BlueHatDesign – Eugene, Oregon Web Design

It’s not always easy for free­lan­cers to get good qua­lity, cons­truc­tive cri­ti­cism on a new con­cept.  We can always ask friends and family mem­bers, but we’re not likely to get a cri­ti­que that is based on solid design prac­ti­ces and con­cepts. Asking in online com­mu­ni­ties can often lead to caus­tic, unhelp­ful com­ments.  Con­cept Feed­back is an online app that attempts to bridge that gap. Here’s what they say about their concept:

Desig­ned spe­ci­fi­cally for small and medium busi­ness mar­ke­ters, graphic desig­ners, and web deve­lo­pers, Con­cept Feed­back pro­vi­des a sim­ple tool to get qua­lity feed­back on mar­ke­ting con­cepts. Best of all, it’s 100% FREE!

There is a full review at Fuel Your Creativity.

I’ve just had my second look at Umbraco, an ASP.Net con­tent mana­ge­ment sys­tem (CMS). When I first stum­bled on Umbraco about a year ago, I misun­ders­tood the license agree­ment to mean that in order to use the open source ver­sion of the soft­ware, you were requi­red to put “Powe­red by Umbraco” on the home page of the site.  After a clo­ser look, reveals that this is not true. The only Umbraco bran­ding that you’re stuck with is in the con­trol panel. This works just fine for my pur­pose which is to give my clients a fra­me­work within which they can edit their own content.

The main fea­ture of Umbraco that has me exci­ted is the text edi­tor. It uses TinyMCE as do many CMS pac­ka­ges. The dif­fe­rence I’ve found from some of the others (such as Insi­teC­rea­tion) is that Umbraco gives you full con­trol over the edi­tor in terms of what but­tons are dis­pla­yed to the per­son doing the edi­ting. This way, you can com­ple­tely hide the Font and Font Size but­tons which will effec­ti­vely eli­mi­nate the pro­blem of peo­ple inser­ting Font Size inline sty­les or worse, font attri­bu­tes directly into the mar­kup.  As an exam­ple, the edi­tor within Insi­teC­rea­tion will actually insert “<span style=“font-style:italic”>” ins­tead of sim­ple <em> tags.

The other fac­tor which I LOVE is that the desig­ner has full con­trol over the mar­kup that the edi­tor out­puts. This makes it easy to main­tain the stan­dards com­pliance of the mar­kup of the site without the need to coach your client in the nuan­ces of edi­ting stan­dards based html using the editor.

I’ll post more on Umbraco as I get more deeply invol­ved, but my ini­tial res­ponse is extre­mely posi­tive. If you call and talk to me about con­tent mana­ge­ment in the near future, we’ll likely be dis­cus­sing Umbraco.

We’ve all been there. You’re star­ting a brand new pro­ject. You’ve out­li­ned the requi­re­ments and lis­ted the fea­tu­res in various ways. You’re sit­ting and sta­ring at a blank docu­ment in Pho­toshop, or a blank page in your sketch­book, and your mind is also com­ple­tely blank.

Crea­tive bur­nout hap­pens to all of us. As a crea­ture of habit, I tend to get into a rou­tine and stick to it. After seve­ral weeks of sit­ting in the same chair in the same office day after day, I can feel the crea­ti­vity slowly ebb.

The ans­wer is to get out of the office (or whe­re­ver it is you usually work). It doesn’t mat­ter if it’s for a few hours or a few days, but a regu­lar change of envi­ron­ment is essen­tial to kee­ping your crea­tive edge.

Regu­larly get­ting away from your fami­liar rou­tine can pay big divi­dends by refreshing your pers­pec­tive. If you sit in the same chair every day, your eyes tend to rest on com­for­ta­ble, fami­liar objects. As soon as you move out to the back gar­den, or the cof­fee shop, your eyes will have a whole new palette of sti­mu­lus. It’s not only visual; that rose bush in the gar­den, or the low hum of con­ver­sa­tion and music in the cof­fee shop can give your nose and ears a fresh pers­pec­tive as well.

In the case of public spa­ces, you have the added advan­tage of pos­sibly mee­ting and tal­king with new peo­ple. Some­ti­mes, just being near enough to overhear some con­ver­sa­tion can give you new pers­pec­tive on a design problem.

I came into design from a pho­to­graphy back­ground, so one of my favo­rite things to do to spark crea­ti­vity is to take my camera out and seek out pat­terns, tex­tu­res, colors, inter­face ele­ments, or wha­te­ver stri­kes my fancy. Doing this in the real world ins­tead of on the web gives the whole pro­cess a much more orga­nic feel.

I like to plan seve­ral trips with my wife during the year where we go find a small town, stay in a bed and break­fast or hotel (an Inter­net con­nec­tion redu­ces stress for me on these trips). Then, we just spend two or three days either hiking local trails, or wal­king the streets and brow­sing shops in the town. During these trips, I always try to see things as much as pos­si­ble through  the lens of my camera. It narrows my focus and helps me iso­late inte­res­ting design ele­ments. Inva­riably, I return from a wee­kend trip with a fresh pers­pec­tive and a rechar­ged crea­tive battery.