It’s apparent that you’ve been a great designer for years, but why the recent success?

Good question. I ask myself that all the time! Well the obvious answer is Weightbot. Little did I know that the day I started designing a weight tracker on the iPhone would change my career so drastically. And I think the only reason was that great design was far and few between on the iPhone. People were craving for apps that were polished and well-designed. I couldn’t really break through as a web designer because there’s so much great talent (including you!) getting all the attention.

Favorite 3 typefaces on impulse, even if it’s comic sans or Papyrus. Go!

This is tough, but I’d have to say Helvetica, Din, and Univers. I know, I’m boring.

What is your specialty in your industry?

I guess that would be user interface design. But I’m far from any expert. I’m the Mario in the Super Mario Bros. world. I’m not great at one thing, but average at a lot. I think it has something to do with the way I was raised. My mom is Korean and I grew up in somewhat of a Korean cultural environment. They tend to want to try everything.

Name one of your favorite webbies and why.

Are you speaking of web celebs? My top 3 favorite web designers are Tim Van Damme, Shaun Inman, and Bryan Veloso. I’m not claiming them as the best of the best (although they very well could be). Their work just speaks to me personally. Oh you said one? I probably couldn’t pick one between them.

Tell me a story about Tapbots and how it started.

I was working for Oakley at the time. Paul Haddad (also at Oakley) has been developing Mac software for many years and asked if I was interested in helping him do an iPhone app. He wanted to do a weight tracker just to test the market and I was just excited to give it a shot. I had just finished watching Pixar’s Wall·e a few weeks earlier and had an idea about creating utility “robots” from that scene in the spaceship where you saw all the different defective robots. Everything was smooth sailing from there.

What are your tools of choice?

Behance Dot Grid Books are amazing. If you design interfaces, I highly suggest them. Other than that, I just use Photoshop and Illustrator for 99.9% of my work.

What is the most important skill to possess as a designer?

For me it’s humbleness and the never-ending will to learn and grow. Technology changes so fast. If you want to be useful 10-15 years from now, you really need to keep an open mind. You also have to realize that there are 8 year olds building websites and using photoshop. There’s a new breed of designers coming who will be better, faster, and work for half the price. I’ll never see myself as an accomplished designer. There’s just so much to learn and so much room for improvement.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a baseball player. My uncle in Korea was a famous pro ball player over there. My dad almost got drafted into the majors and his dad knew Ted Williams. It was destiny. But reality caught up with me and I ended up being a designer. Where do I see myself 20-30 years from now? Not sure really. But I have a lot of hobbies and maybe one of them will grow into a new career when I’m older. I’m really into photography these days. Maybe in 20 years I might be good enough to make a 2nd career out of it.

How hard is it to start up a iPhone application design store?

You mean a company? It couldn’t be easier. Apple has made things fairly easy to make a successful business on the app store. That’s assuming you bring the right ingredients to the pot. The App store is very magical in the way it can take our product and put it in the hands of people around the world. Sure the web does the same thing, but in the app store, it’s so much easier.

Any advice to complete noobs on any subject?

If you are a young designer, take risks. Change jobs often (unless you absolutely love your job, of course). Use all that free time you have to learn and grow as a designer. The older you get, the less time you have and the slower your brain wants to work. Keep all your old work around and go back to look at it very 6-12 months. You have no idea how much motivation comes from seeing how much you’ve improved over time. Don’t think you know everything. Every time I think back to my past, I see how ignorant and foolish I was. There was a time when I thought WYSIWYG editors were the best way to build websites and that hand coders were crazy and wasting time.

I see that you love to sketch. Do you have any sketches you’d like to share? Do you use your sketches in prototyping your applications?

I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. In high school and college, instead of taking notes, I was drawing pictures. I wanted to be an illustrator, but didn’t have that innate talent in drawing. My drawing capabilities are based on a lot of hard work. And even then, they aren’t that great. At least not good enough to do as a career. Here’s the last free-form sketch I did. I drew/painted it with a tablet and used a mix between Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop. I ended up using this guy on my website with the intention of having more, but never had the time.

I do sketch when prototyping apps. It keeps me from thinking so much about textures, colors, and shapes. I can focus on general structure and usability.

What is your one passion in the web industry?

Not sure the best way to answer that, but I can say this. The part of being a web designer that excites me the most—the moment in the process that makes me love my job, is when I’m writing the CSS and see my design come to life section by section. I can’t speak for other designers, but that’s the most enjoyable part for me. And I don’t really have an answer as to why.

Dogs or Cats?

