New Years won’t be the same without you.

It’s a common question amongst us designers. When was the first time you opened Photoshop? To be honest, I have no idea. I know it was around the age of 9-13, but as for the exact moment – blank. However, I could take an educated guess. It had to have been the day I realized that there was something beyond Photoshop Elements. After all, I was sure designers weren’t making those fancy gradient buttons in a retouching software, right?

Now I do remember my first experiences with Photoshop. It was terrible. I saw all these buttons, but had no idea what they did. I’d click the brush tool and drag, but nothing would appear. I’d draw something with the shape tool and ask myself, that’s it? So I turned off the computer and returned to my sketching book. I’d given up without even trying. “It’s not for me,” I thought. But I was wrong. It was. I just didn’t know it yet. From childhood, I was...

It’s that red circle with a numerical value inside. It’s cool, it’s effective, it’s annoying.

“The Apple Push Notification Service is a service created by Apple that was launched together with iOS 3.0 on June 17, 2009. It uses push technology through a constantly-open IP connection to forward notifications from the servers of third party applications to the Apple devices; such notifications may include badges, sounds or custom text alerts.” – Wikipedia

I love push, to an extent. It gets the job done. It reminds me of the crap I have to constantly take care of: email, to-dos, calendar events, etc. However, there occasionally comes a point when I really feel like throwing my iPhone out the window. Let me explain.

Badge Counts:

1-5 – ain’t no thing but a chicken wing
6-10 – okay, okay, I’ll take care of it
10-20 – gosh, I’m so busy now adays
21+ – FML

I’m now learning that you have to...

Once upon a time, music could only be heard by making it yourself. Then, inovation upon inovation brought us to the record player (phonograph). Then came the casette, compact disc, and now, straight up digital baby! With services like Grooveshark, iTunes, Rdio, and Spotify, listening to your favorite song is now a mere click or two away.

That introduction was solely to mention Spotify, my personal favorite. They have finally brought out the embed feature.

Simply add the Spotify Play Button to your blog, website or social page and light it up with music. You can feature any song, album or playlist. All your fans have to do is hit play to enjoy the music. Totally free. Totally legal. Totally awesome.

Just testing it out.

It’s okay everyone, the white space won’t be flooded with ads.

After a quick chat with my good friend Morgan Allan Knutson, a designer at Google, I finally understood the whitespace. He said, and I quote,

We’re working on it (iterate, iterate, iterate). We’ve also thoroughly enjoyed becoming a whitespace meme.

There you have it folks.

Now, if you want to read an interesting guess at the new meme, check this out. Nifty stuff.

But you know what’s cooler than $600 billion? $1 trillion.

Well, the inevitable has happened. Instagram has been acquired. By who? Facebook. For how much? Reportedly $1 billion. Am I surprised? No. I’m I glad? Not sure.

Every day that passes, we see more experiences being shared through Instagram in ways that we never thought possible. It’s because of our dedicated and talented team that we’ve gotten this far, and with the support and cross-pollination of ideas and talent at a place like Facebook, we hope to create an even more exciting future for Instagram and Facebook alike.

Before today’s acquisition, Facebook’s last purchase was Gowalla. It no longer exists. I believe this was the first fear that popped into the minds of many as they began to see the headline “Facebook Acquires Instagram” make its way through their Twitter stream. I also believe CEO Kevin Systrom thought the same, hence this statement.

It’s important to be clear that...

Codename: Google Glasses has become the new hot tech news (that doesn’t exist). While I believe the idea is great at its core (technology working for you when you need it, then disappearing when you don’t), there are some practical problems to having a circle appear in front of your eye every 17 seconds – on the streets of SF or NYC.

I made the Google Project Glass team a new commercial. I don’t think they’ll like it. – Tom Scott

This parody on YouTube by Tom Scott, shows the current flaws in the system – humorously. Hopefully, before we inevitably order ours in white, these issues will be ironed out.

Okay, okay. I won’t [enter verb here] about The Industry everyday. However, today we hit a milestone – 100 articles. Just saying.

December 12, 2011, Drew Wilson and I launched The Industry – an online media source that covers design focused startups & people. Each month, the site has seen significant growth both in traffic and design community presence.

Today, we’ve partnered with Pulse to include The Industry across their apps. Cool stuff. I’m ecstatic.