Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

New Design Live (sorta)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This is the first design I did not mock up in Photoshop first–I designed it in the browser.  I’ve yet to get around to look­ing at it in older IE browsers, sorry.  I reserve the right to change things in the future, but this should pretty much be the basic stuff.  There’s a lot of respon­sive design and CSS3 work into this one, so it should look good on a mobile device and iPad.

Comments are cur­rently removed. I’m still try­ing decide if I want to have them at all on the new site.  You can point feed­back at me on Twitter or Facebook though!

More Crossovers in Web Design and Writing: Kill Your Darlings

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s often heard advice in writ­ing that you should kill your dar­lings.  I don’t take this to mean you should kill your char­ac­ters (although really, why not?).  What I think this typ­i­cally refers to is hav­ing the open­ness, the will­ing­ness, to cut pieces that you love in ser­vice of the greater story.  You may have a line or a scene that you just love, that you think shows all your bril­liance.  But in the scheme of all things story, it doesn’t work.  It slows things down, or takes the reader out of the story.  Maybe it’s too shiny, or maybe it’s just irrel­e­vant.  You need to be will­ing to swal­low your pride and kill the bit to make a bet­ter piece.

I was reminded recently that this holds true for web design.  I’d built this tabbed nav­i­ga­tional struc­ture for a web­site that I really liked.  I thought it was clever and use­ful and I spent a lot of time cod­ing it.  But come time for con­tent to be loaded into the site, it just wasn’t work­ing.  I tried chang­ing the design of it visu­ally, but that didn’t fix the prob­lem.  The prob­lem was that it was just slightly too dif­fer­ent from the usual UI pat­terns.  It was con­fus­ing.  Ultimately, we cut it down into some­thing that was more rec­og­niz­able and standard.

I’m sorry I haven’t been blog­ging lately.  Oddly, I blog less when busi­ness is slow.  All my think­ing time is devoted to how I am going to get work, get paid, and avoid des­ti­tu­tion, rather than what I can blog about.  Maslow’s hier­ar­chy in action!

I’ve spent the last two weeks devel­op­ing a new Clockpunk Studios web­site.  When I’m burned out on star­ing at that, I switch over and learn CodeIgniter for devel­op­ing apps.  My brain is full of cod­ing things right now, and not so much with the prose.  I’m hop­ing that all this time and energy trans­fers over to a broader appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge.  The more I know about pro­gram­ming, per­haps the bet­ter I can write TAKEDOWN NOTICE.   And if not, well, hope­fully I’ve expanded my skillset with new ways to pay the bills.  It’s win/​win, really.

Lesson in Progress: How to Balance Travel and Freelancing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve spent this week get­ting increas­ingly wor­ried and agi­tated about tak­ing this trip to Kansas and then on to Ohio for World Fantasy Convention. In fact, by the time you read this, I should be past Denver and on my way east on I-​​70.

The idea of vaca­tion and travel is some­thing I’ve strug­gled with how to man­age since start­ing my own busi­ness as a web designer for authors and pub­lish­ers.  I have to admit that one of the aspects about the lifestyle that appealed to me most was the abil­ity to set my own sched­ule, not just on a daily basis, but also on a weekly or monthly one.  If I want to take some time to go spend with my fam­ily in Kansas, I can. Theoretically.

The truth is, though, that travel costs money, which means I need to work more to pay for the trip, but by tak­ing the trip, I’ll be work­ing less.  So I end up with this sit­u­a­tion where I’m try­ing to jug­gle projects and travel, and I haven’t even talked about how the graphic design work isn’t done very eas­ily on a lap­top (writ­ing and writ­ing code, how­ever, goes very smoothly).

So while it seems from the out­side that you can have a lot more free­dom in this area, the truth is, when you have a day job, you may have strictly lim­ited time off, but at least then there’s some­one to cover for you.  When you’re a one man show, you have to either make sure you have some­one in on your project with you, or you have to be pre­pared to drop the daiquiri, pull out the lap­top, log in, and fix the problem.

I’m hop­ing that this trip has a min­i­mum amount of dis­rup­tion of my work. I’ll be dri­ving on Friday/​Saturday, and will be ready to work hard Sunday. I’ll work a reg­u­lar sched­ule Monday through Wednesday, but then Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I will be at World Fantasy Convention and not really work­ing a reg­u­lar set of hours. I’ll drive back early Sunday morn­ing to Kansas, mak­ing the 12 hour trip hope­fully in record time, col­lapse, and get up Monday and work a full day.  Then I will either spend all of Tuesday dri­ving back to Colorado, or I’ll work a half day, drive and stop halfway at a motel, then be home Wednesday mid-​​afternoon to put in some work Wednesday afternoon.