Dogs. I’m not a cat hater though. I’d love to have a cat, but I’m allergic to them. They seem pretty entertaining, but to be honest, I always feel like I can’t trust them. Probably because I’ve never owned one. Dogs on the other hand, are just great. I’d be pretty sad if I were allergic to them, but fortunately I’ve been blessed with the ability to live with man’s best friend. My first dog was a chocolate lab. She was great, but stayed with my family when I moved out for college and she died a few years ago. My wife and I have a 3 year old female Shiba Inu now. They are awesome dogs, but need a lot of work. They are almost like wild dogs in the sense that they weren’t bred to be domestic in looks or behavior. Everyone who sees our dog says she looks like a little fox. Anyways, dogs rock and Shiba Inus rock (although they aren’t for everyone).

Thanks for the interview! It was fun.

Epilogue

Mark Jardine has impressed and inspired me in his ability jump ship to the freelance world, to create such pixel-perfect products as well as such innovative products. His contributions to the design world and especially the iPhone world will be the model and inspiration for many applications and websites to come.

I want to thank Mark for letting me interview him. He’s a great soul and a kind fella. If you love Mark Jardine’s work as much as I do, I highly recommend the following links:

• markjardine.com Mark’s personal website
• twitter.com/markjardine Follow Mark on twitter
• radiantmars.com The works of Mark Jardine
• Los Angeles Aiki Kai One of my personal favorite’s in Mark’s portfolio
• tapbots.com Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad’s iPhone app website
• pth.com The website of Paul Haddad, Mark’s developer in arms

Introducing 80+ ridiculously rad social networking icons, made by deft-fingered Haitian refugees, not really… but really. I’ve developed over 80 refined, amazing social networking icons for the top networks around. They’re all the rage with you crazy newsk00l intarweb kids. Use them on your blogs. Put them on t-shirts, coffee mugs, your face-space or whatevs.

Here’s whats you get

The Social Network Icon Pack consists of 40+ 16 pixel x 16 pixel icons and 40+ 32 pixel by 32 pixel icons all in 32-bit PNG format in the following flavors:

View on light background • View on dark background

• AIM
• Apple
• Bebo
• Blogger
• Brightkite
• Delicious
• Design Float
• Digg
• Dopplr
• Email
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Friendfeed
• Gamespot
• Google
• Google Talk
• Last.fm
• Linkedin
• Mixx
• Mobile Me
• Myspace
• Netvibes
• Newsvine
• Openid
• Picasa
• Plurk
• Posterous
• Reddit
• RSS
• Skype
• Stumble Upon
• Technorati
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Viddler
• Vimeo
• Virb
• Windows
• Wordpress
• Yahoo!
• Yahoo! Buzz
• Yelp
• YouTube

Ohh my gourd, these icons are ridiculously rad and ooze awesomenesss Rogie! What can I give you?

Well thank you … you interweb person! Is it Jim? Frances? Hondo? Gertrude? Well, I took a stab at it anyhoo. First, you can tweet about these icons if that’s your bag. If you are seriously overflowing with that much gratitude and love, then please consider donating your old Duran Duran albums, your kid’s lunch money, a gallon of gas, an iTunes gift card, a retro Star Wars T-shirt, something from my wishlist, this wicket maquette, this kid robot hat, this sweet shirt, or really anything you please. In any case, you can donate if you’d like by donating with Paypal by clicking the hyperlink with your mouse.

How are these icons licensed?

If you use these icons, please place an attribution link to komodomedia.com.
Social Network Icon Pack by Komodo Media, Rogie King is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.komodomedia.com.

Wait, where’s the download?

Ok, head on over to the downloads area to click on your download link and that’s it!

The nitty gritty

I claim no right of ownership to the respective company logos and glyphs in each one of these icons. .

Sweet mama, how can this page be so simple, yet so sexy?

Yup, that’s exactly what I said to myself when I saw dConstruct 2009’s newest design by clearleft. I envy them in a very specific way. Simplicity and minimalism. Let me explain.

We all know the kind of sites I design. Detailed and illustrative, but that takes time and often it actually hinders the design. The kind of sites I design tend to be too detailed, and as a result get too busy. The more busy the page is, the more it dilutes the user’s focus and dilutes the experience. I hate this about my design style and my aim is to design sites more and more in the fashion that clearleft does. Simply, beautifully and stunning. Not too much. Not to little.

