We're actively seeking developers & designers for our new Detroit location. Learn more
When designing an app it’s easy to think about the thing I’m building. When sitting down to design, I usually start outlining the areas of the app I think should be there. I then draw sketches depicting the screens around that architecture. This doesn’t always work because what I think might be good for the…
So you want to build a small marketing website? I am frequently asked by friends how to set up a website for their small business. We rarely build marketing websites here at Atomic Object, so I hope this will be a helpful guide. A small 1-30 page marketing website is critical to attract, inform and…
At Atomic Object, we all participate in writing for the company blog. It can be hard to come up with new ideas that feel worthy of being published. However, once the rhythm of writing is established, I find the ideas and writing come easily. In addition, it’s so easy to publish on the web that…
In a recent web app, my team decided to try Compass sprites to make our lives easier. Here’s a note from the Compass sprite description: Spriting has never been easier with Compass. You place the sprite images in a folder, import them into your stylesheet, and then you can use the sprite in your selectors…
In my last post, entitled Site search is important, I talked about the reasons why improvements to your site search are important for a good user experience. This post is a little more practical guide describing how you can improve your results. “In short, best bets (where an editor can select the top results for…
Most major websites have internal search engines that help you find the information you’re looking for. Typically, the more content you have the more vital a good search utility is. Can you imagine navigating to the book you’re looking for when using Amazon? But having a good search engine is good for smaller sites as…
Atomic Object mourns the loss of Steve Jobs, 1955-October 5, 2011. Statement by Apple’s Board of Directors Stanford’s 2005 Commencement address delivered by Steve
HTML5 offers new tags that make it easier to embed content into your website, including audio & video. In a recent project, I wanted to embed an .mp3 file, but didn’t want to use Flash or javascript, so I looked into HTML5. To my pleasant surprise, I found the audio tag will “automagically” insert an…
Find yourself sending a lot of short messages with attached images, do you? Have a desire to quickly communicate with friends and family about where you are and what you’re doing? Whether it be via one of the popular “social media” avenues or your mobile phone—you’re not alone. And come to find out, this isn’t…
Last night there was a Grand Rapids web meetup on the subject of typography. Three presentations covered everything from history to cutting-edge techniques. Karl and Tim proposed using fonts in lieu of images in a web user interface. Victor gave a good overview of how to choose and work with type on the web. Taylor…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object