As a front-end designer, I increasingly find myself working on UI/UX projects and design systems (styleguides). There is no debating the fact that the toolset, frameworks, and configuration for front-end projects have gotten pretty complex: Gulp, Webpack, transpilers, PostCSS, CMS, Servers… the list goes on and changes frequently. Some or…

In this article I want to offer some strategies for managing client communication during a project. Often thought of as a pebble in the shoe of creative flow and productivity, frequent check-ins with your clients can actually help you be more productive, deliver a more successful product, and be a…

We all want projects to run smoothly. We want clients to trust us when we advise them. We want them to confidently put the success of their project in our hands without second guessing every-single-decision™. …

I’ve recently been getting a lot of questions around what it’s like to start working for yourself as a designer/developer. I don’t have all the answers, but here’s a bit about my journey and some things that have worked for me. How did you get your start as a freelancer? Many years ago I started as a photographer. Not…

Let’s let users subscribe multiple times to a single list in Mailchimp! — A HUGE thanks to Wes Bos without whom I never would have understood this. He is a master at breaking things down and I hope to pay it forward without butchering the steps :) Mailchimp makes it very easy to get started with email marketing, and everything works pretty flawlessly…

Writing proposals that cut to the chase. This is part three in a three part tale (read part 1 and part two). If you’ve read the first two posts in this series, I want to take a moment to thank you for sticking with it as I ramble on. If…

Establishing trust in the client on-boarding process. This is part two in a three-part tale. (see part one and part three). In Road Trips With Clients I discussed the value of breaking out the discovery or road-mapping phase of a project into it’s own mini-project. But how do we get…

Selling the discovery phase as a deliverable in web projects This is part one in a three-part tale. (see part two and part three) Being a freelancer in the web-making business is no easy feat. You have to keep your technical skills sharp, grow your business sense, and constantly put…

Full-screen hero sections with large tag-lines and over-sized background images have been one of the most common design patterns in the past few years (though that is fast changing, with video replacing photographs). Don’t camouflage your message! Some of the possible challenges when combining photography and text might be the busyness or luminosity of…