The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is so incredibly tall but lacking any sort of reference point I had trouble really grasping the height. So today I took an Instagram I snapped yesterday and composited in a building I’m more familiar with: New York’s own Empire State Building and yesteryear’s world’s tallest building.
Visual note taking
I wrote an article on the thoughtbot blog about my approach to taking notes in a highly visual method as a way of absorbing information and not just transcribing it. The notes are from a recent trip to Cape Cod where I met with a new client who hired us to build something that will ultimately be complex, so my goal for the trip was to get a most basic understanding and reduce it to a simple idea, which will ultimately lead to a simple, usable, non-bloated web app.
Article: How To Take Notes Like a Champ
For the boys
This morning’s photo-shoot for this awesome review.
Awesome review indeed.
My company blog (http://robots.thoughtbot.com) got an overhaul. My contribution to the redesign was the header.
Watercolor sketches, part of a design process article I wrote for GIANT ROBOTS, my company’s blog.
Last week I wrote an article on my company’s blog about the process behind my Landing Pad helicopter illustration.
The designers at thoughtbot (myself included) just launched a new project called Landing Pad, which is a showcase of beautifully designed iPad apps. As of this writing we have only one entry, so this is a call out to anyone who is working on an iPad app or knows someone who is to get in touch with us - design@thoughtbot.com or submit a screenshot directly.
I created a new site called Picture Quotes where I find or take submissions of quotes accompanied with a picture of the author. It’s clearly a response to services like Tumblr or Twitter in which any piece of text not accompanied by an avatar or photo is devalued by the reader. Given this context I feel adding a picture vivifies the text in a contemporary fashion. But mostly I’m doing it for fun.
Note: I made it using some CSS3 so if you’re not using Firefox, Safari or Chrome it’s probably going to look pretty lousy.
I’m starting a new project called Draw and Color — the idea is pretty simple, I will draw something and color it, then post it to the site. The first four drawings I’ve done have started as pencil sketches or charcoal, and the coloring was done on the computer, but that will soon evolve to gouache or watercolor or whichever way it may develop.
My reasons for this project - other than being fun - come from my sense that as a web designer my work is hard to ever declare “done”. We go from mockups to HTML to app and then revisions occur in cycles after that. What I want from Draw and Color is to get a sense of accomplishment, so when a drawing is done, it’s done.
So feel free to follow at drawandcolor.org.
I launched a new portfolio site for my work: portfolio.kevinburg.com. Powered by Tumblr, of course.
Umbrella Today has an iPhone app!
The app was approved over the weekend and we just updated the website this morning to reflect it. We’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while, particularly because of the numerous road blocks we encountered while attempting to get the SMS notifications to be on time and not cost a ridiculous amount.
So the solution, if you’re an iPhone user, is this app. We use push notifications instead of SMS messages so they’re always on time and it also automatically detects your location. In many ways it’s a huge improvement over the site itself.
Visit umbrellatoday.com/iphone to download the app.
thoughtbot.com got a redesign which launched today. It was a joint effort between myself and designer Fred Yates who joined thoughtbot over the summer.
