Posts by Nathan Sinsabaugh

This week marked the launch of Quipol, an exciting new social polling service that we had the pleasure of working on over the past few months. There’s a sample Quipol below, so make sure you cast your vote.

We’re total UI geeks, and we had a seriously fun time designing the user experience, interface, and marketing website. One of the highlights was the opportunity to apply responsive design techniques to an app. The application of responsive techniques to marketing sites is becoming more of a common occurrence, but is still a relatively new phenomena when it comes to web-based software.

Whether your viewing a Quipol, building one, or visiting the website, you’ll have an experience catered to the device you’re using. Learn a little more about

With everyone and their cousin launching a web startup these days, “Coming Soon” pages are a dime a dozen. These placeholder pages let the world know you’re out there, give interested people a way to connect with you and, if you do it right, incentivize people to spread the word about your endeavor.

From the “Coming Soon” page back, it’s crucial that the experience you create for your audience is well designed.

TweetDig has done a particularly nice job of this. The aesthetic is simple and pleasing, and they’ve added a nice interactive touch: When you enter your email address the beta spot counter increments. Not only is this bit of interactivity delightful, it also communicates the value—via scarcity—of a beta spot, and reassures visitors that their actions are not…

You may have seen my recent post encouraging you to attend re:build, a web design and development conference taking place in Indy on July 29th. Since the moment I first stumbled upon the conference website I’ve been impressed with the the event and eager to attend. As a 5 (or is it 6?) year veteran of SXSW Interactive, I’m pretty sure there’s more to get out of this single day event than two weeks in Austin (sans great barbecue and crazy geek parties).

After a few months of wondering who the masterminds were behind the event, I was fortunate enough to run into one of its cofounders, Tony Dewan. Tony has graciously accepted my…

If you design or develop for the web, and live even remotely close to Indy, attending re:build is not optional.

Check out this list of speakers:

• Ethan Marcotte
• Yehuda Katz
• Neven Mrgan
• Jan Cavan
• Faruk Ateş
• Leah Culver
• Brad Colbow

What more do you need to know? See you there!…

Following up Lauren’s summer reading list, I’d like to suggest that Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design is the one book web designers and developers can’t afford to miss this summer.

Last November I wrote this little rave about responsive web design. The general idea is to use media queries in tandem with fluid layouts and flexible width images/media to create websites that respond in real-time to the size of a visitor’s screen.

It’s pretty cool, and good for your visitors too.

If you just can’t get enough, check this out: Ethan Marcotte is speaking in Indy at…

After a few years of using an iPhone—which I love—it was refreshing to press physical buttons at a gas pump today. And not the crappy kind that you find at ATMs, where they’re super low profile and depress an almost imperceptible amount.

It’s amazing how satisfying tactile feedback can be… each press conveying a real sense of accomplishment

In spite of the recent high profile failures, I remain set on getting as much data off of my hard drive and into the cloud is possible. Below are a few of my favorite subscription services, all of which will save you hard drive space, and the pain of tethered syncing.

• Spotify (music—not available in the U.S. yet)
• Rdio (music)
• SlideRocket (presentation tool)
• Pandora (music)
• Netflix (movies)
• TinderBox (proposal tool)
• Readability (bookmarking and distraction free reading)
• Instapaper (bookmarking and read later — technically you don’t have to pay for this, but if you did, I would)
• Typekit (web fonts)

Bruce Nussbaum’s post on the failure of Design Thinking reminded me of my post from 2009 in which I questioned how much of ‘design thinking’ was intuition and how much was science. My point was that we can’t crush the intuitive and spontaneous aspects of design with statistics and fabricated rationales in an effort to secure a more respectable seat at the business table.

Nussbaum’s claims that Design Thinking failed when CEOs started implementing it as an ‘efficiency-based’ process, and Tim Brown, of IDEO fame, argues that design consultancies utilized it as a ‘process trick.’

Expecting design to be an efficient and linear process is a set up for a let down.

As I said here, intuition–going…

Our recent brand work with Slingshot SEO reached an exciting milestone this week with the launch of the company’s new logo and website. Working with the Slingshot SEO team has been great fun, and we’re super happy with the results.

Slingshot SEO is a leading provider–that’s stating it modestly–of search engine optimization consulting and marketing services. They serve an impressive list of clients and do an incredible job of, as the new tagline says, creating Digital Relevance for Deserving Brands.

We’ve still got some Slingshot SEO stuff cooking, but in the meantime, here’s a quick run-through of the new identity and website.

Visual Identity

The updated logo is more of a re-imagining than a redesign. The old logo had been used as an avatar across…