From the desk of Matt D. Smith

If you are a new freelancer, independent designer or developer, or would like to become one, this was written for you. This book has been lying dormant for sometime now. Hopefully, if enough people find it interesting in its current state, that READ MORE

I went on my first ski trip when I was a teenager. It took a solid day to learn the ropes of speeding down a mountain on a pair of sticks, but I was hooked. At that point in my life I READ MORE

I use Dropbox to store 100% of my client work– source files, review folders, inspiration, assets, etc. Anytime I finish a set of designs for client review I send a dropbox link instead of an attachment. Here's the basic structure of my READ MORE

After recently listening to Tim Ferriss' interview with Pavel Tsatsouline, which is fantastic by the way, this quote from Pavel really stood out. "The brightest young people today, what do they end up doing? They end up designing apps. In the 50s READ MORE

A sailboat can’t make any progress without wind, in fact going straight ahead into the wind will get you nowhere. Your boat won’t move forward at all. You move the fastest sailing against the wind. Not directly head on, but READ MORE

And Now, For Our Next Act Teehan + Lax just closed their studio doors and moved into Facebook. Good for them–they've made a big decision. Make sure you read the entire post before you make some snarky comment on Twitter, judging their READ MORE

I just finished my fourth book since changing a key habit over Christmas a few weeks ago. Essentialism, a New York Times bestseller by Greg McKeown, dissects “the disciplined pursuit of less.” The book uncovers ways to focus less on the trivial READ MORE

Twitter friend, Mike, created a shield-like shape (below) in Illustrator and had some issues when scaling it down. The shape was built with multiple polygons that all aligned beside each other to form the final mark. The seam in between the individual READ MORE

When I was 13, I smoked my first cigarette. Maybe it was 14. Either way, I was young. A friend of mine, Billy, was older looking than the rest of us–tall and lanky with a protruding Adam’s apple. He had READ MORE

Another year is in the books so let’s recap. I’ve done this for 2012 and 2013 and looking back on those reviews, I’m so glad I captured the highlights when I did. There’s always the “ohhhh yeah” moments READ MORE

To finish off the device wireframes (iPhone, iPad, and Macbook Pro) created for AIUX, we’re creating the OS X status bar and a Safari title bar. Simple shapes form the backbone of these icons—the wifi symbol consists of circles READ MORE

I’m reading a book, “Revising Prose” by Richard A. Lanham, in which he writes about the imbalance of nouns and verbs in the Official Style, a formal language used to sound more professional. He writes: ...they all build on the same READ MORE