Blog
6 Things Pokémon Cards Will Teach You About Design
Pokémon cards are so hot right now! According to nintendolife.com, the Pokémon company sold 3.7 billion cards in 2020 + 2021. Even though the Pokémon franchise is now 25 years old, it’s still highly popular among all age groups, especially Pokémon cards. Those who grew up with it, and those just learning about it are buying Pokémon cards left and right to complete their collections, battle against others, or sell them on for a profit.
November 9, 2021
How To Add A Social Media Share Bar In Jekyll
Adding a social media share bar at the beginning or end of each post is a great way to encourage readers to share your content on social media. In the past when my website ran on WordPress I used a plugin to add this functionality. This felt very clunky and slow to configure and interact with. Now that my site runs on Jekyll, I have a code snippet that accomplishes the same thing. It is simple, easy to use, and can be replicated across my entire website wherever I need it.
November 1, 2021
How To Add Related Posts In Jekyll To Increase Engagement
Including links to related posts at the end of each post is a great way to keep users engaged with your content. With a WordPress website, you can install a plugin to achieve this functionality. On the other hand, if your website is built in Jekyll (like mine), it requires a little bit more work to achieve the same end result. I was able to incorporate related posts functionality pretty easily into my own Jekyll website so in this article, I’d like to share with you how I did it.
October 25, 2021
10 Ways I Use Figma As A Creator
As a creator, I use Figma every day and I can honestly say it’s 10x’ed my creation process. By working in one application to do many different types of tasks, I save time and work more effectively. Not to mention my knowledge of Figma has increased to the point where I can use keyboard shortcuts like a ninja to quickly manipulate shapes, colors, and alignment. If you’d like to learn about the different ways you can use Figma as a creator to 10x your design process, this is the right article for you. I’ll also include examples of my work to show you exactly what I mean.
October 18, 2021
How To Never Run Out Of Ideas As A Designer
As a designer, your value comes from the things you create. Your “job currency” is creativity. With that said it’s hard to constantly generate ideas. There is always pressure to create a unique design that looks stunning. Over time, this create-on-demand dynamic can cause tension. You might save your creative energy for only one or two projects, or not put your 100% into a project in the first place in case your ideas are rejected.
October 4, 2021
A Walkthrough Of My Obsidian Setup
I last wrote about my Obsidian Setup way back in March. I was still finding my feet with Obsidian and trying lots of different things to see what worked well for me. Since then, I’ve made a lot more changes to develop the system I use today. This system allows me to track my goals, remember content I consume, and manage my content creation process. In this comprehensive article I would like to share with you my current Obsidian setup. I’ll be going into detail on how my vault is structured, naming conventions, tags, templates.
September 20, 2021
UI Design Patterns - Character Limits
Character limits are used on text fields to indicate the maximum amount of characters that can be entered into that field. These components are important as they provide immediate feedback to the user when they fill in a form. If you’re a fan of usability heuristics, you’ll know this trait relates to the heuristic: visibility of system status. Character limits provide important feedback to the user, so it’s important they are designed correctly.
August 30, 2021
How To Improve The Usability Of Password Fields
Password fields are a necessity if you’re designing a login or sign-up form for your application. As common as these types of fields are, they can be frustrating to interact with when poorly designed. I was recently tasked with improving the usability of the login page on one of our apps at my job. To learn more about how to implement these components in a user-friendly way, I spent some time researching.
August 23, 2021
Design A Website From Scratch In 7 Steps
Designing an entire website can seem like a big challenge. You need to think about all the pages, the content on each page, how it’ll be designed, what colors to use; the list is pretty long. While this can seem daunting, designing an entire website from scratch is highly achievable even if you are a beginner. The secret? Breaking it down into small, manageable chunks. Then working on each chunk one at a time.
August 9, 2021
Mind Maps - The Ultimate Getting Started Tool
Mind maps are a powerful tool for getting started with project planning, learning something new, or even making decisions. They help you to overcome the hurdle of getting started in many ways: A blank mind map is less intimidating than a blank page because it’s easy to create and add to. It removes the friction or resistance often associated with the blank page. The mind mapping process is simple enough that you can quickly and easily start writing ideas down. By thinking in a visual way, more ideas will come to mind based on the connections you make. Mind Maps Are Great For Visual Thinkers They help you to pull thoughts and ideas out of your head and structure them in a way that makes sense to you.
August 2, 2021
Jekyll - Add Related Posts At The End Of A Post
At the end of a blog post, it’s a good idea to recommend similar posts to your readers. This helps them to find more great content on your website easily. I used to manually add related posts at the end of each article but this became really tedious. When I migrated my website from Wordpress to Jekyll, this similar posts feature was a must have for me. I wanted to make this process as automated as possible.
July 26, 2021
How To Never Be Bored Again
Feeling “bored” can result in a complete lack of motivation. You don’t have the drive to pick something from your list of chores. You can’t bring yourself to do anything except watch YouTube mindlessly. At the same time, at the back of your mind is a small sense of guilt. A sense that you should be doing something more valuable with your time. Something creative or constructive. If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. It’s something I used to struggle with.
