iTree

If I only had one piece of art/furniture in your home, this would be the one. Large, stable, and awesome. The iTree has a full range of speakers in back, leaving the rustic bare wood of the tree in the front.

Concrete Dock

This is small, compact, and stable enough to sit your iPod on at your desk or workstation. Who can argue with the coolness of a chunk of sidewalk on your desk?

iPhone Lens Dial

Mobile photographers take heart: You don’t have to haul a big tote of lenses with you to get excellent up close shots. Highly-rated iPhone camera people Photojojo have just the thing.

Arkcanary II

The laws of physics are what make this Gramophone-esque speaker amplifies the sound the natural way. You can fill a room with sound without plugging in a single extra thing.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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We sat down with Jerome and got his feedback about how he handles inspiration, rejuvenates creativity, and got started with design in the first place.

First question, so let’s start with the basics. What prompted you to enter the design business in the first place?
As a young boy I was always very interested in Art & Design; painting, illustrating and drawing. I’ve also always loved puzzles and problem solving, so I was naturally drawn to Graphic Design as a synthesis of the two. Computers and technology are another passion. I was quite fascinated by merging the two; creating computer art, which on a ZX Spectrum was quite a difficult task!

I attended art college then studied for a degree in Graphic Communication. I did pretty well managing to get a first class degree alongside a mildly damaged Liver. The course finished in 1997 and I decided I didn’t really want to go and work for anyone, so I decided to work for myself.

Freelancing for a few local design firms was an easy way to start, it allowed me an element of freedom but still gave me the chance to work with more experienced designers and learn new skills. While I was doing this and my confidence grew I started to attract my own clients. At this point I was still a traditional print designer. As the internet and web design as we know it started taking off I saw an opportunity to expand my skill-set.

There’s sometimes the perception that graphic designers don’t make good web designers… [but] the key is learning and understanding the constraints.

Over a period of a few years I made the transition from print designer to web designer. There’s sometimes the perception that graphic designers don’t make good web designers. Personally I think that’s bollocks. From a purely design point of view you work with the same core skills but within the constraints of a new medium. The key is learning and understanding the constraints. This is what excited me, I’ve always loved learning so I saw the web as a new challenge. As a discipline it’s very new and ever evolving, so theres always something new and interesting around the corner. As the realms of what was possible to build on the web expanded I decided my next step would be to build my own web app.

You are the front-end designer for the Solo App website (editor: insert link) for ThriveApps.com, but what separates you from many web designers is you area also the designer for the app itself. Which came first: Web design or app design, and how did you transition from one to the other?
In a basic sense web design came first. Although ever since I started using the web I had a lot of ideas for web apps floating around in my head. I eventually chose Solo as a project because it was a market that I could understand and I knew there was a need for beautifully designed apps that would appeal to creatives.

For me it was a natural progression, I’d been designing websites with pretty big CMS systems anyway. So the transition from a design and architecture stand-point wasn’t too hard.

In each of our interviews, we focus on The Muse aspect of design – what is inspiring to you as a designer – because everyone has a different starting point for creating. When you feel creatively drained, What do you do to rejuvenate your creativity?
I find starting a project really difficult and often very time consuming. During the process there’s sometimes a point where I seem to consciously avoid sitting down and working at it. Getting easily distracted. This used to really worry me, but now I know it’s just the way my brain works. I like to work on one project at a time so in the background I’m always processing this one problem. There tends to be a point where everything starts to click and fall into place.

I’m alway surfing the net looking at new things absorbing information, this tends to inspire me. Sometimes I go off and do something else to clear my head. I’m always confident that the solution will eventually reveal itself.

Is there any special place(s) you visit to ‘reconvene’ with your muse? (either physically, like a vacation spot, or emotionally, like a certain type of music)
Not really but sometimes I find Reggae helps. Other than that relaxing with friends, having a few beers and spending time with my family.

