Taking a break from writing code.
I wanted to quickly talk about the idea of always doing “research.” This came up as a topic on TheDesignSuperpower episode #9, but I wanted to expand on this.
Logo development is something I’ve never really done professionally. It’s fun to think about, but I’ve always worked with excellent visual designers and illustrators who know what they’re doing.
Voice and tone is an important part of content strategy, especially for an app dedicated to writing. I have to be careful to set the stage for the voice and tone, since a lot of it will be driving the content and appearance of the page. Voice, tone, and visual design also sets an important first…
In the process of building Novel Monkey I’ve been referring to many useful articles and resources.
For mostly my own benefit, I’ll list all of them in here as a handy resource.
It’s not much, and it’s kind of janky—everything is kind of janky, but I decided to throw up a temporary splash page. So there’s that!
Now all four of you following this dev blog, go forth to novelmonkey.com and boost my Google Analytics to the teens!
Ok, I’m the kind of person that wants to sit down, think about things, and make sure I design and build it right. It has to be just right, pixel perfect, and the code has to be clean, legible, and functional.
This is what I wrote from another post:
I kind of understand why they call it the grind now. You’re just doing a lot of work — you’re doing ALL the work, you barely feel like you know what you’re doing, there’s so much to do, you…
It’s been a month since I’ve posted. Lots have happened, and I wish even more have.
Of course, I could just blame “life” happening and “having no time,” but I did dedicate the last couple of months to working on this full-time, and I can’t say I’ve been using it as…
I’m absolutely terrible at marketing anything. I know it’s a lot of work, and that it’s absolutely critical for a product’s success. I’m also not very good at going about and drumming up excitement.
These reviews are informal and I’ll be writing honestly and off the top of my head, without much editing.
Week One has been interesting. I’ve been laying out all the ground work to NovelMonkey, and I’ve been a bit slower than I would like. I think if I just tried building…
Great user experiences should be completely transparent, obvious, and unnoticeable. When an experience is poorly designed, it becomes easily noticeable, or even absurdly painful. Like when you keep yanking a door only to realize it’s push to open.
Hey look ma I can post code to Medium!
I’ve found the hidden (power user) feature of writing in code blocks!
This means no more trying to awkwardly coerce Medium to display what I want it to display. Hooray!
This is something I’ve never really worked on or have thought about before, so this section might change drastically over time as I get more acquainted with the subject.
It’s probably a good idea to be able to manage your users in a web app, or perform basic…
The way an app’s data is constructed and stored can severely bias the design of an app. The way data is connected might make some aspects of an app very easy to create and others a complete nightmare.
The bread is in the oven, and I’m moving into the meat of the product — the technology.
I’ve already preconceived this project as a ReactJS and MeteorJS product, so that part is done. The combination…