How have you come to have the success that you’ve had?

It’s only through God’s grace. He’s really just put me in the right places at the right times.

I can’t honestly say it’s been anything I’ve done on my own. I’ve been really blessed to have met some wonderful people, and doors have been opened through them that I never could have expected.

Tell us one thing we don’t know about you.

I’m a sneaker fiend. Working at Foot Locker and its subsidiaries all through high school afforded me the luxury of having a new pair of sneakers every day for a few months.

I’ve cut down to about 25 pairs nowadays.

Name the top tools of your trade. Go!

A sketchbook and imagination. I love to sketch because it’s one of the only mediums where I’m more concerned about getting an idea across than perfecting elements like alignment, colors, or typography.

As far as digital tools go, I’m in Photoshop every day, and probably couldn’t do what I do without it. I also just got into using a Wacom tablet, and I see no signs of turning back!

Name three people that you admire and why.

My wife. From the first time I met her—in fifth grade!—I knew she was a passionate person. Whenever there’s something she’s driven to do, you better believe she’ll get it done. She’s got a really fine sense of people: how they’re feeling, what their body language is saying, how to be empathetic. I’ve learned so much from her about how to love and how to live.

My dad. He’s a very smart man and many people go to him for advice. Whenever I go to him, though, he never seems to actually tell me what to do but instead points me in the right direction to make the decisions on my own. It’s a unique quality to possess both wisdom and humility, but my dad has a great balance of both.

Superman. Flight, strength, speed… What’s not to admire?!

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

Mustardo, Bauer Bodoni and Estilo Text.

Tell me a story about your favorite project you’ve worked on.

In December 2006, I had the chance to travel to Dublin for a project with Happy Cog for Comhaltas, an organization than promotes Irish music and culture. We went with all of our significant others to attend the Comhaltas holiday party.

One night, Emily—my girlfriend at the time—suggested a horse and carriage ride around Dublin Square. She had a chance to see the city already, but because I had been in a training session with the client all day, I hadn’t had the chance to see much of the beautiful city. I agreed to the ride.

About halfway through, I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out the engagement ring we had shopped for months earlier, and popped the question.

Her response? “Hell yeah!”

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

Open-mindedness. And some sick design chops.

What is your biggest passion in life?

Living, of course! As a Christian, I try to claim the promise that we should have abundant life. Although I love what I do for a living, I try not to work too hard. Instead, I love spending time with my wife, family, and friends.

Also, I’ve been a musician my whole life. My other passion is sharing the gospel through music. Until recently, I was a singer/keyboard-player for Philadelphia-based contemporary Christian band Four24. I’m not playing or singing anywhere right now (other than studio work with the band), but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until it becomes a part of my new New York life.

Can you share any hard lessons you’ve learned being a designer?

I think the Art of Clients™ is a difficult one to master. Getting a client to articulate their thoughts in a way that gets you excited often seems like voodoo to me. Listening—not hearing, but really listening—and asking the right follow-up questions take a lifetime of repetition. Occassionally, there will be a client with exceptional communication skills, but interpretation and appropriate action are generally skills you’ll have to work hard on your own to hone.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Happy!

What piece of design work are you the most proud of?

Just yesterday, I started and finished a redesign of my own site that I’m finally happy with. So, new site coming soon! (But beware: I’ve been saying that for the last 4 years.)

Any advice to complete noobs on any subject?

Dear noobs: you can do anything. The end.

One thing I love about teaching is seeing students that think they can do everything. “No need to hire an illustrator, because I can illustrate. Why commission a photographer when I have a decent camera and a good eye?” That’s the kind of mindset that moves mountains.

I’ve been lucky to work on projects where it was feasible to commission illustration or outsource some 3D, but the danger is that it sometimes produces negative and siloed views at one’s own skills. I grew up drawing my whole life, yet because I drew less and less, I started to believe that I actually couldn’t draw anymore. There are definitely people that excel at their trades and there’s wrong with specializing, but believing in the fact that you can do anything can bring a confidence to your work that generates surprising results.