July 19, 2021
Jekyll - Add An Affiliate Disclaimer To Specific Posts
On this website some of the links used are affiliate links. To let people know this, I include a disclaimer at the top of relevant pages. Instead of manually copying and pasting this text for each new article I write, here’s how I implemented an affiliate disclaimer to specific posts or pages. In the _includes folder, create a file called affiliate-disclaimer.html Add the following code to that file: {% raw %} {% if page.has-affiliate-link %} <p><i>This article contains affiliate links.</i></p> {% endif %} {% endraw %} Feel free to change the actual content of the affiliate disclaimer message.
July 12, 2021
Establish A Shut Down Routine For Maximum Clarity
A shutdown routine is something you do at the end of your workday that tells your brain, I’m finished with work today. By making a shut down routine part of your daily habits, you’ll find that your mind can focus on other things outside of your work. Once your mind knows that your tasks have been handled for the day, you’ll be less likely to think about that email you need to send or that random task you should prioritize.
July 5, 2021
5 Ways For A UI Designer To Come Up With Ideas
As a UI Designer, you are essentially paid for your ideas. They are your greatest source of value. Because of this, your job is dependent on always creating more value. This type of tension can result in burnout if you don’t acknowledge that your creativity comes in waves. It’s not always possible to come up with amazing ideas on the spot. But, if you realize this, you can leverage your creative moments of brilliance and store great ideas for when you need them.
June 28, 2021
Be Consistent - That Is Your One Thing
It’s easy to be bombarded by things you should work on or should do. Things from work, things in your life, things you read on social media. This can cause overwhelm and it can be difficult to see the wood from the trees. How can you overcome this to get your most important work done each day? How can you prioritize the things that will give you the most value in the long term?
June 21, 2021
Creative Constraints Are Good For You
We all need constraints to operate effectively. In the world of creators, creative constraints allow us to focus our energy and concentration in the right place. Without creative constraints, we become overwhelmed by all the potential choices and decisions we could make. We develop paralysis by analysis and become unable to do anything. “True Freedom is Healthy Constraints” - Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative Imagine This Scenario Imagine this scenario:
June 14, 2021
Life Contexts - Cues To Differentiate Between Work And Home
As one of the many people now working from home, I found the process difficult at first. I couldn’t switch my mind between my day job, my side-projects, and spending time with family. Everything bled together which left me focusing at the wrong things at the wrong time. Over time, I have learned to set up various “life contexts” to focus my mind to the work at hand. These life contexts are made up of subtle and not so subtle cues that signify the type of work or activity I’m currently doing.
May 31, 2021
The Creator's Philosophy - Create Once Use Many Times
In the world of content creation, we’re always creating new things. New blog posts, new videos, podcasts, and social media posts. It can seem like an endless task to create and add value to the world. The trick to avoiding this overwhelm is to adopt what I’m calling the creator’s philosophy: Create once, use many times. Once you understand and apply this concept to the things you create, you’ll be able to overcome creative blocks to create things that your audience will enjoy.
May 17, 2021
Why You Should Schedule Time For Creativity
The whole idea of creativity and being creative is underestimated in today’s world. We all think we’re not creative or can’t think of original ideas but that’s not the case. There are many definitions of creativity everywhere you look. Simply put, being creative is about being able to combine things in new ways to produce different things. This is such a powerful concept and one that you can apply to almost any discipline.
May 10, 2021
UI Design Patterns - How To Write Effective Error Messages
Any well-designed application should have good error messages. When I say good error messages I’m not talking about a message like “Critical Error x-299498sdkfjh”. Let’s face it, that helps no one. A good error message will tell the user what happened, why it happened, and how the user can fix it. Errors will always happen no matter how well you build something. This is because you can’t account for how every single user will interact with your app.
May 3, 2021
Jekyll - Add Estimated Reading Time To Posts
Adding the estimated reading time of your article provides valuable context for readers. They can decide if they want to read your article now or bookmark it and save it for later. It’s a feature seen most commonly on the Medium platform but you can replicate this feature on your Jekyll site. After some tweaking, I have been able to add this feature to my website (it’s actually pretty simple) so I’d like to share the process with you.
April 28, 2021
How To Make Your Productivity Systems More Efficient
How we live our lives and the systems we use to keep on top of things is always changing. As we find new helpful nuggets of advice, we adopt those into our systems to try and be more productive, less busy, or happier. With that said, it can be challenging enough to define the areas we are struggling with, never mind coming up with an effective solution and implementing it.
April 26, 2021
Jekyll - How To Enable Incremental Regeneration To Speed Up Build Times
A great tip for speeding up the build time of your Jekyll blog is to make use of the incremental regeneration feature. This process will only generate the pages that were updated since the last build as opposed to re-generating all pages with each build. A Word Of Caution While this sounds like a fix-all solution in theory, in practice a word of caution is advised when using this feature.
April 21, 2021
Why Regular Reflection Can Help You Become More Productive
It can be easy to fall into the pattern of working from day to day, week to week. Finding the time and motivation to learn how to improve or become better than you were before can seem like a huge task. However, by building a practice of regular reflection into your life, you’ll notice huge benefits over time. Being great doesn’t happen overnight. Start small with intentional improvements and build upon those over time to allow for even more improvements.
April 19, 2021