Blog of Francesco Mugnai » Jake Mize

25 Pics of Places You Probably Don’t Work @!

Jake Mize — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:12:51 +0000

We are in the process of building a new building for our company and we were all assigned to bring in photos of places we thought were pretty cool. I found a bunch of photos that I thought were really inspiring and meshed a lot of textures and natural elements together that just made for an awesome work experience. Most of these places are probably places you guys don’t work at but if you do feel free to send me an invite to come hang out. Enjoy!

Not all fo these are super fantastical but I think they all represent a very unique work experience. A lot of the photos were pulled from either Flickr or Office Snapshots.

Remember to follow me on twitter @jrmize and also purchase a BoomSkin while you are at it.

Build Your Own iPhone Specific Website

Jake Mize — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:31:58 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some legit content. I have been very busy lately with work, freelance, running BoomSkins, etc. Recently I just finished my first iPhone specific website. It was created in an incredibly short time (less than a week) and generated it’s first sale within 15 minutes of launching, I felt an amazing sense of accomplishment. What I wanted to do was give you guys a brief run down of what I did to create the site, tools that I used, tips that will help, etc.

Beneficial Websites

Tutorial:Building a website for the iPhone

iPhone WebDev

CSS iPhone

Creating the for the iPhone

It was a challenge learning what you needed to do to make things work on the iPhone. First off you have to think about the small screen, flip orientation, fluid widths because of the orientation, load time, etc. Here are a couple of highlights that you need to remember when creating for the iPhone.

Fluid Widths / 100% Widths – you don’t have to use fluid widths but if you don’t, when a user flips their phone sideways your content doesn’t stretch to fill the width. I found that it works best to design so that your buttons, content, images expand based on the orientation. It looks better and it makes for a better user experience.
Load Time – you have to remember that some of your users may be viewing the content on their 3g / edge network. So load times are key, you want the page to load fast so make sure you optimize your images properly.
Large Buttons – people have fat fingers. Even though I have heard that the iPhone has an algorithm that molds the click function based on your usual habits it still makes it easier for the user when your buttons are large enough for them not to miss.
Mobile Detection – You need to have a snippet of code that allows your site to be loaded when a user is visiting with their mobile device.
Text Adjustment – When you rotate your iPhone because the resolution changes your font size increases, it almost seems as though the font size gets bigger. To keep this from happening you can incorporate this snippet of code in your body style -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;.
PNG’s – Make sure you use PNG’s where needed and enjoy taking advantage of transparent PNG’s. Remember you don’t need to test for IE or anything else accept for mobile safari.

I highly recommend that everyone take the next step and create your portfolio, mini site, etc for the iPhone. It is a great learning experience and you will learn a lot about how people may interact with your site as you browse around on it yourself. More and more people are going mobile these days so we need to adapt to this change and create experiences that are beneficial for you and the user.

Enjoy! Follow me on twitter and don’t forget to visit BoomSkins to get your iPod, iPhone, and Apple Laptop protection!

Web Tools – Support Details

Jake Mize — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:51:01 +0000

Hey guys, it has been a while…I’ve been doing a lot of cool stuff lately. Stuff that I will soon post about but for now I just wanted to post something that I came across while browsing the internet. It’s called Support Details, it’s an awesome web application that gives you a lot of basic information about your computer, browser, flash, java, etc. At first glance you may ask how in the world does this benefit me, I know all this stuff on my own!?

Well let me tell you how it can be useful. Say you are working with a client and you send them a link to view the masterpiece website you are creating for them. You know the one that has the huge logo, way bigger than it needs to be and the flash intro with no skip button because, you know, people need to see the intro to their website….you get the idea. And for some crazy reason they can not view the flash or some of your pretty jquery isnt showing properly or maybe they are on the latest IE6 browser that just came out last week. There could be several reasons they aren’t viewing the proper experience. Well all you have to do is send them to Support Details and it will display all the information that may be causing these issues. They can either tell you over the phone or they can save it as a PDF and email it to you.

I think it’s a great little tool that can help the client understand they need to upgrade certain features of their operating system or give you some insight on what you need to change for it work for a more broad audience. Enjoy!

Remember to follow me on Twitter and visit BoomSkins in your free time!

Friday Findings – UI Stencils

Jake Mize — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 07:47:46 +0000

I really didn’t stumble onto this on Friday but it sounds better that Saturdays Surprise, right!? Anyways, if you are a web designer / ninja like me you will probably find these UI Stencils very useful. You can use them to create wireframe websites and throw them like ninja stars (although I don’t really recommend throwing them, maybe just a toss?). Check out these products from UI Stencils.

Oh and remember to follow me (Jake Mize) and Mr. Mugnai on Twitter!

Website Stencil

Website Sketch Pad

iPhone Stencil

iPhone Sketch Pad

iPad Stencil

Throwback Thursday: Vintage Ads

Jake Mize — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:18:23 +0000

Hey guys, it’s Throwback Thursday time!!! What is Throwback Thursday you ask? It’s when you throw back on Thursday, duh!! This throwback is way cooler than the NBA jerseys, and the new old Mountain Dews. I thought I would post some vintage ads so we can reflect back on how sweet and cutting edge the designers were in 2009 1965. Check it!

15 Napkin & Sketch Book Doodlers, Inspiring or Fun?

Jake Mize — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:02:10 +0000

We have all done it, your guilty, admit it! Whether you were bored in class or bored on that last blind date with the Millionaire out in Beverly hills, you were or you are a doodler.

I personally like to draw three legged unicorns riding on surf boards shooting bazookas, but thats just me. Check out what these “professional” doodlers are doing.

30 Fickle Flickers, Say What!?

Jake Mize — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:05:23 +0000

Fickle Filckers?!?! Just like me, I’m sure a lot of you have no clue what a Fickle Flicker is, well neither does wikipedia. Basically, from what I can gather a Fickle Flicker is an origami bank note that displays the currency face and usually some type of hat or garment. They are very amusing to look at and very creative. Hopefully this will spark some creativeness on your end so you can pump out 12 websites tomorrow. Thats the kind of inspiration I bring to the table, remember that!

By the way, I just realized that these things are not called Fickle Flickers, thats just the name of the site they are displayed on. But the name sounds really cool and there is some beautiful content flow going on above, so, I’m going to leave it. Enjoy!

All of the photos come from this website, this way I don’t have to link every single photo. Plus all the photos open in pop-ups, cuz pop-ups are cool!

45 Cash Munny Designs

Jake Mize — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:28:53 +0000

Not sure how many of you are familiar with Munny’s, but they are really cool little figurines that can be modified to your hearts desire. According to Wikipedia (only because the real Munny site was down – but now it’s back up – Get Munny) they are :

A Munny doll is a blank figure the owner can decorate using pens, pencils, markers, paint, and other pigments. A Munny doll is made out of vinyl and has movable joints. The first Munny doll was white, and has since been available in other colors such as black, pink, blue, and phosphorescent green. The figure is housed in a box which includes 4 random accessories that vary from a different series (1 through 4, 4 being the latest) such as a carrot or a hat. The doll also includes one out of a series of collectible coloring books

Here are 45 of the coolest Munny’s I could find. I’m sure there are more but I have to tend to other things like, eating and sleeping. Enjoy!

If you have enjoyed this posting, follow me and Francesco as well as the other authors here on the blog! Enjoy!