You’ve recently transitioned from Happy Cog, a very highly respected design firm to Big Spaceship, another highly respected design firm. Can you share anything that you have learned from Happy Cog and tell us what you love about Big Spaceship (other than the insanely cool name)?

The most valuable lesson that I’ve learned from working at Happy Cog comes in two parts. Part one: only do work that you stand behind. Part two: fight for work that you’re proud of.

I think the level of work that comes out of Happy Cog is top notch, and the only way to maintain that level of quality is to really be committed to every piece of work that is created. Happy Cog always strives to work with interesting clients doing interesting things, and that has its rewards. Conversely, they aren’t afraid to walk away when there’s a client disregards the fundamental values that make the work what it is.

An insanely cool name implies an insanely cool place, and Big Spaceship more than fits the bill. There were 3 big things that sold me on uprooting my established Philly life and moving to a new city:

1. Big Spaceship’s work is what made me interested in web design in the first place. As you can imagine, being a huge fanboy made it impossible to turn down this offer.
2. Everyone is creative. At Big Spaceship, the term “creative” isn’t reserved for people who know how to use Photoshop. Brainstorming and ideation are a company-wide activity. All ideas are treated as valuable, regardless of where they come from.
3. The company culture is one of experimentation. A lot of our time is spent just figuring stuff out. When people are in this mode 24/7, it produces astounding results, whether it’s for clients or not. For instance, when we were interested in physical computing, we “hooked the Twitter API into a servo motor”, seen here. I’ve got a decent handful of new ideas between my sketchbook, my inbox, and physical objects sitting on or around my desk that will probably soon see the light of day.

Got any samples of your work you’d like to show off?

All the work that I’m proud of—and am allowed to show—can be found at portfolio.danielmall.com.

Epilogue

Dan Mall is an award-winning interactive art director, designer, and developer. He is an enthralled husband, Senior Designer at Big Spaceship, technical editor for A List Apart, and former singer/keyboard player for contemporary-Christian band Four24. Dan writes about design and other issues on Twitter and his industry-recognized site, danielmall.com.

Housing Works, Art Direction & Design by Dan Mall

First, follow Dan on Twitter. I do. You should because he’s awesome. Ok, phew, that is out of the way.

I first came to know of Dan through Twitter through my friend Jesse Gardner (another great designer). The first design I saw of Dan’s was Housing Works, which of course, I was blown away by. I loved it. I loved that it seems original and unique. I loved that it didn’t follow all the trends in the book. It was gorgeous and seemed to tell the story of Housing Works, an organization moved to help prevent AIDS as well as the people it helped. Great direction.

Dan has also been involved with designer-loved organizations such as Mozilla and A List Apart. He’s got a ton of amazing work in his portfolio, but the pieces that really stand out to me are his recent work with Preventiv (view in his portfolio), the website for Four24, Housing Works and Parc Rittenhouse. To me his art direction exudes such a timeless classic nature (a sort of holy grail for designers) with a focus on rich typography and photography. I think it’s safe to say that I’d like to be like Dan one day.

I absolutely loved interviewing Dan. He is such a kind and humble person, always giving glory to God and not himself. It is this quality that I think makes him so great, not good, but great at what he does. He truly is a stunning designer, yet he presents himself in a manner that encourages others at their level. He is careful not to step on peoples pride when assessing their designs, yet ready to give his own opinion when asked in a way which honors the designer. I say he has the Art of Humility™ down. I can’t wait to see what great designs he churn outs next.

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.

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.

Holy flippin’ hamsters, this site is beautiful. I don’t know if I’ve seen a site that I love every “square” inch, but I sure do with Squared Eye. From it’s calming hues, to it’s sexy image preview tool tips, to it’s subtle fading navigation, I love it all!

I love the cartoony, yet professional feel – something that I don’t even know if I know how to nail yet. With it’s generous use of white-space, large fonts, smooth-yet-subtle animations and the whale with ear-to-ear grins (I guess I’m loving hyphens), and gratuitous use of Archer, I dig this site big time.

