JSON Animations with Lottie
JSON Animations with Lottie The first time I came across Lottie it seemed like Voodoo or something. Here were tiny file sizes, smooth, extremely attractive animations, completely independent of resolution concerns: they were infinitely scalable because they used SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) for their images. How could this be? The first ones I found and […]
UX Year in Review 23
UX 23 State of the Industry I am a UI/UX Designer, Consultant, and Frontend Web Developer with over 23 years of experience working out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Toolsets Used Figma Figma* Asana Adobe XD Wave Accessibility InVision App *I repeated this on purpose. Figma does everything, and I USED it for everything this year: […]
Deep Beneath the House of David 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4 – Israelites on the Road The Veldtman Cracker Factory In Chicago I worked at the Veldtman Cracker Factory for many years. Old man Veldtman was a self-made millionaire who’d built a fortune on his grandma’s soda cracker recipe and a nearly inhuman work schedule. He was sorely afraid of communism and […]
Deep Beneath the House of David 1 of 4
Part 1 of 4 – The Train from Chicago, Spring 1918 Spring in St. Joe The evening I pulled into St. Joseph station from Chicago a dreary rain was falling, driven off of the lake and smelling like spring. It was the fourth month of the year, 1918, and I had come to find my […]
User Flows that Make a Difference
User Flows that Make a Difference That’s why we all got into this business, right? To make a difference in the World? Some of my favorite colleagues back in design school at Ferris State used to gather at this local gem called Schuberg’s and talk about all things graphic design (and life) over pints and […]
Am I an UX Designer?
Am I an UX Designer? Choosing a niche in a (maybe??) saturated market. Back in 2005 it happened, like so many things in our careers, without really meaning to. A financial institution client of ours, really a conglomerate of Midwest-based banks, needed a UX Designer… did we have one? We did. Same with Microsoft’s Grand […]
Fonts, Webfonts, Licensing and the Web
Fonts, Webfonts, Licensing and the WWW Much has changed through the years since I was a young college student designing websites back at Ferris State University in the mid- to late nineties. Back then we generally built our websites in a non-wysiwyg HTML builder called PageMill, where all styling was done “inline”, or in the […]
Color Choice and Accessibility on the Web ’23
Color theory principles such as complementary colors, near complements, and the interplay different RGB colorspaces have with one another play a key role in validating web color choices. In the current environment of ADA Guidelines playing such a large role in web design, I find a tool like the WAVE accessibility evaluation tool to be […]
Credit Union: Mobile Screens and UI
For this large midwestern credit union, the requirements for their users was a set of icons and screen flows on their new mobile app that would delight users and guide them through the onboarding process of the new app. User stories for the app had already wrapped, so with those in hand I authored a […]
And then there was a new site
I do not, under any circumstances recommend the domain name registrar Register.com. And here is why. This is a story of a website lost, a website found. A website rescued and brought back from the very brink of the quick. This is the story of NateDuckworth.com 2000: Bring the Ruckus I first registered nathanduckworth.com in […]