I started working with them earlier this year as a freelancer art directing an iPhone magazine called TapTilt and then later a new iPad magazine, Sideways. The opportunity to help shape what books and magazines will look like in the future was just too good to pass up.

Here is a a quick look at my latest project, Sideways magazine. You can get a closer look in the iTunes store.

Note: I was pleasantly surprised to see a Tech Crunch article about the magazine this morning.

Popular Science has a good video talking about the process of creating their magazine.

Here is what happened. Last summer I learned through someone on Twitter that my site had been ripped. This has happened before but what made this rip different was that it wasn’t someone’s personal site it was a site that a client had obviously paid for. That worried me, what if that business owner turned around and claimed I had stolen from him? Could I get sued for something like that? Even if I could prove that it was my original work I would still have to hire a lawyer and that’s not cheap.

To complicate matters the site wasn’t a pixel for pixel rip off. The designer had taken my illustration from my comic’s site and recreated it with stock images from iStock. I know this because when I discovered the site I used the contact form to inform the site owner of my concerns. The site owner forwarded it to the designer who wrote explaining his process. He had cobbled together pieces parts from other sites to create something he felt was unique. Below is what he sent me.

I actually kinda felt for the guy, I wasn’t sure what his intentions were. It’s hard to design something 100% unique. But what the designer did next changed my mood from disappointed to furiously mad. He added a little girl to the image of the swing and wrote me back to say that we should be better now.

A few weeks later after I had calmed down I mentioned the incident in an interview on SixRevisions. My point was that designing should be about building something unique not just assembling cool looking parts to makes something trendy. According to a comment left on Carsonified’s blog yesterday my actions got this guy fired.

I felt like the design was a rip, the client and his boss must have too, otherwise he would still be employed. What do you guys think, did I go to far by comparing the two sites publicly on a site with a large following? I didn’t link to the site or call out the designer publicly, but maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. Or do I owe him an apology?

Works great in safari on a desktop (I manually resized the browser to test out). Doesn’t work at all on the iPhone. The iPhone seems to capture the whole page and then scrolls it. Is there a way to trick it into fixing the background>
Here is an example of what I’m working on

While you’re there check out the portfolios of those who attended if you’re looking for some inspiration, you won’t be disappointing.

This wasn’t the first official comic (the larger image is easier to read) but it was a start. I whipped out my cheap little Wacom and sketched this out in about 5 minutes and got it on Twitter as fast as I could.

I started The Brads (or Bradz with a Z as it was called early on) to make my friends laugh. There was no schedule, I didn’t do any of the things professionals recommend doing before launching a web comic like having a months worth of comics in reserve, befriending other creators or developing a consistent look to the art and charicters. I was just winging it.

The very first comic, seen above, is still one of my personal favorites. I had been freelancing for about a year at that point and I really wanted to move into doing more illustration. Drawing a comic for my blog was a great way to force myself to draw on a regular basis and improve.

After a couple months this blog was no longer a web design blog but was becoming a real web comic with real readers. I also thought it was sending mixed messages to potential clients who were visiting the site, it was time to move the comic to its own domain.

This took a little longer than I wanted it to. About 3 months longer. I was having fun drawing the comic and people seemed to be enjoying them so it was time to take it seriously. After the winter Hiatus the comic was relaunched on its own site at the end of February.

I have a couple comics stored up for the future in case I am to busy to draw a new one each week, but I do like to keep those in reserve and run a fresh one if I can.  After the relaunch I really wanted the comic to be able to jump on the issue of the week. The first comic that dealt with a time specific issue was the Diggbar comic and it’s still my favorite. I also like how the joke would only work as a comic.

Growing up I read anything that was in comic format: comic books, comic strips, bubble gum wrappers, cereal boxes, everything.  My senior year of high school I picked up Understand Comics by Scott McCloud. At the time it was just another comic book. After I saw Scott’s work on the Google Chrome comic last year I went back and reread some of his other books and it was a revelation. Several people have pointed out the similarities between some of my info-comics (Misunderstanding Markup and Contrast in Design) and Scott’s work. They’re right, he has had an enormous impact on the way I think about comics and on design in general. I would recommend it to any designer even if you have no interest in drawing comics.

With one year of drawing The Brads under my belt I want to thank all my amazing friends old and new who have encouraged, helped, tweeted, commented on and proofread my work over the last year. I’ve had a great time and I’m excited to see where I’ll be a year from now. Thank You.

You can divide designers up into two groups. The first are the problem solvers — we can safely put Andy into that group. The second are the decorators.  For the sake of argument I’m going to put a younger version of myself into that category.

Andy’s main point is simple: If your goal is approval you’re design will never be successful. The younger Brad was eager to jump in and start designing. I wanted to get in a quick phone call, maybe get an idea for what sites the client thought looked cool and then open up Photoshop to see what i could do. The problem solver takes a different approach. It’s built around the users and their needs.

Andy never brought up a problem I had with doing multiple comps and that was how much MORE time it took. You would think that giving several options up front would push someone in a direction more quickly, but that wasn’t often the case. The client was picking colors and design elements from all the comps and I was building something new with each iteration. The new designs never looked as good as the originals because good design is holistic, not patched together. I would just wind up with a Frankencomp with a bunch of unrelated pieces thrown together.

The worst part of the Frankencomp was that it got the myself and the client focused on the window dressing and not the design problems we were trying to solve.