Do check it out. Do tell them that it is hot. Do make a site that is original, fun and smooth like theirs. Do follow Squared Eye on twitter. Do subscribe to this site’s feed now, ’cause more inspiration is coming. Rock the free world.

RogieKing.com

It is because of this site that I swiftly began construction of my very own site: http://rogieking.com. I think that you will notice the very obvious similarities, yet the ways that I made it my own. I hoped by making this site that I would honor the person whom I was inspired by, yet not dishonor him with blatant rip-offery (if that’s a word ;), and I appear to have honored him by this sentiment he echoed on twitter:

This is what I call inspiration: http://rogieking.com/ Looks great!

Tim Van Damme – link

• TextFlow Online Word Processing

  Pretty interesting looking online flash-based word processor.

• RegExhibit OSX Regular Expression Editor

  The OSX Regular Expression editor and debugger I’ve been looking for.

• Housing Works Beautiful design

  The design for this website is stunning. I love large background websites.

• s3slider jQuery Sliding Image Captions

  A very cool solution for image captions that lay over an image and animate in.

• Ronald Jenkees Electronic music

  One of the most original sounding solo electronic artists out there. Check out “Stay Crunchy”. I can’t wait for his new album!

• Inovat Sweet Looking Portfolio

  Incredibly simple, yet sweet looking portfolio web design.

• Enable path view in OSX Finder

  Haven’t you always wanted to display the full path to the current folder in your Finder window? In terminal, enter the following command:

  defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

  Next, enter the following code to restart your Finder:

  killall Finder

• Creative and Live Tight Minimal Design

  Really clean and tight minimal design. I love the logo and subtlety.

• Space Collective Dark Simple Design

  Beautiful dark website design. I love the typography, color scheme and the block-like grid.

• Carbonica Stunning hand-drawn style

  This site has taken hand-drawn to a new level, complete with hand-drawn icons, headings, navigation and a cool illustrative style.

• Weightbot Website Dark, smooth and metallic

  Weightbot for the iPhone/iPod was cool and so is it’s site. I love the dark, metallic, apple-like style. Gorgeous work by Mark Jardine.

• I AM SECOND Amazing, heart-felt stories

  I absolutely love real stories about what God has done in people’s lives. This site is awesome.

• jQuery Fling Subscribe/Publish event model

  Collin Allen has written a sweet jQuery plug-in that makes it easy to code JavaScript events using a publisher/subscriber model very similar to Flash.

• jCrop jQuery Image Cropping

  Very smooth jQuery image cropping plugin.

• Smooth CSS Image Resizing in IE

  I can’t believe that I’ve never seen this until now. Finally, bicubic interpolation for Internet Explorer with only one CSS rule:

  img {
-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;
}

  Preview:

  

• Dropbox/Leap Scrapbooking Killer online scrapbooking

  Jon Hicks has come up with a very sweet way of scrapbooking all of those screenshots that you’ve been compiling over the times. I think I’ll actually use this one.

Not only are the site designers dishonored by a complete rip-off, but the designer attempting to design by “inspiration” gets their name smeared. The design community can be brutal ;) Honestly, some of these inspired designers have the best intentions. They are starting out and mean the best. I earnestly never want to see a good designer get their name smeared in the name of inspiration.

I thought I’d share with you how I have been inspired by sites, movies and products for my last redesign of Komodo Media, version 4. I hope that through this designers can learn to be inspired by all great art forms around them, but maintain a style of their own.

Base inspiration

Click on a thumbnail for a larger version.

It’s very obvious what Komodo Media version 4 is on the whole. Thematically, its very jungle and islandish in nature. From wood to leaves to toucans to outriggers, it feels like you are lost in a jungle. Thats the intent. My inspiration came from a mixture of a love of Swiss Family Robinson and Pirate/Jungle movies as a child as well as a few visits to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland.

Once I knew the theme, I went around the internet gathering all imagery that I felt represented this theme well. I didn’t want to clone them. No, I just wanted to surround myself by the kind of things that spoke “jungle” so that I could design in that style. It has become a pretty regular process now for me to gather a ton of screenshots or images of inspiration and surround my design with them as I design.

