Understand Design or Fail

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: January 26, 2012

Design is a loaded word. It means something different depending who you talk to. For example, design in the context of an innovation services firm (like AO) means something entirely different than design at an ad agency. Unfortunately for many, lack of understanding for what design is and what it can do for products, goods…

Read More »

Posted in Design & Development, Tools, Visual Design | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

CSS Resources for Work and Play

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: January 7, 2012

The adoption of CSS3 by modern Web browsers has allowed us to design richer Web applications that utilize the browser to handle some of the visuals we historically depended on Photoshop to render. Although the technical ability is pressing forward with great momentum, the toolset for designing high fidelity interfaces is lagging behind.

Posted in Design & Development, Tools, Visual Design, Web | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Beautiful doesn’t mean usable

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: December 8, 2011

I’ve enjoyed the attention that beauty has received in the interface design community over the past few years. There has been a push to raise the level of elegance, which makes for a much more enjoyable user experience.

Posted in Design & Development, Usability, Visual Design | 1 Comment

Agile Design: Music Worth Playing

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: November 11, 2011

When talking with fellow designers, I often get blank stares when I mention Agile Design. Here I hope to shed some light on the subject and give you a few tips on how to incorporate it into your design process.

Posted in Usability, Visual Design, Web | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Vector Map Pins

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: October 4, 2011
map-pins

I’ve created map pins several times for geolocation-based applications, and I lean towards pins that are simple and scalable.

Posted in Tools, Visual Design, Web | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Taming Application UX with a UX Library

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: September 6, 2011
UX Library Example

Application design requires consistent visual and response paradigms, which can be difficult for a team keep track of in Agile design and development. One solution that I’ve found extremely beneficial for large applications is the UX Library. A UX Library is essential documentation for UX elements within an application. The documentation detail will vary based…

Read More »

Posted in Design & Development, Iterative Development, Tools, Visual Design | Leave a comment

Sustainable Photoshop

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: July 14, 2011

Working with a visual designer’s Photoshop files should not be a hair-pulling experience. Too often though, I open a PSD (Photoshop document) and my anxiety level goes through the roof because the document is a complete mess, and completely unsustainable. Here are a few easy things designers can do to keep their PSDs from causing…

Read More »

Posted in Tools, Visual Design | Tagged | 7 Comments

Simple Grid jQuery Plugin

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: July 1, 2011

Simple Grid is a jQuery plugin intended to be a no-fuss way to “replicate” your Photoshop grid on top of your development site. Download @ GitHub Set these 3 variables to get started: rowHeight This is your line-height (most of the time) columnWidth This is your column width – it’s BEST to use a number…

Read More »

Posted in Tools, Visual Design | Tagged | 2 Comments

Design Prospective

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: June 15, 2011

I find it confusing at times to know whether someone is talking about her (specfic?) design craft or a design “strategy.” When talking about design we often use “big D-Design” as a way to distinguish the formal definition of design from the craft or discipline of one particular field within design.

Posted in Company | Tagged | Leave a comment

Blank Color Swatch & Style Library

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: April 25, 2011

I keep a Photoshop color swatch and style library for each project. It makes the design process easier and more accurate. It also allows someone else to come along during production or maintenance and easily use the same colors. Photoshop doesn’t come with nice clean libraries though. The defaults looks like this: I’ve never used…

Read More »

Posted in Tools, Visual Design | 1 Comment