Start Here Designs

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Fri, 24 May 2013 19:25:46 -0700

Peripheral Designs for OneWed Occasionally I have to take a...

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:00:00 -0700

Peripheral Designs for OneWed

Occasionally I have to take a break from the heftier challenges of UX and product design to create gorgeous or helpful marketing assets. Here are a few examples.

A Beautiful Upgrade I’ve been wanting to update the header...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:14:00 -0700

A Beautiful Upgrade

I’ve been wanting to update the header of OneWed for a LONG time now. It’s amazing how fast products can change in the startup world, and yet they can be so slow if you only have 3 team members.

The Problem

People weren’t using our minimalist navigation. People really weren’t exploring the site and had a hard time grokking what we did.

My Solution

Put the meat of our project up top, in an eye-catching way (note the colorful icons!), to encourage exploration and give a better picture of what the site is about.

This had some interesting consequences: I was forced to merge the information architecture of our photos with that of our (previously separate) articles and galleries section. It’s not a perfect solution, but I’d say it was a huge step up in the time we had available.

The Result

Well, we just passed Martha Stewart Weddings’ traffic a few weeks back. I don’t think that’s due to my new header, but everyone I’ve spoken with in testing has expressed an interest in clicking on every damn link in that header, so I think we done good.

Still a long way to go, as usual.

Working from home today! I’ll do pretty much anything to be in...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:02:00 -0700

Working from home today!

I’ll do pretty much anything to be in the sun, or near it, or around it. I love my job, but I hate offices.

"There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation,..."

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:42:00 -0700

“There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming...

My New Desk Moved my in-office desk to the sunny side - finally!

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:22:00 -0800

My New Desk

Moved my in-office desk to the sunny side - finally!

Social Equality Educators Logo Sometimes you do a quick pro-bono...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:31:00 -0800

Social Equality Educators Logo

Sometimes you do a quick pro-bono piece and you don’t think much of it, even if its for a good cause. And sometimes you do a quick pro-bono piece and it turns into nationwide news.

Social Equality Educators is a Seattle-based organization of teachers fighting to defend education and improve the state of affairs.

They’ve been making the news lately thanks to member Jesse Hagopian, whose tireless, public, and always clever activism got him arrested for attempting a citizen’s arrest at the Washington state capitol to protest budget cuts to education, interviewed by Keith Olbermann after the act, and has recently interviewed on CNN and quoted in the Wall Street Journal to represent Seattle’s Garfield High in their refusal to issue the MAP test to their students.

Wanna help?

Sign SEE’s petition to support teachers refusing to give the ridiculous MAP test!
Check out the Social Equality Educators website (if it’s not down due to high traffic).
Check out Jesse Hagopian’s articles on Common Dreams.

Kind of amazing where a little design help can go. They’ve started using another one here and there which is unfortunately very ineffective. So hopefully I can support their momentum and improve the one I designed.

But man, how COOL is it to see your logo on some awesome activist action?! I hope it helped, even a little.

A Brief Guide To Life

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:39:00 -0800

From Zen Habits’ A Brief Guide To Life: less TV, more readingless shopping, more...

OneWed.com - New Website Launch! Responsibilities: product...

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 15:26:00 -0800

OneWed.com - New Website Launch!

Responsibilities: product design/branding, web design/ui/ux/look & feel, front end dev, copy

Our OneWed V3 relaunch was more of a product design win than a UI design win. Being a startup, we wanted to re-imagine the product, but we wanted to get it out the door as soon as possible. Now that it’s out, I have a million things I want to change to make the brand promise more clear, and to make navigating the site easier and more enjoyable.

Having said that, the product design win set the foundation for a hugely improved product.

When we acquired OneWed, it was a site with a ton of traffic, few repeat users and a severely outdated design. Relaunch V2 was basically a design clean-up, but it was kind of like putting lipstick on a pig. The site suffered from feature glut, a weak brand promise and little to no connection between different aspects of the site.

I joined the project and worked with our CEO/marketing guy and our lead/only engineer to re-imagine the site. We took stock of what assets we had, tried to better understand what our target audience actually wanted, and looked for the intersection of the two.

As a result, we lopped off an entire arm of the site (the wedding planning tools) and reworked the information architecture and gave the site yet another visual makeover.

What we ended up with was a site that still had quite a few features, but now they all make sense with and support each other. Our new brand promise is “actionable inspiration” - a place where nearlyweds can go during the wedding planning phase to find photos, products and vendors that will help them get inspired as well as shop and book for the wedding.

As said, now that the site’s up, it seems clear to me what mistakes I made (and fortunately, how to fix them). Right now, my main goal is to make our brand promise and what the site actually does a LOT clearer, as well as make navigating the site easier and more fun.

If I were to point out what we could have done better, I would say that we designed for features we haven’t released yet. Looking at photos to find local vendors you want to hire is a brilliant idea - but it’s useless if you can’t search by your location. There’s a few issues like that.

Most of all, I think we need to improve our conversion funnel. We want to help people shop for products and book vendors using photo inspiration, but we just don’t make it easy right now. That’s what I’m working on right now.

And so it goes in the startup world!

Friday Meeting I love startup life.

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:39:00 -0800

Friday Meeting

I love startup life.

OneWed’s Wedding Inspiration App is now available! AND I...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:11:00 -0800

OneWed’s Wedding Inspiration App is now available!

AND I DESIGNED IT! I was able to spend a lot of time working on the design (uncommon in the startup environment), and I did a great deal of testing and re-iterating, which had a massive impact on the success of the design.