As designers, we can’t ‘put a lid’ on creativity, but we each handle it differently when it comes to how it arises in every day life. Do you notice creativity springing up in non-work areas of your life? How do you keep it from going overboard? (if it happens to be a problem; for many designers it’s not)
At the moment I’m pretty much focussed and overboard on Solo and our next product Studio. It takes up quite a lot of my thinking time and to be honest cuts quite a lot into my non-work time. When I was designing regularly naming typefaces in posters and magazines was always a quirk, as was trying to guess the Pantone colour of things. Yes, that’s Reflex Blue! Now I do find that I’m a little too neat when I colour in with my kids and I still smell printed things.

Design is a very human, very basic form of communication: Brand designers work out emotional responses to a logo and cultivate the image around a feeling they want to evoke. Interface designers (for either web or app development) find the most intuitive way for the user – the human – to interact with the product. What helps you get in touch with your current future users and provide the best design and interaction you can?
I tend to try and start one on one conversations with our users. We also send out surveys to see what people like and don’t like.

When we first launched Solo I used my gut instinct for quite a few things as I’m pretty typical of our target audience. I got some things right and some wrong but learnt a lot in the process. For Studio and the next version of Solo the process is more structured giving a more refined user experience.

Imagine you have a day to yourself. You have no pressing work commitments, no urgent emails, no deadlines on the horizon (hard as it is to imagine!). The day is your own. How do start the day? What would you spend the day doing to sort of get out of Design Mode for a bit and into Living Mode?
Yes that is quite hard to imagine! If I was completely on my own without the family I’d probably like an easy day reading the paper, going for a beer at lunchtime, playing video games during the day; that sort of thing. If I could wake up somewhere else I’d do the same thing but in a Taverna in Greece or Tapas bar in Barcelona.

I come from a print and web design background – where once I create the design, or at least make it final, it stays pretty much intact through hand off, when the client takes over and project is finished. As an app designer, you are always tweaking the product to make a smoother user path. Do you feel saddened or excited as you watch an initial design – so perfect and seamless – morph over time to match user feedback or scalability?
I feel excited as the app grows and improves. Over the course of our first year we have seen how small changes can enthuse users who will then evangelise about our product. Feedback and iteration are at the core, we can’t be continually developed in a bubble.
I find the feedback process enlightening. It’s great to speak with Solo’s users and find out that they are using the app differently to the way that was intended. Throughout the process I always stick to our design ethos.

Usability doesn’t change; How people use a website or a mobile app today is basically the same way they’ll be using it tomorrow. When things are as nailed down as that, how do you stay on top of originality in your design work?
With Solo I set out to have a unique aesthetic to try and distance us from other apps. The aesthetic came from my print design background and it resonates with our target market. Strong typography, intelligent use of space, visual hierarchy with subtle use of colour all play their part. This is a strong foundation, the originality will now be shown in extending our features and how we include new experiences and technologies.

Last question, three parts, and specifically on app development. Be honest! There are myriad apps for one task, both browser and mobile based – as consumers we have a choice. As an app designer, you notice details, functionality, and user paths – but at the same time you use apps for everyday tasks in your own personal life.

Do you ever find yourself (1) Just using an app as a consumer, not a designer; (2) Using an app as a designer, noticing what you can be inspired by in a future design of your own; (3) Getting sidetracked by others’ interfaces, sort of forgetting what makes your product unique?
I don’t use many web apps as a consumer, the apps I use tend to use in my spare time are iOS apps on iPhone or iPad. At work I tend to try a hell of a lot of different apps to see what people are doing with newer technologies, UI and UX. The influences tend not to have a dramatic effect on what I’d doing. Its more subtle; a transition here, a jQuery plugin there.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Products like the first electronic digital watch (Hamilton’s Pulsar prototype, 1970) to the first wireless remote control (Zenith Space Command, 1956) to the first handheld LED calculator (HP-35, 1972) have brought in new, compact designs of common items and have since created generations of people that simply don’t know what it’s like not to have these things.

In the process they have changed the way we do things; the way we create, problem solve and in many respects, live.

Apple had several hits in this timespan. Here are five products that came from Apple that changed the way we do things today.

