Design & Development

If you’ve worked in the world of the internet at any point in the past few years, there is a good chance you’ve heard of the hot new technology that is HTML5, and there is a similarly good chance that what you’ve heard is largely hype and buzzwords. While HTML5 does offer a great deal… Read More

Design & Development

Photo by Jeremy Keith. With the multitude of phones, tablets, phablets, fondleslabs, and other devices on the market, it can be difficult to determine whether or not your new responsive web site is actually responsive. Unless you have a lot of cash to blow on every mobile device that exists, you are probably going to… Read More

Design & Development

In college, when we asked our teachers how to assign a price to our art, they would tell us to charge whatever it was worth to us. This answer was thoroughly infuriating because we wanted a ‘correct’ number. What’s the equation? Is each square inch of canvas (or wood, or paper) worth a certain amount?… Read More

Design & Development

The days of designing websites based merely on visual components are over, unless like being invisible. Don’t get me wrong. I am not against well-designed websites. Visual design of your website plays a key role in shaping your potential customers’ opinions of your brand. The first six seconds after someone lands on your website can… Read More

Design & Development

When developing responsive websites, you will inevitably encounter designs that require some kind of HTML reordering. Often this arbitrary reordering can be achieved through clever CSS tricks, but if that is not possible or practical, you may end up having to do some kind of javascript to sniff for browser widths. Enter Intention.js. Intention.js is… Read More

Design & Development

Information Space has a conceptual mirror... Physical Space Having recently worked my butt off to earn a Master of Architecture, I often come across those who are curious about my decision to channel my design education into the wonderful world of the interwebs. Basically, I'm regularly asked what capital-A Architecture actually is– as in, physical… Read More

Design & Development

The Setup Front End Development is a fairly new concept. Back when “Webmaster” was an actual job title there was no real “development” on the front end. Websites were structured using tables, CHSS and SSP were being joined together to make what eventually would be CSS. The web was still primarily a place for documents,… Read More

Design & Development

If you’re like me in the kitchen, sometimes you want to add a little North African flavor to dinner. After some light Googling the other night, I found plenty of couscous recipes, but I also found this culinary gem: “5 Couscous Cooking Mistakes to Avoid.” Wait, what? “Cooking” couscous amounts to no more than adding… Read More

Design & Development

Change is in the air around Portent. Change that’s directly tied to how we see the future of Internet marketing. And it’s exciting. And it involves cool design innovations like parallax scrolling and HTML5 animations. As we shift our focus more and more towards what we call 10% content—deeper, larger projects that take bigger risks… Read More

Design & Development

Update! Learn the ins and outs of a faster site in our Ultimate Guide to Site Speed! As you may already know, we’re a little obsessed with page load speed. We wanted our home page to load in under 1 second, and we were close. But close isn’t good enough. So, with some guidance from… Read More

Design & Development

***** If you’ve ever used Photoshop on a Mac, you’re probably familiar with this guy. Would you like to send him packing and never see him again? If you answered yes, strap on your Photoshop helmet and get ready for the blog post of your life. For this blog post I am using Adobe Photoshop… Read More

Design & Development

Last night I gave a presentation at the Seattle IA/UX meetup. Good pizza, plus I got to say ‘toilet bowl of death,’ which is one of my favorite phrases. IA, UX and SEO from Ian Lurie I know IA/UX and SEO are supposed to hate each other. What I don’t know is why. We’re all… Read More

Design & Development

If you want to call yourself a web designer these days, you’d better be ready to keep up. Daily study is required or you’ll be left in the dust. I follow countless blogs, listen to podcasts during my commute, and work on random projects at home just to try out new things. When I start… Read More

Design & Development

My daughter just turned 3. And aside from wondering where the devil the last few years of my life went, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make Christmas special for a girl whose birthday is in December.   Charlie loves technology. My iPad 2 was instantly hers the moment I brought it home… Read More

Design & Development

OK everyone. Take a deep, freaking breath. I can’t sneeze right now without spraying germs on someone’s attempt at a data-driven work of art. Here’s why the poster you paid someone $400 to make isn’t an infographic: Lack of clarity. Infographics should ease and speed the consumption of information. If you take something you can… Read More