This is a really hard product to design for - we have too many content types and are trying to do too many things, because we INHERITED the project, rather than starting fresh.

But, everything we do have is really awesome, so the trick is trying to make it understandable. Go get it on the Appstore. How did we do?

"Fill your mind with the meaningless stimuli of a world preoccupied with meaningless things, and it..."

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:27:55 -0800

“Fill your mind with the meaningless stimuli of a world preoccupied with meaningless things,...

Pomodoros = Health It totally weirds people out, but on my...

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:34:00 -0800

Pomodoros = Health

It totally weirds people out, but on my Pomodoro breaks, I go do stretches and practice mindfulness in the stairwell. It’s really good to take time out during the day to get re-centered, to remember that I’m alive.

Working on the fourth bride! The girl everyone has been asking...

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 14:41:26 -0800

Working on the fourth bride! The girl everyone has been asking for. Our gorgeous apple-bodied bride, Retro Betty.

"How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed,..."

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 09:27:17 -0800

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of...

"For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your..."

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 08:56:06 -0800

““For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to...

Keeping up with my 3 item to do list for work every day has been...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:15:24 -0800

Keeping up with my 3 item to do list for work every day has been helpful and highly successful.

In general, I can only finish about 3 tasks a day anyway, but just having a list I can work on and a single item to focus on at a time eradicated the usual task list paralasys I get from looking at a long list ans not knowing where tp start (or bouncing between them).

Operation SiteKill : How To Market Yourself Without All The...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:23:12 -0700

Operation SiteKill : How To Market Yourself Without All The BS

Much as I adore my pretty portfolio website, I’ve been thinking for awhile now that it’s more than a little useless to me AND is a drag to upkeep. So I’m KILLING MY WEBSITE and linking www.startheredesigns.com to my work-related Tumblr blog.

The Portfolio
Although I’ve been taught to show between 5 and 15 of my very best works in my portfolio, I’m finding that the nature and pace of my work make this pretty useless.

As a freelancer who sometimes has lots of projects and sometimes works on one really cool thing for a year or so, my output is inconsistent. When I work on one really cool project, arguably where I learn the most, I don’t have a lot of finished work to show.

As a freelancer who works with small startups, I tend to wear a TON of hats - and trying to list them all on a homepage just makes me look like a liar.

Findability and The Contact Form
I spend a lot of time turning down people who send me project proposals via my website. Right now because I’m contracting long-term, but also because I don’t generally find jobs through the usual routes - I get most of them through friends. I don’t need a contact form.

The Resume
My resume also seems completely useless at this point. Education - yeah. I know people who make twice as much as me in the tech field who never went to college. Useless.

Yeah, I worked full time at a couple of companies once, but the only other entry in there is “Start Here Designs: 2008 - Present”. I COULD list every client I ever worked with, or even just pick the best, or I could just talk about what I do every day and people who want to hire me can take my word for it.

I’m over it.
Maybe this’ll come back to bite me in the ass later, but I don’t feel like I need a resume, or a portfolio, or a contact form. I’d rather talk about what I do on the regular via Tumblr and show my qualifications through my insights, glimpses of my work, challenges I’ve had, and things that I find important.

I’d rather be a personality than a pile of screenshots.
What’s weird is that I think this actually makes sense for where I am in my career. Really I’m only 6 years out of college, but I don’t feel like I need all the trappings of my portfolio class from ‘06. I don’t go to interviews. I don’t answer bullshit questions like “tell me about a time when you messed up”. I will never again slave over a leave-behind. I don’t make cold calls. I don’t print out resumes.

I am privileged. And I’m going to abuse that.
The trick, I think, will be actually making an effort to make this blog less of a “check out these minimalist posters” and more of a “look what I did today” project.

Vizify - Quickly turn your social media data into a series of...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:54:33 -0700

Vizify - Quickly turn your social media data into a series of colorful infographics that can help you stand out and get hired.

I love how Vizify presents my education and career history. I LOVE TIMELINES. I wonder what it would look like with all of my clients? Probably unreasonably cluttered.

First glimpse at the newest faces of Offbeat Bride Ariel, one of...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:16:55 -0700

First glimpse at the newest faces of Offbeat Bride

Ariel, one of my awesomest clients, asked me to design new characters for Offbeat Bride’s branding (I also did the web design for all the Offbeat sites). Not only have I not done much illustration-for-hire, I really haven’t drawn anything serious in a LONG TIME.

I went to the art store to buy some Micron pens, a pencil and eraser (which I didn’t own) and I almost cried with joy from the smell and feel of art supplies (it didn’t hurt that My Chemical Romance’s “Sing” was playing and the gothy redhead behind the desk was doing My Little Pony mod).

We’re not done yet, but Ariel was eager to show her community (because that community is TIGHT YO) - their feedback is putting me on artist cloud nine.

I was worried that people would pick the characters apart (and they still might), or that they were TOO ANIME (they kinda are), but the feedback is so positive. Seriously, the Offbeat crowd is the most supportive and fun online community I know of.

Case-in-point: They’re already joking about slash fic between two of the characters.

Ariel has done an amazing job directing me in the character designs - she really wants to represent a variety of brides (we didn’t really touch upon age or ability, but she’s covering race, gender identity, sexuality, style/ interests, weight and deviance). This is the first time I’ve ever had to be pushed to try harder to show overt acceptance. This is me we’re talking about. I’m so grateful to be able to work with someone who is as devoted to these values as I am.

I often fantasize about a really radical and fulfilling career - this is one of those moments when I feel like I’m really living my dream. Seriously?! I’m getting paid to draw and promote radical acceptance! AT THE SAME TIME!!!