Last week, my fellow Moonfarmer Erin and I were sent on an excursion to Charlottesville, VA to attend the Tom Tom Founder’s Festival! It was a jam-packed 4 days of sharing, learning, and meeting new friends!

Tom Tom Fest is a interdisciplinary, multi-track conference that explores the future with entrepreneurs, leaders, designers, innovators and visionaries who inspire change.

Having a company or organization website provides you with the opportunity to communicate with other people about what you do, and what you care about, without ever actually talking to them. That’s a pretty powerful thing!

Many people intend to go about building their website the Right Way — they don’t want to waste their money on something that doesn’t work or doesn’t matter. But they may not know where to start. So like any other sensible human being, they Google it.

If you search for “website” or “how to make a website,” you’re thrust into a world of advertisements…

Human-centered design is a way of approaching your design practice that specifically addresses the needs of your user base. It’s possible to design something beautiful and that works really well — in theory — when only you and your team test it, but could be missing the main needs of your users once it gets to them.

The term “human-centered design” was originally coined by IDEO, a design organization that makes community-oriented projects to combat poverty and create a more sustainable world. It seeks to educate designers around the world about human-centered design in order to help those designers improve…

To design something to be inclusive means to make it approachable for a diverse set of users. Often, this focuses on optimization for accessibility without compromising the experience of users not using assistive technology. (Assistive tech might include things like screen reader apps that “read” a web page for visually impaired users, speech input software, and other programs and products.)

Inclusive design has gained popularity in UI/UX more recently because it’s valuable in guiding a better design process and appealing to a diverse population. For instance: if an interface is created with high contrast color scheming to accommodate color blind…

I was absent from the office for two days last week, but it was for a good reason: I was volunteering on the event staff for New York Smashing Conference! Smashing Magazine, a digital publication for web designers and developers, puts on multiple conferences around the world every year to spread innovative ideas in the realms of art, technology, design, and development.

This conference is an amazing opportunity for people in creative occupations to get together, discuss their newest ideas, and explore ways to improve our industries. Speakers showcase products and the process it took to make them successful, live-code…

I’m Shauna, and I’m currently an intern here at EMN. I’m in my last semester of college at SUNY New Paltz, where I’m earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. In the past four years, I have learned a lot about design in several different places.

The first is the most obvious, which is through formal education. This entails going to class, doing your assigned projects, writing papers, and existing. What a lot of people don’t realize, though, is that you can only get so much out of that. In college, you gain a distorted perspective of your…