BlueHatDesign – Eugene, Oregon Web Design

The 10th anni­ver­sary of Web­Vi­sions, a nationally-recognized con­fe­rence that explo­res the future of Web design, tech­no­logy, user expe­rience and busi­ness stra­tegy was held in at the Port­land Con­fe­rence Cen­ter this past week. I have to con­gra­tu­late exe­cu­tive direc­tor Brad Smith, the great staff, and an ama­zing crew of volun­teers for put­ting on a fan­tas­tic conference.

The line up of spea­kers was top-notch as always. Topics ran­ged from Luke Williams’ “How to Spark Dis­rup­tive Inno­va­tion” (ope­ning key­note), to Shashi Bellamkonda’s “Per­so­nal Bran­ding”, to nuts and bolts stuff like “Desig­ning Our Way Through Web Forms” with Kim­berly Bles­sing and Chris­topher Schmitt.

I came away from this con­fe­rence smar­ter, more con­nec­ted and more ins­pi­red to keep lear­ning, and keep buil­ding awe­some stuff for the web!

(photo by Shashi Bellam­konda)

Mood boards are a way to get the client acti­vely invol­ved in the pro­cess early-on in a web pro­ject. This allows them to feel that they are being inc­lu­ded and kept in the loop. It even gives them a way to par­ti­ci­pate in the design process.

I am a fairly linear per­son, espe­cially con­si­de­ring that I’m a desig­ner (we tend to lean toward the crea­tive and quirky). It has been my habit to want to jump in on a new design pro­ject, open Pho­toshop and bang out the design tem­plate straight away. I have a pretty good idea up front what will work in HTML/CSS and what wont, so I usually feel con­fi­dent that I can come up with a good, usa­ble design on the first cou­ple of attempts. This approach has wor­ked well for me for the most part, up to this point. (more…)