to an element.  Neither does Safari for Windows 5.0.2.  But mobile Safari for the iPhone 4 and the latest version of Safari for MacOS do render reflections, even if a 3D transformation is applied.

View the demo.

Bookmark and Share