So that’s a lit­tle exam­ple of the plan­ning I have to make for myself.  I try to keep it flex­i­ble, in case I’m in the mid­dle of Kansas and someone’s server explodes, or if Monday morn­ing, there’s a ton of stuff hit­ting the fan, so I need to stay over a cou­ple of days to get things in order.  The key here, as in most things, is main­tain­ing flexibility.

Really?  That flex­i­bil­ity that seems so appeal­ing cuts both ways.  You have to be ready for it.

Web Design Inspiration: Fourmile Heroes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Sometimes, it’s the sub­tle work that impresses me the most.  A non-​​trained designer can blun­der their way through the broad strokes of design, but it’s those fine lit­tle details that are telling.

The Fourmile Heroes site is a char­ity site sell­ing posters by a won­der­ful illus­tra­tor named Steve Lowtwait.  He has this mar­velous style that I just adore—if you’ve been around Boulder lately, you’ve seen some of his work hang­ing in shop win­dows.  One of these days, I’m going to pick up a print.  I admire how civi­cally minded Steve is as well.  Proceeds from the posters go to local firefighters.

Back to the site—it’s built by a design com­pany called Slice of Lime, based locally as well. They really know their stuff.

The first thing that stands out is the great use of typog­ra­phy here.  At a glance, I rec­og­nized a cou­ple of the fonts from my favorite font site, Font Squirrel, such as BlackJack.  Digging into the stylesheet, I spot­ted a CSS dec­la­ra­tion I wasn’t famil­iar with:

p, ul, ol {
line-height: 1.4;
margin-bottom: 20px;
 text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
 }

181d22236e8bbcdfab9dcf13137118c7 It was the text-​​rendering set­ting that I wasn’t famil­iar with.  I did some dig­ging and learned that with­out this, we don’t get lig­a­tures prop­erly in font-​​sizes below 20px.  Can’t think of a time when I tried to use a web font for any­thing small, but this is good to know-​​ligatures are very impor­tant.   So there’s some­thing I learned.  You can read more about text-​​rendering on Mozilla’s site.  Don’t ask me why it’s required in the first place.

The over­all lay­out and orga­ni­za­tion of the page is great and well-​​balanced.  It leads the eye from piece to piece very effec­tively.  But the sec­ond thing I want to point out is its sub­tle use of tex­ture.  Each of the color blocks has a sub­tle tex­ture that really brings the whole thing together for me.  I find tex­ture really helps my eye stick to a design, no pun intended.

As a gen­eral tip, if you’re not pick­ing apart the code on sites like this when you come across them, and you’re inter­ested in design, you really should!  I use Firebug in Firefox to inspect ele­ments and track down the CSS and Javascript being used for var­i­ous effects.  It’s one of the best ways to learn real world web design, and all the exam­ples are right out there for you.  Just don’t steal the code.

Thinking Ahead to the Future of Clockpunk Studios

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been think­ing a lot lately about what my options are for grow­ing my busi­ness.  I quite enjoy run­ning a web design and devel­op­ment com­pany with a staff of one, but it behooves me to think about what the future will hold, and if I want to achieve cer­tain goals in life, I will have to grow as a busi­ness.   The way I fig­ure it, I can grow via the fol­low­ing methods:

  • hire reg­u­lar sub­con­trac­tors to assist with projects, and take on more projects.
  • raise my rates
  • increase the num­ber of bill­able hours I do in a day
  • hire full time staff
  • find pas­sive income streams

Hiring reg­u­lar sub­con­trac­tors is tricky.  You want reli­able and depend­able free­lancers who are skilled, but don’t cost so much that you might as well do the work your­self.  It’s dif­fi­cult to find those peo­ple, but if you are one of those peo­ple, please con­tact me.  I’m very inter­ested in hear­ing from you.

Raising your rates is a risky game of chicken, and you never know when you might price your­self out of your niche.  I’m def­i­nitely push­ing the upper bound­ary of my main author web­site niche.  Publishers are happy with the costs, but new, indi­vid­ual authors find my ser­vices on the pricy side.  I don’t want to leave them behind entirely if I can help it.  They’ve been the core of my busi­ness since I started part-​​time a few years before I founded Clockpunk Studios.

