Monthly Archives: February 2010

My Holy Sh*t Moment

Filed under:
Graphic Design, Print Design, Typography
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Recently, Mitch Goldstein (a great designer and educator at Rhode Island School of Design) blogged about his holy sh*t moment. His was that you could photograph type instead of just ‘typing’ it. A design student, Brittany Loar responded with her ‘moment’ as well.

Here are few of my holy sh*t moments:

  • Throughout high school I would design everything with drop shadows. During my second year of college I realized NOT using a drop shadow was actually better. I do break this rule sometimes, but with great subtlety.
  • As far as typography, I realized that I could kern out (generous space between letters of the word) words to add more contrast with other type (see this logo). I learned this closer to my third year of college.
  • As far as page layout, using very generous margins with blocks of text really opened some things up for me (see this print ad). This as well was learned during my second year of college.

These probably don’t sound too groundbreaking if you’re a designer, but for a young designer (as I was), they are huge.

Now it’s your turn!

What was your holy sh*t moment in your profession, whether you are a designer, writer, photographer, programmer, or any other type of professional.

Comment & Share!

iconnect redesign

Filed under:
My Full-Time Job, Redesign, Website Design, WordPress
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iconnect is an e-newsletter for A.T. Still University that I designed in partnership with the Communication & Marketing Department. The goal was to create a place to get all your University news in one place. New stories and photos are added almost daily and it has become popular among the ATSU community.

This was one of the first project I worked on when I started as web developer and I found out a week ago that it had won the bronze award for Excellence in Alumni Web Sites, Electronic Newsletter at the CASE District VI Institutional Awards Ceremony. With this excitement, I looked for ways to make the website better, because everything can get better, right?

The redesign included adding color (green), centering the website in the browser (instead of pushed left, like atsu.edu is), giving the ATSU logo some breathing room and finally removing the strange gradient of dark to mid blue in the header. The slideshow of content on the homepage was also revamped and made more intuitive (I hope).

Read the official announcement.


close-up of the iconnect header area.

What projects have you been working on lately? Comment & Share!