Carlos Cuéllar UX Designer

Always fun to visit the Bay Area. This time we went to a wedding in Treasure Island and the views were breathtaking.

Khoi Vinh, designer and blogger at Subtraction.com, interviews digital designers about their careers. Because no one teaches you how to build a design career, it’s interesting to see how these industry-leaders did it… and it’s fun to see how luck and coincidence played an important role for them too.

Recently I had to design my first Windows 8 app. It ended up being fun, but the lack of resources and documentation (specially if you compare with iOS and Android) turned this into a challenging experience. Well I wish I had found this blog post before. Designer Katie Riley writes about her process and frustrations designing for Windows (pretty much the same ones I had) and she also shares some free resources, including an amazing Sketch app template.

In the last few months I’ve been posting links about front-end style guides and related resources. Well, this one has them all. It’s an extensive collection of articles, books, talks, tools and even podcasts about style guides and pattern libraries. I think one of these days I’ll write a longer post about how we wrote the style guide that we use at My Big Campus.

If you use a static site generator like Jekyll or Middleman, Proteus will help you get up an running. It’s a collection of starter kits that will give you a basic foundation for your site: HAML + Coffeescript + Sass + Bourbon + Neat + Bitters… That’s pretty much the same setup I use. If you use Serve instead of Jekyll, this Serve Project I forked a few months ago uses the same components except Bitters.

I wanted to talk about some tools I use so I wrote down a list that I called “Nerd Fun Tools”, but then I found this blog full of nerdy interviews with people talking about stuff they use. I think that’s a better format than just writing a trillion nerdy posts about similar stuff, so I’m going to pretend I’m interviewing myself and I’ll talk about stuff I use.

Read more

This collection of Automator actions is a must for me and it is one of the first things that I install in every mac I use. Some of the things that you can do with them are saving images for web (using Photoshop or Preview), make file names web-friendly, create clean archives, symbolic links and more.

I just migrated the content of this blog to Jekyll. I’ve been using Textpattern as my CMS of choice for years, but I wanted to try something new and my blog is the perfect place to experiment.

The process has been pretty smooth and I’m surprised of how easy it was to migrate the old content, posts and links. I might miss some things from TXP, like having a nice back-end or a search engine built-in, but it should be easier to tweak the design of this site using Jekyll and the workflow is very similar to the one I use at work. I am also hosting this in GitHub Pages, what makes everything even easier.

Anyway, I’m giving this thing a try for the next few weeks. I’ll keep changing things here and there and if I don’t like it I can always go back to good ol’ Textpattern.

Fira Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed for the Firefox OS. Designed by Erik Spiekerermann and Ralph du Carrois, it's been my type of choice in a few projects lately.

If you're not happy with Apple using Helvetica Neue as the default typeface in Yosemite, give this a try. This is a modified version of Fira Sans that works as the default sytem font once it is installed in your fonts folder. Not perfect yet, but getting there...