Dawghouse Design Studio | Web Design and Graphic Design Tutorials, Inspiration and Freebies by Jan Cavan

UI Design Mini Bootcamp

Jan Cavan — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 06:21:46 +0000

I recently gave a presentation at the Southern California Web Designers and Developers Meetup group. I’d have to say, this crowd is awesome! Thank you all for coming out and for being very patient despite the technical difficulties we experienced. Most importantly, a big thanks to the organizer Mario Noble and to SendGrid and Microsoft for sponsoring the event! As promised, here are my slides and the “The Making of Creatibot” time-lapse video.

Every Website or app that we design is an opportunity to communicate important information to our users, extend our reach and communicate the personality of our brand. Following best practices and standard design methodologies are crucial to its success. In this talk, Jan will walk you through the various design processes from wireframing, actual prototyping and visual design in order to create usable, beautiful and memorable interfaces for the Web.

Judging This Year’s Annual Design Awards

Jan Cavan — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:55:56 +0000

I’m stoked to be judging this year’s Annual Design Awards 2012 alongside Ivan Chermayeff and Sagi Haviv of “Chermayeff & Geismar”. Chermayeff & Geismar is a firm known for designing logos for companies like National Geographic, NBC, Xerox, Mobil, PBS, Chase, Showtime, etc. Other judges include notable designers like Elliot Jay Stocks, Fabio Sasso of Abduzeedo and Jacob Cass.

Giving Away 2 Dribbble Invites

Jan Cavan — Thu, 31 May 2012 03:22:22 +0000

Update (06/14/2012): Sorry for making you wait, guys, but my schedule has been crazy! Anyway, I finally got around to picking the winners. They are:
1. Mark of Happy Garaje
2. Tim Berkelmans
3. Victor Beazzo
4. Zhou Zhou

Thanks to everyone who participated. You’re all very talented and I hope I had a lot more to invites to give away, but I’ll post them whenever I get more.

Update (06/14/2012): I scored 2 more invites so I’m giving away 4. Sorry guys but my schedule has been really crazy. I promise to post an update over the weekend. Hang in there guys!

These two Dribbble invites have been sitting in my account for a while. I’ve been meaning to give them away, but never got around to do so and I keep forgetting about it. Today, I just renewed my PRO account and remembered having these two. So to all those who’d like to sign up for Dribbble, please leave a comment (with your name and a link to your work) below. It’s the best way for me to keep track of those who’ve been wanting invites, otherwise, it’ll probably slip through my mind again. And don’t forget to follow me on Dribbble :)

Mobile Web Best Practices*

Jan Cavan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:50:18 +0000

Mobile Web Best Practices is a great resource for those who want to get started and learn more about the mobile Web. "Best practices" is a loaded term when it comes to creating mobile web experiences. It’s a unique context with its own challenges and opportunities. While there’s no silver bullet, this site will help you ask the right questions and help solve problems so you can start creating future-friendly web experiences.

List.js

Jan Cavan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:42:54 +0000

Do you want a 9 KB cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable? Yeah! Do you also want the possibility to add, edit and remove items by dead simple templating? Hell yeah! Check out List.js

F*ck You, Pay Me

Jan Cavan — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:51:28 +0000

"We ended up not using the work", "This isn’t really what we’re looking for", etc., etc. — Are these lines familiar to you? Ever had difficulty getting a client to pay you for the work that you did? Then you will surely enjoy Mike Monteiro’s talk appropriately entitled, "F*ck You, Pay Me"

Font Dragr

Jan Cavan — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:42:53 +0000

Check out Font Dragr, a web app for testing custom fonts right on your browser just by dragging and dropping them! Plus, an additional custom feature is by dragging the Font Dragr bookmarklet onto your browser, you can test any website with any custom font!

CSS Font Stack

Jan Cavan — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:48:37 +0000

A useful resource for font stacks that you can just copy and paste.

Hey Do Me A Favor

Jan Cavan — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:43:59 +0000

Alright, so this is probably a useless resource, but I thought of just sharing it anyway. Remember this popular quote?

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

So if you’re ever angry, don’t say anything. Just send the person you’re angry at this link.

WhatFont Tool

Jan Cavan — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:53:38 +0000

Ever wanted to find out what font has been used on your favorite websites? Well, you could always of course use FireBug and look through this site’s stylesheets, but that’s too complicated. WhatFont is a tool that I’ve been using for a while now and it’s going to do just that with a single click.