I love dConstruct 2009’s bold, simple and big style. I love it’s vibrance and quirkiness. I love the speaker view page, with just the right amount of character. I love the fact that the nav isn’t just a horizontal bar. It breaks the mold by offsetting the current navigation item and really ties the whole theme and branding in. It is this type of website that the pros make. This website seems very easy to design. It seems like the design would be very easy to attain, yet it is this sort of site that is hardest to attain, because of it’s striking balance of simplicity and style.

Good job on creating a very inspiring and relevant site clearleft! Your work is an inspiration to me.

And the official winner of the drawing for Tweetie goes to Adam Souders of Elion Design Company. Congratulations Adam and thanks all for the kindness in voting for my site.

Come on down Adam and retrieve your prize! If aren’t on a Mac, I’ll give you something of equal value, say an iTunes gift card or what have you.

Now, onto the leftovers from the MacHeist. I’ll be giving away the following throughout the day, so stay tuned:

• Acorn
• Picturesque
• Kinemac
• The Hit List
• Delicious Library
• Multiwinia

You’ve asked. You’ve begged. Fine, you get it. Here is a revision to the sign in with Twitter and Facebook button set. This time, I’ve included 16px icons, 32px icons and 3-state buttons for signing in with Twitter, Facebook and OpenID. I’ll keep this brief and not rant like I usually do.

Oh, wait! Last bit. Before you download these bad boys, realize that you’ll need to link me back as I am releasing these under an attribution license. If you need different arrangements and can’t link me back, we’ll have to settle it some other way, so contact me. Peace.

Download Social Sign In Buttons & Icons

Social sign in buttons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

As social websites like Twitter and Facebook have become dominant forces in the social network scene and with both networks offering sign-in solutions using either of them, we are going to see “Sign in with…” buttons popping up all over the place. And why not? Why would I want to create yet another account in the account-soup that is the interweb today? I don’t! It’s a heck of a lot easier for me to sign into a site using my Twitter or my Facebook account than it is to go through a lengthy account creation process.

Well, then cool! So as signing in with these websites is becoming more popular, let’s just say that I think that the buttons are not so hot. Let’s face it. I want to click beautiful things. I don’t want to punch some gawdy twitter button that some poor developer with an amazing idea came across on an old geocities design hack’s site. I want that developer to have a beautiful “Sign in with Twitter” button.

Enough of my ramblings, I’ll get to the point. I made signin buttons for both Twitter and Facebook for you guys to use at will. There are 3 button states in each PNG image that you will see in the download: default, hover and press. That’s all! Enjoy!

Download Social Sign In Buttons

Social sign in buttons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

Time for another inspiration post. This post is long, long due. I remember when I first saw Anand Sharma’s work at Dragon Interactive. I was stunned by his clever gradients, pixel precision, cross-fading animation and level of detail put into everything. I remember wrongly thinking that his site used Flash because of the smoothness of his animations, and clever way of producing text shadows. No, he does it all in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Dragon Labs

While I certainly tip my hat to his work on Dragon Interactive, I think everybody, their Aunt Bea, and their pet snake have too :) I’d like to talk about some of the work I’ve seen him doing on an upcoming site called Dragon Labs. Anand has showed me his work as he has progressed with this design.

Bubbles boil up hover effect on a beaker at Dragon Labs.

First let me say, that he has given me a whole new definition of “meticulous.” Everytime I thought the design was complete and looked great, he’s spend another 3 days on it and make it better. His level of detail, perfectionism and devotion to a design is flawless. Every time a revision is made to one of his designs, its for the better and often introduces on more sparkle to dazzle the design. He thinks and researches each one of this designs in a way I’ve never done before. Typically, I start with a canvas and start designing. Anand researches his subject like a Jedi knight preparing for battle, knowing his enemies’ weakness, studying his target, preparing, waiting, until the right moment. This most of all impresses me about Anand. He designs because he loves it. He designs it right. He is meticulous.

I could rant more on process, but I think it important to see what I’m talking about. Anand has made his “sketches” public on his flickr account. There you can comment on his work, view samples from his portfolio and work that he has done on Noisefreak, Girl Gamer, Dragon Interactive and more.

Another thing I have noticed about Anand’s work is how he uses PNG images and scales them for the browser size. With a large resolution monitor, the beakers at Dragon Labs are large and gorgeous. When a user resizes their browser, they are in for a treat. Anand has used percentage based CSS dimensions on the beakers to scale them according to the browser dimensions. What does this mean? Well, other than being ridiculously and insanely rad looking, there is no cutoff. The beakers stay in view and seem placed right on the “shelf” for large and small screens. Awesome. Also, you’ll notice a bubbling effect shown above on the Octopus beaker. No, this isn’t an animated GIF image. This is a frame-by-frame animation of a PNG image of bubbles. You can see three frames of this PNG “filmstrip” here. Too flippin’ cool.