Here is what I do now. I put a lot more work into the pre-design. You can read a more detailed version of my process here. There is a lot more research upfront, starting with the content and working our way out. On a recent ecommerce site design I sat down with the client to talk about why they had such a high abandoned shopping cart rate. We talked about how their business worked off-line, how they took orders and how they interacted with customers. We quickly figured out that the reason why the shopping carts were abandoned was because the people creating the orders needed approval before placing the orders, they were building quotes. Armed with that new information we set out to build a site that dealt with their specific set of problems.

Another great example is the recent design of Microsoft’s Bing Travel site. The layout, fancy ajax and functionality is very similar to Kayak.com. Douglass Sims noticed something odd about the two sites. He was getting lower prices on the Bing Travel site. When he clicked through he couldn’t find the lower rates on the airline’s sites. Bing’s site wasn’t pulling over up to date rate information. When Bing travel was designed it pulled all the cool design functionality of Kayak.com over but they didn’t understand all the problems that Kayak.com has been working on for years.

What it comes down to is that you have to first have to understand the fundamental problems the design is trying to solve. From my experience creating a bunch of comps to see what sticks isn’t an effective design approach. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t experiment and try new things, or even present several solutions to one problem. But be careful thinking that just throwing out three comps at the beginning of every project is going to solve a problem you haven’t defined.

1. What skills/education did you acquire to obtain your current position?
I went to Kent State university in Ohio and takenstudied Advertising and minored in graphic design. Before going solo and starting my business I spent several years working at agencies building up my portfolio. Even as important was joining local groups and associations where I could meet other creatives and marketing folks who helped me grow as a designer and help me find work and clients over time.

2. How long have you been in the graphics career?
I graduated almost 9 years ago.

3. What was your hardest part in finding a job?
Early on it was the lack of work to show. twilightMy first full time web design position came as a result of designing my church’s website. My future boss was impressed that I wanted to spend my free time designing websites even though that design I was showing was absolutely terrible.

4. How did you find out about

your current position?
In Cleveland where I live the agencies don’t pay much (relatively speaking). Many of the good designers in this area usually leave town after a few years. The other option is to get out from company life and start your own. With a good portfolio and some know how it’s pretty easy to set yourself up as a freelancer.

5. What do you think was the most important thing that helped you obtain your current job?
Meeting people. I spent years going to work in the morning and leaving 8 hours later. Once I started networking after work and got out to meet other people dragonball evolution in my field in my spare time a lot of opportunities opened up. It took years to build a network but it’s been the most valuable thing I ever did.

6. What type of portfolio do you have?     Case?       Electronic?      Web Site?
I have a website. It doesn’t matter what you design, t-shirts, posters, print, web. You NEED to have your work online. Even if you don’t have your own domain it’s so easy to get a

Flickr account or post work on a site like Behance. At my last job I would scout talent at the local colleges and if we got a resume without any work we never contacted them.

Wireframes and contentiron man

Before opening Photoshop I need to know more about the content of the site. In a perfect world  the client would deliver all the content before designing starts, but that’s not always a realistic expectation. In this early stage I want to know dark knightwhat the primary objective of the site is and how the content will support it.

On a lot of projects I work with a copywriter or information architect since they can add a lot to  a project at this stage. For this example I’m using a wireframe I put together in Indesign since it was a small project.

The discovery stage is done to prevent surprises down the road. To get the client focused on the content instead of design I like to put wireframes

together. The wireframes are pretty dull and they keep people from worrying about color and photos and focused on refining the purpose of the site. Below is a jpg of the home page in the wireframe, you can download a PDF of that page here.

First round design

When the content has started to solidify I can turn my attention towards the design. Sometimes I sketch and sometimes I just work from the wireframe. transporter 3Below you can see the first round of the design.

The design at this stage is like a colored in version of the wireframe. The site sells  handmade crafts from China. The logo has a touch of red in it so I decided to use red a the dominant color. The dark red really helps the logo stand out. Even though this design is kind of dull it establishes a lot of the topography and colors that will be used later on.

Adding some personality

• australia
• fight club
• sin city
• the incredibles
• yes man
• spider man 2
• killshot
• enchanted
• toy story
• race to witch mountain
• inkheart

The embroideries that will be sold on the site are beautiful so that’s where I turned for inspiration. I took a small swatch of one of the products and desaturated all the color from it in Photoshop. This would become the pattern that is used on the header and the footer of the site. The pattern’s layer style is set to overlay and at about 27% opacity.

Since these crafts are hand made I wanted to get some more texture onto the site that was more organic. I used some water color textures in places to accomplish this. In this early version I had a map of China in the background, but I was never happy with it. It seemed to distracting. I tried some other things (here are a couple examples 1 2) before settling on the final.

Here is the final design again without the map of China and a focus on the product.

As you can see there is a lot more to design than just making a site look better. For me design is a process that starts with a solid understanding of what a site will do. The site wouldn’t work for another client because all the elements that went into the design came from the product and brand of the products.

Let me know what you think about my process. Do you do something similar? Should there be more emphasis on the research and wireframes upfront or should there be less? How would you approach this project?

The site you’re reading now is my businesses’ website. As I added more and more comics I felt like it was sending mixed messages to new visitors who were looking for website design.  To clear things up I moved the cartoons over to BradColbow.com. Over the next few months there is a lot I want to do there. I’m going to add an illustration portfolio and maybe a little bit of ecommerce.