Increasing the num­ber of bill­able hours is also a tricky game to play.  The more hours I’m focus­ing on income, the less time I’m spend­ing work­ing on main­tain­ing my skill set and look­ing for new work.  Like every­thing in small busi­ness, it’s a bal­anc­ing act.  How much time does one spend on each part?  I’m fairly happy with the num­ber of hours I work right now, so I’d like to avoid this growth method if I can.

Hiring full time staff is some­thing I’d love to do in the long run, but right now, that’s not going to hap­pen.  I’m think­ing of it as a five year goal.  I need to con­quer a lot more ter­ri­tory to make this pos­si­ble, and doing so will involve restruc­tur­ing the basis of my busi­ness (incor­po­rat­ing, for one).

Passive income streams are the holy grail of the infotech-​​based small busi­ness.  The idea here being you do some upfront work and develop a prod­uct which pays div­i­dends over time with­out much effort.  I’ve played around with stock pho­tog­ra­phy, and the best that’s man­aged to do is help defray my costs of buy­ing stock art for my projects.  I’m also toy­ing with devel­op­ing and sell­ing WordPress themes on pop­u­lar theme mar­ket­places, but it’s start­ing to look a lit­tle over-​​saturated out there.

Then there’s the whole online-​​game project, but it’s a huge gam­ble and dif­fi­cult to jus­tify the large num­ber of hours of devel­op­ment time before it stands a chance of return­ing on the investment.

The truth is, the future is prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion of the above.  I’ve recently started out­sourc­ing some small tasks here and there where appro­pri­ate, and I’ve recently bumped up my weekly hours quota.  And I’m still inves­ti­gat­ing the idea of devel­op­ing WordPress themes for sale.

Do you have any thoughts or sug­ges­tions?  Please feel free to share them in the comments! 

Links of the Week, September 9th, 2010

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Seth Godin Leaves Publishing, Promptly Publishes Paper Workbook

Seth Godin recently made even big­ger waves than usual in the pub­lish­ing world recently by announc­ing Godin’s depar­ture from the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing sys­tem.  It’s an inter­est­ing read, half ra-​​ra piece about his own suc­cess, half indict­ment of the pub­lish­ing sys­tem’ as it stands, and it’s reluc­tance to change with the times.  A cen­tral point Seth makes:

The thing is–now I know who my read­ers are. Adding lay­ers or faux scarcity doesn’t help me or you. As the medium changes, pub­lish­ers are on the defen­sive.… I hon­estly can’t think of a sin­gle tra­di­tional book pub­lisher who has led the devel­op­ment of a suc­cess­ful marketplace/​marketing inno­va­tion in the last decade.

If you’re like Seth and you already know who your read­ers are, why not cut out the mid­dle man?  It’s prob­a­bly not a tac­tic if no one knows who you are, but increas­ingly, large play­ers like Seth have got to be ask­ing them­selves, why aren’t they doing it on their own?  Once again, we learn we live in some inter­est­ing times, as far as pub­lish­ing goes.

You’ve prob­a­bly already heard the news of his announce­ment, but just recently he launched his first post-​​traditional project, and it’s not any­thing like what I expected.  He’s sell­ing paper work­books in bun­dle 5 tied to his lat­est book, Linchpin called the ShipIt Workbook.  The whole point is to fill them out with pen or pen­cil.  I’ve heard it often argued that print will sur­vive in spe­cial for­mats, such as books designed as works of art.  Paper work­books is not one I would have expected, but Amazon has already sold out, so I’m not going to ques­tion his method­ol­ogy on this one.

Don Kenn’s Fantastic Post-​​It Note Monsters and Ghosts

Barn full of tentacles

Don Kenn writes and directs tele­vi­sion shows for kids in Denmark. He also draws the most amaz­ing post-​​it note mon­sters I have ever seen. Post-​​It note art seems to be an entire genre/​medium of its own, and I imag­ine some art his­tory MFA stu­dent is going to get a great the­sis out of study­ing it in depth, link­ing it to the alien­ation of the office envi­ron­ment work­force and what-​​not.

His char­ac­ter designs remind me very strongly of some of the ghosts in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.   But it’s all the sea/​lake mon­sters that really cap­tured my heart.  I find some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing about the idea of strange, mon­s­ter­ous crea­tures liv­ing just beneath the sur­face of the waves.

Icons, Icons, Icons

I book­mark the hell out of free icon sets.  Icons are some­thing that gets used in nearly every sin­gle web design project in some form, and they can be really time con­sum­ing and costly to make cus­tom for clients.  Rather than blow a bud­get spend­ing so much time on some­thing that gen­er­ally fades into the back­ground, I like to use freely avail­able sets on the web.  A cou­ple more popped up onto my web designer radar this week. 