LaserWriter (1985)

Desktop publishing wouldn’t exist – or at least, would be years and years behind had it not been for the LaserWriter. On the shoulders of changes in how type is used on computers by both professional designers and home publishers, Apple introduced the LaserWriter printer in 1985. The LaserWriter was not the first laser printer (three had come before it), but it was the first available for the Macintosh.

What made the LaserWriter a true innovation was it’s use of Adobe’s PostScript interpreter, a language that controls page description for the computer. PostScript in the LaserWriter defined fonts as an outline, which let John Q. Public now have almost complete creative control over rotation, size, position and fonts on the page. It could tackle complex pages unlike any other mass market competitor, letting the publisher lay out pages with bitmap & vector images and outline fonts… all at high resolution. The LaserWriter also touted 8 pages a minutes (egads, how speedy!) and printed at 300dpi, and set a standard in industrial design with it’s small, sleek form-fitting case.

After a while, the competition began using PostScript and Apple’s lead in the printer business was minimized to the point they stopped making printers altogether in 1999.

Nonetheless, the era of Desktop Publishing ushered in by Apple with this single device had arrived.

PowerBook 100 (1991)

Design innovations brought about by the PowerBook 100 are industry-standards we accept today. Prior to this single laptop, notebook computers were heavy, clunky things reserved for computer geeks (geeks who would have to work out and stay beefy in order to carry them around).

The PowerBook 100 brought us one single thing that’s just the way things are now: It moved the keyboard up under the screen. In the space where the keyboard used to be (at the front edge of the machine) they put a trackball, and later trackpad. Within months, most other laptops boasted this same layout.

Nowadays, we simply accept this as the way it is. Uniformly, across the board, this is how a laptop should be built.

PowerBook 500 (1994)

This machine heralded a lot of changes that are now in common use industry-wide. The PowerBook 500 had the first touch pad (in that space now available in front of the keyboard, thanks PowerBook 100), the first expansion bay, the first stereo speakers on a laptop, the first smart battery that communicated it’s charge status to the operating system itself. And, just for the eyes the first curved case.

This machine single handedly set the trend for a decade of laptop design and set the technology bar for laptops forever.

Despite bringing in many years of trendy, curvy laptop cases, Apple would later go back to the early days of laptop looks. Notebooks from Apple in the early 21st Century had gone back to the squared style of yore.

iPod (2001)

Mobile music had existed long before the first iPod sold. Digital music had been available for three years before it (Diamond Rio 300, from 1998), but the iPod made mobile music ubiquitous. Granted it took a while to catch on, a problem which Apple tried to solve by also marketing the iPod as a portable hard drive. Along came the Shuffle, the Mini (now Nano) and Touch.

The iPod made it popular to take your music with you. It created the soundtrack for your day (to the detriment of a little human interaction, however). Other companies have tried to dent it’s success, and have only achieved status as second-rate devices – even as their quality and functionality is not in doubt. For most people, there is simply the iPod and No iPod.

Ironically, trends toward touch screen devices have prompted some to speculate the iPod Classic (as it’s now called) is on the brink of extinction.

iPhone (2007)

It isn’t up for argument that Apple was the first to produce a touchscreen handheld device (they weren’t), but the original iPhone in 2007 changed the way we use smartphones today – some have said it made smartphones smart. The iPhone was derided by critics for only having one button (most cell phones until then had more buttons than a late-model Countach had vents). The original iPhone put emphasis on software that runs the device, not the hardware it’s on. Following the success of the iPhone, other big players entered the market, with both popular handsets and operating systems.

It may not have been the first, but few can argue it was the game changer that brought us what we take for granted today.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Writer’s Block tends to appear much less frequently when you have a consistent system you use for making content; and having a system also helps you be happier as you write. So here’s the basic ways you can find things to write about, and a few tips at the end for reducing the mental cramps that strike when you think you’re out of ideas.