What is Dragon Labs?

YShout Shoutbox Administration Panel at Dragon Labs

Dragon Labs is more than a pretty face. Its a community offering. It’s some of Anand’s best work put out for you to learn from and use in your own projects. Want to know how he did that great crossfading effect on Dragon Interactive? That’ll be there. Want to see an insanely cool implementation of a “pulsing” shoutbox admin panel? Yup, that’s there, and more coming. Anand will be putting quite a bit of his genius work up there, a sort of tutorial-like, one-way blog of sorts.

Follow him

So what do you do with people that have more talent in their left pinky finger than you do in your whole body? Follow the leader. Read their blogs, study them, learn from them, follow them on twitter. You know what to do.

• Follow Anand Sharma (aprilzero) on Twitter
• Dragon Interactive

Deja vu? No, this is a bit different this time around. Last time, I was in a contest hosted by WPWebHost for Coolest blog powered by Wordpress and I won! I gave away everything. That’s right, I gave away all of the prizes and I gave away the money to Intermountain Children’s Home . It was an amazing experience, made possible by you.

I’ll make it short this time. Komodo Media is now in the “Best Wordpress Design Contest” running for best Hand-drawn style. That’s right baby. Komodo Media was all done by hand, no stock graphics here ;) This time, granted I win, I’m gonna keep the cash for a much-needed video card upgrade for my wife and I’s late night habits of video game playing. All I’m askin’ is for a vote.

Vote for Komodo Media →

Looking for the software giveaway? Of course, I am still doing what I promised and giving some software away, but I am not encouraging others to vote and receive the software. Mimi, one of my readers, pointed out that they felt this was unethical, so I will refrain from it anymore. In fact, in order to prove that I mean it, If I win the contest (which it’s looking like I wont), I will give the winnings to the second place. Thanks all for the votes!

I could not be more proud and humbled at this moment. I have a new son, Jackson Titus King, named by his 2 year old brother, Jameson. My amazing wife Toni, gave birth to him at 12:43pm on April 6th, 2009. Here are his official birth stats:

Length

21 inches

Weight

7lbs 9oz

Time

12:43pm on April 6^th, 2009

Hair

Brown

Eyes

Blue-ish?

He looks a ton like his big brother Jameson did at birth. He has the same King family scowl. He has already taken well to feeding and loves to suck on his left hand. Toni tells me that he loved his left hand in the womb as well and it showed on his ultrasounds. He is breathtakingly beautiful and all the doctors and nurses have not hesitated to tell us that. Yes, I’m sure they say that to every new parent, but I’ll take it ;)

Hopefully we’ll be heading out of the hospital tomorrow. You may have noticed the IV in his right hand. He has been in the NICU for a day now as he had a fever when he was born, but that fever has now subsided, thank God. The only issue now has been a bit of a dip in his oxygen levels when he sleeps, but nothing too alarming. We are stoked about getting home and sharing him with his older brother, who will, I’m sure will put Jackson to the test.

Toni is doing well and healing well. She hates any time at the hospital and has been waiting to get out. Any time at the hospital other than for seeing or giving birth to babies is not the greatest time at all so with that in mind, we are thankful we are here for a baby birth, but ready to get out.

Thank you

The biggest thanks of all go to 3 special forces in my life. First, God. Thank you father for answering every prayer that we asked of you. You have given us a wonderful gift in my wife’s health and our new son. You are awesome. Second, my wife. You are my hero. To see how much you have had to deal with in this high-risk pregnancy for our family and to bring us one more child is amazing. You worked incredibly hard to bring this little miracle into the world and you deserve all honor for your love and amazing motherhood. Third, thanks to my son Jameson. You named your little brother Jackson Titus even when your parents had no clue what to name him. You are going to be an amazing big brother.

Also, thanks to all of you who have prayed for, hoped and wished that all went well in this childbirth process. Thank you for your friendship and kind words.

During my month-long stint of full-time freelance work, I picked up a job for andCulture, a company I knew about through a friend I met on twitter, Larry Marburger.

andCulture needed a smooth and silky set of 36 icons for an Adobe Flex web application that they had been working on. I was happy to provide them with this icon set and it was a great learning experience, as it was my very first icon set to design for Komodo Media.

The result, I feel was a very nice looking set and fit well within their application. I was honored to have been able to work with andCulture and Francis Lukesh on this project. View more in the portfolio.