The Col­mena Hos­pi­tal­ity Group is New York-based chef Sea­mus Mullen, a renowned prac­ti­tioner of mod­ern Span­ish cook­ing. The design was once again put together by the inim­itable Kyle LaMar and Amber Chan­dler. An exer­cise in cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing, this project uses a par­al­lax effect, which I hacked up and abused to achieve the effect of the cover image slid­ing beneath the hon­ey­comb pattern.

From A List Apart’s Annual “What We Learned” fea­ture: “In 2012, I left Seat­tle and the com­pany I founded to join Twit­ter and help solve the most seri­ous issue in the world that I might be qual­i­fied to solve: infor­ma­tion glut­tony. We used to live in a world where we didn’t have access to enough infor­ma­tion to keep us prop­erly informed; now our prob­lem is the oppo­site: there is so much sig­nal com­pet­ing for our atten­tion that we spend entire …

Who knew? I prob­a­bly should’ve, but as of two years ago, there is a CSS prop­erty to out­line text. Sim­i­larly to how Illus­tra­tor han­dles basic shapes, you can cur­rently con­trol fill color, stroke color, and stroke width, all with CSS. It’s cur­rently only avail­able in Webkit, so your oppor­tu­ni­ties for mass appli­ca­tion are still some­what lim­ited — Chris Coyier has a great post on the rules and some workarounds — but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to play around with. To famil­iar­ize myself, …

Maque­tte is a Manhattan-based fine-arts man­age­ment com­pany that sought an updated, sim­pli­fied redesign of its web pres­ence. The design — which smartly puts an empha­sis on Maquette’s excel­lent pho­tog­ra­phy — was put together by two awe­some friends of mine, Kyle LaMar and Amber Chan­dler. The final ver­sion fea­tures a flex­i­ble lay­out and and a super light­weight slide show built on CSS3 ani­ma­tions. (Also check out an alter­nate single-page ver­sion of the site that fea­tures some Waypoints.js trick­ery and my first foray into the Google Maps API.)

Ken Cor­bett is a New York-based psy­chol­o­gist that recently pub­lished a new book, Boy­hoods: Rethink­ing Mas­culin­ites. To cor­re­spond with the release, Kyle LaMar whipped up a sim­ple — yet remark­ably effec­tive! — site redesign that I coded out across an after­noon in Octo­ber. Because of that sim­plic­ity, it remains one of my favorite 2012 projects.

Another set of nifty tools for any­one inter­ested in respon­sive web design. When build­ing up a respon­sive prod­uct, there’s a strong incli­na­tion to set break points to accom­mo­date the most pop­u­lar devices — iPhone, iPad, maybe an Android device or two — and leave it at that. Chances are, most of your vis­i­tors will be on one of those devices, and if they’re not? Well, the site will prob­a­bly work. It’ll func­tion, at least. Maybe. Is this a short­sighted prac­tice? Absolutely. Is it lazy? Yep. …

The view from out­side my new office space.

For my birth­day last May, my dad gave me his old Polaroid SX-70 Land cam­era, com­plete with the orig­i­nal leather case and a flash­bar. For being nearly 30 years old (the Alpha 1 came out right around 1977), the cam­era is in remark­able shape, and I’m still test­ing the lim­its of what it can do. My dad also sourced a few packs of Impos­si­ble PX70 Color Shade film, both of which expired in early 2011. Below are some of the results …

Just a few days ago, Google intro­duced web font ana­lyt­ics. The num­bers stag­ger­ing, but not all that sur­pris­ing: Open Sans topped the list with nearly 28 mil­lion total views; Droid Sans was a mere 7 mil­lion views behind, fol­lowed by Oswald, Droid Serif, and (remark­ably) Lob­ster. The really inter­est­ing stats, though, are the Views by Plat­form:  Nearly half of all view­ers are using Fire­fox, which is nearly dou­ble the num­ber of Chome users! I (along with most devs I know) …

The Respon­si­na­tor has quickly become the tool that I turned to most in the early stages of any respon­sive project. Type in a URL, and it returns approx­i­ma­tions of that URL as dis­played in iPhones, iPads, older and newer Android devices, and even Kin­dles. Now, it’s not pixel per­fect — there is, after all, no sub­sti­tute for test­ing on the actual device. How­ever, if you find errors on the Respon­si­na­tor, chances are good that you’ll find them on the device, too. Plus, …