1. Interviews

Interview other people who do the same thing you do, and especially those who have a niche in an area relating to your topic. The closer you can stick to a single area of expertise the better, because it gives more precise and more rounded-out content.

Interviews are very good because they bring a different perspective to your blog – which is especially cool if you usually publish content all by your lonesome. Bringing in different ‘voices’ rounds out the flavour of what you write, speaks to different types of people, and is always interesting to read.

Based on my own experience, you may even notice your readers’ time on site going up as you bring in some interviews.

2. Audio/Video Posts

Getting your readers engaged with non-text content is a fantastic (and highly successful) way to increase readership, commenting, and interest in your blog. Don’t be afraid to put your voice or face out there and talk – remember that even if you think you don’t know much, you’re still several steps ahead of most of your readers.

Darren Rowse talks about the importance of creating video content on ProbBlogger in his post, “The Benefits of Creating Talking Head Videos for Your Blog.” Definitely worth watching.

3. How-tos/Tutorials

Providing high-quality tutorials is like giving your readers a manual; it’s something they can learn from and go back to later for reference. Step-by-step instructions force the reader to take some time working through it – which is the best way to learn. Speed-reading never helped when you’re undertaking something serious, and there are no shortcuts to blogging.

Tutorials – either in article or video form (although video tutorials are more popular) – are always a high source of traffic. On design-related blog I publish(ed), those were the articles that always had the most pageviews per month, and most inbound links.

4. Resources & Tips

Chances are, you’ve got a folder of links or a long list of bookmarks (well, if you’re like me you do) of resources that you use regularly – or if not regularly, for a specific if seldom-used purpose. Don’t be shy about sharing your resources. Sharing not only tells your readers you care but also helps the people who operate that resource improve their product… and make it more valuable to you.

True, everyone can Bing It, Google It, or Yahoo It [sic] but if you can gather high-quality resources all into one place it’s very beneficial and time saving for your readers. They may be more apt to bookmark those pages because they can be used over and over again as reference points.

5. Lists*

It’s no joke that lists are popular all over – on design blogs, blogging blogs, even on CNN blogs.
The reason? Lists are very easy to scan, very easy to read, very easy to remember, and very easy to write. In short, if you can put together five or so quality points about a topic you can write a quality post for your blog.

The thing to remember is not to rush things when you write, or you risk being sloppy, or perhaps not including everything you wanted to (it’s hard to remember everything when you’re speed writing… I know, I’ve tried it).

I’m a firm believer in organizing articles by outlines before you sit and write them out as a full-length pieces. These five tips will help you get the basics down fast, and leave the writing and tone of words to you.

Here, These Might Help Too…

If you’ve ever sat down to write, got about half of it done, and then found yourself running dry even on the article you’re still writing, try a few of these tips to either get your brain back on track or prevent it from going off track in the first place.

• Keep a real, live pen and pad next to your computer You can still write faster than you can open Notational Velocity or Stickies or Whatever and type a new idea down. Plus, being able to sketch an idea can often help you remember things better, or visualize it rather than word it.
• Don’t use the browser, email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or phone while you’re writing I’ve come to appreciate the importance of full-screen writing apps, like Ommwriter or Bean’s fullscreen feature (⌘+⇧+F to toggle fullscreen view). Not only can you lose time, but once you come back to your article you either have lost your thought, lost the wording, or at the very least lost your momentum.
• Tell everyone around you not to disturb you Much of the time, a family member, workmate, or other person nearby may not know you’re working – or at least trying to think and concentrate. Let them know when you’ll be writing, recording or otherwise prepping articles and content. Set a timer – for them – and tell them you’re not to be disturbed unless it’s an emergency.

Thoughts? Give me a shout in the comments if you have an idea of your own!

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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I lied. There’s actually 12 themes. Twelve themes that are just as fullscreen and just as awesome as the ten.

Delight

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Fullscreen Photography

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Fullscreen by Graph Paper Press

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Adventure

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ANAN

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CONTRAST

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King Size

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Minimalista

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Panorama

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Photorific

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RockWell

See More ➥

Sideways

See More ➥

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Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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