Inspiration in the details

Infinise Design

In earlier mockups of Komodo Media v4, I used tabs that were inspired by Infinise Design’s tabs. I loved the smooth rounded edges that were slightly non-typical in websites I’d seen around the block. I ended up moving to the recessed wood pill-shaped navigation that you see now.

Bear Skin Rug

In earlier versions of the my mockups, I used an accordion style post browser in the right sidebar featuring popular, random and recent posts as well as categories. Something always felt wrong with it and it seemed a bit too narrow as well. My tabbed based solution was inspired by Bear Skin Rug’s beautiful sidebar tall tab implementation. I just loved it.

Command-Tab

As I was working on my mockups for Komodo Media v4, a good friend and fellow designer, Collin Allen was working on the new version of his site, Command-Tab. I was fortunate enough to see mockups of his navigation and fell in love with his hammer icon for his primary navigation. The other icons were nice, but the hammer icon…oooh, I loved it. That one icon inspired a total reworking of my main navigation and helped to inspire my icon, inset in the wood, pill styled primary navigation.

The Guinness Toucan

I like to make my designs mean something, especially my own site. I love Guinness. I was trying to think of a classy way to work Guinness into the site that didn’t scream beer drinker or drunkard. That’s not my bag and its not me. I remembered an old ad campaign that Guinness used to run using a toucan and that was it – I was sold. I quickly reworked my version of the toucan using Fireworks. You can see the Guinness toucan flying in the header, squawking next to my twitter stream, perched atop the outrigger in the footer, and adorned the mail stamp when you use the contact form.

Apple Mail

It’s been said a time or two before. Working in a creative and well-designed environment inspires design. For the longest time, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Finally, I realized why I loved working on my Mac. Every part of the interface feels aesthetically right and those aesthetics inspire me. In this case, I loved Apple’s mail.app icon so much, I designed my contact page stamp to match.

Super Mario Galaxy

At the time of my redesign, I was playing Super Mario Galaxy quite a lot. I love the Mario series and this game was no exception. Once again, I love tying elements of me into my design. I decided to keep this one subtle as well and designed the 5th star rating on my blog posts to be the luma from Super Mario Galaxy.

Veerle’s Blog

I guess one could say that a lot of things about Veerle’s blog inspired this fourth design of Komodo Media. I’m not going to say yes or no to that, but I do know that one element of Veerle’s design inspired me: the calendar icon. So I took her great design concept and made it my own…island style.

Apple iTunes

I guess I’m an Apple tool, but once again I got inspired by another OSX program, iTunes. You’ll find the result of my inspiration in two places. First, the pill shaped search box, albeit a grainy inset wood is inspired by the search field in iTunes. Second, my trademarked uber-awesome foliage-O-meter dons a knob that many have recognized to look very similar to the volume knob in iTunes, with a very different purpose. Apparently I feel that knobs to control the density of the jungle is on par with volume level. *snicker*

Hicksdesign

I’m sure a ton of things about Jon Hicks’ site inspired me during the redesign, however one very obvious inspiration is typography. Gill Sans for headers? Check. Lucida Grande for content? Check.

Inspiration comes from many places and over time. I encourage you to dig deep and look all around you for inspiration for your design. Don’t limit yourself by merely copying a site. Be inspired by others’ work and adapt and rework it to make it your own, bringing recognition to your own skills and honor to whom you are inspired by.

I know this much. Lists like this really help me. I’m typically an out-of-the-loop sort of fella, so by the time I find cool stuff, it’s years later than the crowd. So, maybe, just maybe this will help you stay in the loop:

• The Importance of Icon Metaphors

  I’m already a huge fan of Louie Mantia’s work, but I found this blog article particularly interesting. Learn how it’s not only important for your icons to look good, but speak in a language your user knows.

• LG Streaming Blu-ray Player Ohhh my awesome!

  Blu-ray with no discs? Wha!?!? Unlimited Blu-ray quality movies from Netflix? Wha?!?! Hello, dream-machine.

