Larissa Meek

With FOWA this weekend twitter has picked up steam and was very busy with people commenting live from the event. It was really cool to follow along. I assume we will see Twitter jamming again with SXSW less than a week away. This year looks to be bigger and better than last year. SXSW is an excellent conference to get a handle on current trends in the digital landscape.

You can also follow me on twitter, if you like. Twitter has come a really long way from last year and added a lot of new features.

I’m bummed that my panel is in the same slot which my favorite blogger is on: Dooce - “Content Boundaries, a 12-Step Program (Margaret Mason)”. I will be missing out on that one but here’s a short list of some panels that I might try to attend. *Mental Overload*

• 10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment (Bryan Mason)
• Scope Creep and Other Villains (James Archer)
• Top Ten Lessons Learned in E-Commerce (Tony Hsieh)
• Worst Website Ever: That’s So Crazy, It Just Might Work (Andy Baio)
• FM 2.0: The Future of Internet Radio (David Hyman)
• A General Theory of Creative Relativity (Jim Coudal)
• A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe? (Corey Chandler)
• Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts (Michael Lopp)
• Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs (Peter Kirn)
• Rome, Sweet Rome: Ancient Lessons in Design (Jennifer Fraser)
• Social Design Strategies (Emily Chang)
• Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users (Kathy Sierra)
• A Conversation with Michael Eisner
• Hollywood and Design and Literature: Just Who is Inspiring Who? (Evan Hirsch)
• Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices (Hank Blumenthal)
• What Teens Want Online & On Their Phones (Anastasia Goodstein)
• What User Generated Video Means to Word of Mouth Advertising (Daphne Kwon)
• How Many Clicks to the Center of…? (Conleth O’Connell)
• A Critical Look At OpenID (Jason Levitt)
• The Science of Designing Interactions (Andreas Weigend)
• AJAX and Flash Mistakes (Jonathan Boutelle)
• Content Management System Roundup (George DeMet)
• Secrets of JavaScript Libraries (John Resig)
• Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! (Annalee Newitz)
• The Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing For Creatives (Derek Powazek)

And yes… There are LOTS more.

Entry Filed under: Web Design

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We had a little brain-share session with the talented Josh Corliss after work today and he was kind enough to share some of his endless Photoshop knowledge. During this discussion he asked the question; “How often do you use the plastic wrap filter?”

Um, like NEVER!

I went home totally inspired because it dawned on me that the plastic wrap filter was perfect for creating some candy wrapped in plastic and it would be a nice addition to my lollipop header. After some trial and error I think I have a pretty solid example.

Here’s how I did it.

STEP 1. Add a dark background layer - this can be anything. Next create your candy. I used some layer effects to give it a bit of texture and shine.

STEP 2. Because I want this candy to be hand-made I used the warp tool to make it less “perfect”.

STEP 3. Be sure to give your candy a nice shadow - not too harsh and not too soft. This is easy to overlook but it provides the candy with dimension. I did this with a dark circle and a blur filter.

STEP 4. It’s time to create the wrapper. Start with a grey rectangle shape. The grey is important because you will need to add highlights and shadows later.Use your pen tool to create points on the top and bottom of the wrapper.

STEP 5. Rasterize your layer. Create the wrapper seals using the dodge and burn tool. This is simply drawing out the lights and darks. I also added some highlights on the “points”.

STEP 6. Use the doge and burn tools again to create the highlights and shadows on the wrapper. Don’t go overboard on this otherwise your wrapper will look unnatural.

STEP 7. Use the warp tool to tweak the shape by pushing the sides in. You can finally add the plastic wrap filter. Play with the sliders to get the effect just right. Cover your candy with the wrapper.

STEP 8. To give the wrapper some transparency set the layer’s blend mode to Linear Light. Then copy this layer and move it beneath the red candy and set that layer to screen with 50% opacity or so. I then experimented with some layer effects to give the wrapper more dimension. This is the result.

Entry Filed under: Artworks | Web Design

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I am sick of hearing people say that HTML sites need to be more “free flowing” and that they are just “boxes” and “grids” which are “boring”.

A recent article by Jeffery Zeldman compared web design to architecture. There are certain fundamentals in place that work - things that don’t change. A web designer who complains about grids and boxes is like an architect who complains about gravity.

This is an excerpt from an article by Jeffery Zeldman on A List Apart. Read the full article here.

The inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful designer complains that too many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are “boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs.

The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

(Thanks Melissa!)

Entry Filed under: Web Design

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Matt Davies, of Fadtastic, published an interesting interview with some well-respected interactive designers (all female) asking the question: “Where are all the female designers?” In this article Matt asks us series of 5 questions such as why do we think there are less female designers than male and is a stigma associated with females within the industry?

The following designers participated in this interview:

• Tanya Merone
• Rina Miele
• Veerle Pieters
• and myself

An excerpt:

It is a fact that there are less women in the design industry then men. What the precise ratio of men to women actually is, one cannot be sure. However, as some indication, the guys at A List Apart recently undertook a web design survey in which, in their own words, “Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.”. Out of those 33,000 only 16.1% were female.

Click here to read the full article

Entry Filed under: Web Design

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I recently took some time to chat with Krupt. This was quite a different interview than the normal industry based questions. Here’s an excerpt:

Ok Larissa, you are quite unique so excuse my intro but I HAVE to try and figure you out. my questions are going to be very weird and diverse…here goes

(Krupt): If your house was on fire, name your top 3 things you would have to grab?
Larissa: Wow, that would suck. I would have to rescue my dog “wicket”, my favorite painting “Hollywood” and my laptop.

U: What turns you on in a guy?
L: Confidence without being cocky.

Read the full chat. Click Here

Entry Filed under: Web Design

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