The always fan­tas­tic Smashing Magazine has brought us the 60 Icon iCan­dies set designed by IconEden.  They have a very nice glossy, iOS feel to them which might come in handy in the future. 

The sec­ond link is another round-​​up, which includes a bunch of clas­sics as well as a few new ones.  I don’t gen­er­ally like to bring up round-​​up posts because they’re usu­ally too packed with resources to be much use or pro­vide much con­text, and this one is no excep­tion.  A new site to me, inst­ant­Shift, has this post, 100+ Free High Quality Icon Sets for Web Designers and Developers. It may be worth tak­ing the time to pick through.

So that’s all for this week, link round-​​up.  If you have spot­ted some­thing that you think I should cover in an upcom­ing edi­tion, don’t hes­i­tate to drop me a line with the sug­ges­tion via Twitter, e-​​mail, or the comments.

Exit Funk, Stage Left

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You might have noticed that I was in a bit of a funk last week.  Thank you to every­one who made lovely com­ments on my last post.  I was feel­ing a lit­tle ashamed about my whin­ing there, so I haven’t thanked or replied to any­one indi­vid­u­ally.  I appre­ci­ate you all being there for me when I get like this. Thank you for putting up with it.

I’m see­ing things  more clearly this week, and I feel some energy return­ing. Part of the prob­lem I sus­pect was that I had a really nasty cold, com­bined with com­ing down from all the excite­ment of being back home to see folks.

I’m focus­ing all my energy right now on becom­ing the best web designer I can.  I think the time for explor­ing other poten­tial careers is not when you’re scrap­ing by as a free­lancer.  I’ve been slow to com­mit to life as a free­lancer, wor­ried about any num­ber of things asso­ci­ated with it, but I’m slowly con­quer­ing those fears and start­ing to treat my busi­ness like, well, a busi­ness, instead of just a guy work­ing out of his office all day.

I have plans to rebuild this site from the ground up, as well as build a photo store to sell prints of my land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy.  Stay tuned for more about all that in the future.

Thanks for hang­ing in there with me.  I will hope­fully start to have cool things to show and share again soon.

Delaying a Project and a Good Review

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My “pays the rent” free­lance project load is such that I’m going to have to hold off on my “pipe dreams of the video game indus­try” project right now.  I’m going to shoot to start it up in November now (although I’ll be squeez­ing read­ing in any­where I can). It’s embar­rass­ing to have made that post on Monday and by Wednesday have to change my sched­ule and plans, but as always, my first pri­or­ity is pay­ing the rent.  I always seem to think there’s more time in the day than there really is.  I should prob­a­bly be work­ing more on my time man­age­ment skills (which really aren’t bad) before I should be work­ing on my game writ­ing skills.  Anyway, more to the point, I’m not see­ing a lot of work com­ing down the pipe right now, so I need to hus­tle some up.  If you’ve been think­ing about hir­ing me to build a web­site, now’s a good time.

In writing-​​related news, my story in Interzone issue 224 (on news­stands and in book­stores now!), “Godfalls’s Chemsong,” received a very nice review from John DeNardo over at SF Signal.  I’ll take 4 out of 5 stars any day.  The story is an exper­i­ment of mine to cre­ate  biz­zare alien biol­ogy and soci­ety using mostly real Earth biol­ogy traits that exist in real crea­tures.  I only impro­vised a lit­tle bit, and I’m pleased with the results.  I really should write more sto­ries like that, but they’re a bear to come up with.  But I guess if it were easy, every­body would be doing it.

Case Study: The Five Worlds Website

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

…the Academy was founded to detail the story of how Fremont’s Children directed the out­come of the Making War. This is the incred­i­ble and unlikely story of how a brother and a sis­ter, and other young heroes, cre­ated the bal­anced forces that drive us today. Although this is a tale of our past, it is still a story in the mak­ing. We uncover new bits of infor­ma­tion reg­u­larly. We invite you to drop in from time to time to see it.

Brenda Cooper, co-​​author of Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, con­tacted me a cou­ple of months back, inter­ested in how I might help pub­li­cize the release of the third book in her series, The Wings of Creation. I jumped at the chance to get involved.

nwlogo.png

The first thing I did was tackle the books. In this series, Brenda has built a strong cast of young char­ac­ters and an inter­est­ing set­ting that is both rec­og­niz­able and alien at the same time. They’re good “all ages” sci­ence fic­tion, and I really enjoyed them.