Because of this strange video, I won a trivia con­test early last week. AIGA Pitts­burgh wanted to know any cor­po­rate logo that Saul Bass designed; the answer (AT&T) got me a ticket to Startup Week­end Pitts­burgh, some­thing I did not know existed until I saw the con­test. When I moved to Pitts­burgh, I knew there a big tech pres­ence here — cer­tainly big­ger than in State Col­lege, at least — but I had no idea how wel­com­ing, how community-oriented, and how full of talent …

Since April of 2012, I’ve been work­ing as a graphic designer and front-end devel­oper for Agent Evo­lu­tion, a California-based web design com­pany that devel­ops Word­Press solu­tions for real estate. A major­ity of our projects use the Stu­dio­press Agent­press 2 theme as a basic tem­plate; from there, my job is to adapt that theme to the brand­ing and needs of each indi­vid­ual client. More recently, I’ve begun design­ing in-browser for cer­tain projects, most notably on the respon­sive re-design of MyTe­chOpin­ion, the blog­ging arm …

In honor of Carl Gar­ner Fed­eral Lands Cleanup Day, I released a new ver­sion of my web­site. We’ll default to Q&A for­mat for this one: But, why? Didn’t you just re-do it? A few months ago, I was still feel­ing shaky on some aspects of respon­sive design, and so turned to my old friend Lynda.com. Morten Rand-Hendriksen had just released this course, which calls for stu­dents to actu­ally build a fully respon­sive Word­Press theme as they progress through. Not only did I come …

John Hen­drick­son is a writer for the Den­ver Post, and the man­ag­ing edi­tor of Reverb, the Post’s online arts and cul­ture mag­a­zine. John needed a site to show­case arti­cles he’s writ­ten across a vari­ety of pub­li­ca­tions, as well as his pho­tog­ra­phy and any other projects he comes up with down the line. As with most things, acces­si­bil­ity was key, and so we cre­ated a cus­tomized Word­press post-type, “clips,” and built archives that could sort his projects either by peri­od­i­cal or by date pub­lished. We also broke …

Michael Palmer is a State College-based designer and pho­tog­ra­pher that needed a new port­fo­lio site to show­case his work. Mike’s images were fan­tas­tic, and we decided that they would be best served by a clean, sim­ple design. Mike put the lay­out together in Pho­to­shop, and I coded it into Word­Press. Site includes a nifty JQuery drop­down menu and gal­leries pow­ered by NextGen Gallery.

I just joined Design­spi­ra­tion! Do I know any­one else that uses it yet? Here I am, and here is an image of the first thing I saved: Found via (and per­haps cre­ated by) the illus­tra­tor Soug­wen Chung. I don’t know much at all about the photo, but damned if isn’t remarkable.

I’m happy to announce that I recently signed on as a web designer with Agent Evo­lu­tion of River­bank, CA. AE devel­ops Word­Press web­sites and plu­g­ins for use in the real estate mar­ket, and I’ll get to help fig­ure out how it all looks! I look for­ward to post­ing work soon.

I just recently fin­ished up my first proper illus­tra­tion for the Rag and Bone. The illus­tra­tions are part of an ongo­ing project to revise and revamp the store’s brand­ing, and the evo­ca­tion of vin­tage fash­ion ads from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is cen­tral to that plan. I drew this par­tic­u­lar illus­tra­tion in (per­haps unre­mark­ably) Illus­tra­tor, col­ored it using Corel Painter 12, and assem­bled the final poster in Pho­to­shop. We’ll be doing more of this sort of work through­out the …

When you cut right to it, what’s your web­site for? To show­case what you do? To pro­mote your busi­ness? To find peo­ple of sim­i­lar inter­ests? No mat­ter how you phrase it, a web­site is about con­nect­ing with peo­ple, and — just as cru­cial — allow­ing peo­ple to con­nect with you! A con­tact page is one of the most impor­tant parts of your site, and it’s one that’s often over­looked in the larger scheme of things. As any new busi­ness will read­ily attest, it’s hard enough …

Whether you free­lance full-time or on the side, start­ing out as your own boss can be daunt­ing. Find­ing and bring­ing in qual­ity clients, hold­ing your­self to a reg­u­lar work sched­ule, enforc­ing pay­ment sched­ules, and bud­get­ing for irreg­u­lar income are only some of the prob­lems I’ve reck­oned with since going full-time free­lance. I’d be (more of) a babe in the woods with­out the always-remarkable sup­port and advice of the free­lance design com­mu­nity at large, but, recently, there’s been a flood of …