Shiny logos are just that.  Shiny.  If you take the time and energy to create a timeless logo for yourself why add excess and ruin your mark. You want to keep your logo for quite some time and it should not be recognized for how bright and lustrous it appears on your website.  Good branding [...]

A glossy button is the false separation that splits a button into a top and bottom section effectively displaying a pronounced 3D texture.  The glossy buttons are extensively used on websites / design layouts as a call to action and while they are not entirely fazed out, they are tired and somewhat overdone. Instead, I [...]

Oh the big soft pillowed drop shadow.   They give such height and dimension to our words almost magically levitating letters and images off of the page.  While they were a cool design element not too long ago, today they look illegible, forced and dated. Instead, let us focus on a more controlled, clean shadow that [...]

In downtown Fort Collins, there are dozens of great restaurants to chose from. Every one of them is unique in their own right but very few offer something more above and beyond just food. Now, not every one of them can be Austin’s – a restaurant whose goal it seems is to make it’s patrons [...]

It wasn’t that long ago that I found myself flipping through art store catalogs looking for the most impressive portfolio case in an attempt to get some advantage over what seemed like thousands of graphic designers all competing for the same job. There were countless stories about this graphic designer or that web designer who [...]

As I’ve written here in the past, ‘simple is better than better’. Simple cuts through the clutter. It makes everything else seem overstated, over exaggerated and overhyped. Let’s take BMW for example. No one has ever confused BMW with being economical simply because they make one product – ‘the ultimate driving machine’. Or another – [...]

Hopefully, you already had yourself a chuckle at my expense when you read that headline. Because first impressions really do matter – whether you’re writing a headline or designing a website. If you’ve ever interviewed for a job – looking the part was probably the very first idea you had once it was determined you [...]

This past week, we had the honor of working with the Lucille Ball – Desi Arnaz Center for Comedy, to design a new website. I can’t even begin to explain how nervous I was when I learned about this next project. I went home that night absolutely tense with fear of failure. After all, everyone [...]

Earlier this morning, while dropping my daughter off at daycare – we walked into the classroom and greeted Ms. Lauren, my daughter’s daycare teacher as we do everyday. We’ve now done this hundred of times. So many times – that we’ve come to expect a certain reaction when we walk into the room. My daughter’s [...]

Chances are, if you’ve ever navigated to a website on your iPad you may have noticed that things seemed a bit fuzzy. Perhaps it appeared a lot like watching your standard definition programming on your big-screen HD television at home? Well, good news. The development team at Red Rocket has come up with a way [...]