From read­ing the books, I sug­gested devel­op­ing a web­site for the series as if the site was the dig­i­tal pres­ence of an actual insti­tu­tion in the world. The web­site would pro­vide sam­ples of the books for read­ing, and an ency­clo­pe­dia of information–a kind of reader’s guide, if you will.

The Academy of New World Historians is the orga­ni­za­tion respon­si­ble for assem­bling the his­tor­i­cal texts that make up Brenda’s series. Each book opens with excerpts of inter­views con­ducted by these his­to­ri­ans. The goal of the web­site is to share their pub­li­ca­tions with the rest of the Five Worlds.

The site is built on a WordPress frame­work, using a cus­tom theme. It’s fairly straight­for­ward in design and con­struc­tion to reflect a cul­ture that val­ues sim­plic­ity and usabil­ity in inter­faces. The design uses some jQuery effects here and there for some pizazz–I was really inter­ested in try­ing out the “expanded nav­i­ga­tion” method that I’ve imple­mented on the home page. You can hover over the sec­tion titles and see addi­tional infor­ma­tion for the sec­tion, such as links to spe­cific topics.

Overall, Brenda has been a joy to work with. I hope you will all check out the site and her books. They’re good stuff, and I would rec­om­mend them even if Brenda were not a client.

Why WordPress is the Perfect Platform For Author Sites

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m mak­ing a good chunk of my money through my knowl­edge of the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  I thought today I’d give you some back­ground on why I’ve made WordPress my go-​​to plat­form when design­ing author websites.

Broad Support and User Base

WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  Why is this a good thing?  Well, it means that there’s a lot of com­mu­nity sup­port.  It means that if there’s a fea­ture you want, there’s a good chance some­one has already devel­oped it as a plug-​​in (there are tens of thou­sands of plug-​​ins for WordPress).  If you run into a bug or other prob­lem, there’s a good chance that you can find some­one else who has already expe­ri­enced this prob­lem with a Google Search.  This all trans­lates into fewer hours and more fea­tures for your author web­site.  You get more for less.

What this also means is that rather than hav­ing to go out and buy expen­sive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn every­thing I know from read­ing online.  So I have less up-​​front invest­ment (although still quite a bit of invest­ment in mas­ter­ing parts of it). Those sav­ings get passed on to clients, ultimately.

Great Back-​​end Usability

The back-​​end of a site is the part that only the site author sees.  It’s where you go to man­age your con­tent, write new blog posts, and so on.  Because your read­ers never see this part of your soft­ware, you might be tempted to be sat­is­fied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a com­puter expert, and don’t have any trou­ble learn­ing new inter­faces.  Not all inter­faces are cre­ated equal.  Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-​​friendly back-​​end, but these days, it’s quite sim­ple and beau­ti­ful.  I enjoy spend­ing time inside of the WordPress soft­ware, con­fig­ur­ing things, and a good por­tion of my enjoy­ment is due to that.

And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress.  A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress​.com to set up blogs in the past.  So this means you spend less time learn­ing an inter­face, and more time work­ing on your writing.

Power Theme System

WordPress allows you to con­fig­ure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straight­for­ward theme engine with well doc­u­mented tem­plate tags.   Through a com­bi­na­tion of plu­g­ins, theme writ­ing, HTML, CSS, and judi­cious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design con­cept I have come across that can’t be imple­mented in some fash­ion with the sys­tem.  And using a good blank theme as a start­ing base, you can have a theme up and run­ning from an HTML pro­to­type very quickly.  You dream it up, and I build it.  It’s as easy as that.

A CMS, Not Just a Blog

Some peo­ple make the mis­take of think­ing that WordPress is just for blogs.  That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days.  With a few basic plu­g­ins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System fea­ture you might want.  And most impor­tantly to authors, it gives you a user-​​friendly way of man­ag­ing and edit­ing that con­tent.   Rather than hav­ing to spend money down the road pay­ing your web­mas­ter to update your site, you can do it your­self through the back-​​end.  It’s a win-​​win for you and your webmaster.

Conclusion

So those are just a few of the rea­sons I use WordPress.  I was very hes­i­tant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of neg­a­tives, but each one of those neg­a­tives has been addressed by the devel­op­ment team.  Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress.  Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.

If you are an author, pub­lisher, or small busi­ness look­ing for a site built on WordPress, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design com­pany.  I am avail­able to take new work on start­ing in early September.    I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many bud­gets.  We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with some­thing basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later.  So don’t assume you can’t afford it.  You might be sur­prised how cheaply you can get up and run­ning with your own WordPress-​​backed site.