• URL Shortening Widget & Website For all you social-medians

  URL-shortening for all you Twitter and micro-blogging addicts.

• jQuery Time Pickr

  An incredibly intuitive and clever form time picker jQuery plugin.

• CSS3 Transitions/Animations by John Resig

  A word on CSS3 Transitions/Animations from the JavaScript genius, John Resig.

• Wall Swaps Clever business schwag

  Check this site out, not only for the cool marketing schwag, but a really clever implementation of a corkboard.

• CSS Zen Garden – Under the Sea Hott CSS Zen Garden submission

  This has to be one of the most beautiful CSS Zen Garden submissions I’ve ever seen.

• Make em Proud Runner-up CSS Zen Garden submission

  If under the sea is one of the most hot CSS Zen Garden submissions, this is the runner-up

• @-moz-document

  Style different pages on your domain with @-moz-document. CSS is gonna get sweet if this works cross-browswer.

• FancyBox OSX Content Zooming

  OSX-like zooming for your website for not only images, but iFrame and video content too!

• Google Voice/Video Chat

  Google adds what we’ve all been waiting for. Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.”

• Pixelmator Flippin’ beautiful and vibrant!

  I noticed this site a while back and ran across it a few days ago. What a beautiful site, full of vibrance and killer icons.

• Checkout App Clean site

  Another site I’ve ran across many times. This site also has some great icons and is extremely clean and smooth. Obviously it’s an OSX application. Gorgeous.

• TapTapTap Innovative iPhone design

  I love this site. There’s something about a concept taken to it fullness – in this case, a sushi table. From the chopsticks and tuna to the wasabi and soy sauce to the cutting board, this site rocks. One page, simple, with sweet javascript transitions. Add to that the fact that they are making some of the sweetest iPhone apps out there. In the words of @ridlo, this is the swisstastic hotness.

• Interview with Jonathan Snook The Snook

  Cool interview with the man, Snook himself. Learn about how the masta does it.

• G-Speak Operating System Minority Report is real!

  Thought that OS that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report was impossible and amazing? Check it out for realz.

Being the first of it’s kind on my blog, I have to truly feel this iPhone/iPod app deserves it — and Weightbot does. I’ve been a fan of Mark Jardine’s work for quite some time now and this app is no exception. From it’s uber cute robotic theme to radtastic design to the pixel level, this is one of the few iPhone apps that makes me want to buy an iPhone in Montana even if I couldn’t use it as a phone. Then again, I could always fork out some dough for an iPod touch, even though I’d probably only use it for Weightbot.

If I were to pick two favorite features about the screens that I’ve seen in Weightbot, the first one would be the intro screen with the glowing robot and the second would be the icon. I am a sucker for that icon. It’s hot.

I think that both Mark Jardine (designer) and Paul Haddad (developer) did an amazing job, but only one can truly tell by using the app, which I haven’t yet. I encourage you to first, check out the Weightbot photo set on flickr, next check out the app on iTunes, and last, buy it for your iPhone or iPod touch to keep good designers/developers alive. C’mon…it’s $1.99.

I haven’t been this inspired in a year, or around a year. Well, heck I don’t know how long its been – but the last thing that inspired me this much was sneak peeks of Street Fighter 4’s watercolor-y goodness. I was obsessed with the Street Fighter series as a youngster (maybe it was Chun Li), but enough about that. This post is about Cabel Sasser’s wedding.

When I saw his post about the Wedding design theme “pixel flowers” and nerdery, I checked it out. I loved everything about it. There’s something about a good design taken to the full extent. I’m not just talking a good website here people. I’ve been doing web design so much, that I appreciate so much when design bleeds out to moleskins, print, decorations and more, much less a wedding! Cabel’s wedding made me wish I was a designer, and that my wife was as equally nerdy as me when I got married.

Pixel flower tree invitations.

Pixel tree moleskines for the wedding party.

Pixel art wedding character revisions.

Be prepared to pee yourself with pixel awesomeness when you read about his wedding design. I know I did :) – P.S. That’s a secret.