MyInkBlog » Site News

2 Year Anniversary + Huge Giveaway Celebration

Andrew Houle — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:35:06 +0000

Blogs rarely last very long. They age more in dog years than human years, so making it two full years feels like quite an accomplishment. I’m stoked with the progress the site has made and the support from the design community and my sponsors. I’m shocked and humbled it’s already been a full year since the birth of my son, which I shared about in my 1st year anniversary post. He’s healthy and amazingly energetic, he makes me smile constantly, and is just a blessing in the truest sense of the word. Below is a little glimpse of what I mean :)

Some MIB Tidbits, Facts and Musings

I love checking out other blog’s milestone/anniversary posts. It’s nice to see how far they’ve come and where they are headed. In my last anniversary post, I missed the opportunity to share some numbers with you, so I don’t want to make that mistake again. In a style inspired by Little Box of Idea’s Anniversary Post, here are some tidbits, facts and musings about MIB’s first two years.

MIB’s most viewed post remains Design with Swirls and Flourishes with over 305,000 views.
Yes, I do realize most people associate MIB with Men in Black, but I’m lazy enough to still use the acronym quite often.
I started MyInkBlog’s Facebook Page on December 6, 2009. It now has 761 fans (likes, followers, or whatever facebook decided to do with that?)
The name MyInkBlog is a play on words from ink blot to ink blog thanks to a little help from my wife. InkBlog.com was taken so MyInkBlog became the name of choice.
MIB has published over 265 posts from 31 different authors, and we are always on the lookout for new talented contributors.
There have been over 4,995 published comments from you guys. The first such comment was from April DeStefano, a friend of mine.
Akismet has saved me the burden of looking through over 56,000 spam comments. Wow, I love that plugin!
Twitter has proven to be more helpful than my wildest expectations, which isn’t all that impressive considering my early skepticism. MIB now has over 5,800 followers and has been listed 616 times. If you aren’t already, I’d love if you follow along.
I received a tshirt for my post on Adobe Kuler from the folks at Adobe. A gift that my geeky side rejoiced about for long enough to make it a running joke amongst my wife an I.
MIB’s RSS feed climbed over 10,000 a couple times this month, and is currently at just over 9,700 right now.
MIB averages about 6,000 page views daily. The record day was 39,840 set back on May 25, 2009 thanks to the Stumble Effect on 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts.
Over the past year I have developed a real distaste for list posts and have made a conscious effort not to waste your time or mine with more posts like “458 Websites with Purple Robots” (although come to think of it, that may be pretty cool).
Allowing BuySellAds to manage my advertising was one of the best decisions I’ve made with this blog. Time saved is invaluable!

The Huge Giveaway

I promised a huge giveaway, and thanks to some awesome sponsors I’m going to deliver. Two successful years in the blogging world doesn’t come without lots of loyal readers. I could think of no better way to thank you folks, than to give away some incredible gifts. So here is what is up for grabs.

2 Copies of David Airey’s Book – Logo Design Love

An awesome book by David Airey that explores logos and branding identity. You can read my thoughts on this book in the review that I wrote.

2 Copies of Billings

Billings is a fantastic invoicing solution at a reasonable price. They’ve just added an iPhone app making it even more convenient. For more info, check out the review of Billings that I wrote.

3 Licenses of Pixelmator

Pixelmator is a very nice Photoshop alternative at a much better price. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it does have more than enough to do most jobs, and the interface is slick.

3 Licenses of Brush Pilot

Brush Pilot is a fast and easy application for previewing Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements Brushes, built exclusively for Mac.

3 Copies of Digging Into WordPress

Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr’s comprehensive book on building WordPress sites.

5 Cloud Pack Textures from Brian Iannone

This is a premium set of 24 awesome cloud textures.

$9.99 Vector Pack of Your Choice

Go Media has some of the best premium vector packs out there.

3 Copies of the Smashing Book

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design.

How To Enter

I wanted to keep the entry into this contest as simple as possible so the focus stays on thanking all of you. To enter simply drop me a comment below to be eligible to win any of the prizes. That being said, I’d still love it if you friended MyInkBlog on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribed to the RSS feed. The winners will be chosen at random by mysql queries. The deadline to enter is June 7th, 2010, after that point commenting on this post will be turned off. I will announce the winners in a followup post.

MyInkBlog Reinvented, About the New Look

Andrew Houle — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:24:44 +0000

I’ve been chatting up a redesign for MyInkBlog on Twitter and this site for quite some time now. The redesign/rebranding of my blog has proven to be one of the most challenging design jobs I’ve ever had to complete. I’m not at all surprised that most designers are their own worst enemy, and I was certainly no exception to that theory. I mocked up a new design, threw it out, then started again about 5 times before completing the design iteration you’re seeing now. I’m pretty stoked with the final result, but I’ll never be fully satisfied; more tweaks and changes are sure to come.

About the New Logo

The first thing I did when I started to brainstorm for the redesign was to rethink the logo. I figured most of the branding and styling would fall into place much smoother after that. I’m not sure it actually did, but it seemed like a good place to begin.

I was definitely ready for a new logo, the previous one had begun to feel dated, and unoriginal. I wanted something more customized, something that fit my blog’s style and personality a little better.

Out With the Old

In With the New

For my new logo I began sketching on paper, long before I ever opened up a design program. I hashed out a bunch of different ideas before going with Museo for the words ‘My’ and ‘Blog’. The ‘Ink’ portion of the logo is a customized script I created from my drawings. I scanned in my sketch and traced ‘Ink’ with the pen tool in Illustrator. A few more tweaks later, and that’s the new logo you see now.

Typography

One of my ~~main concerns~~ obsessions with the redesign was improving the site’s typography. Site’s like Brian Hoff’s and Elliot Jay Stock’s have always inspired me because of their attention to detail in this crucial area. The aesthetics and readability of a site are so important to me, and most every designer, so being a design-focused blog I really wanted to make some considerable improvements in this area.

Utilizing Typekit

For the headers, I felt that I needed a unique, bold, but simple font. I decided to check into Typekit and look through the awesome new options that are available. Forever limited to web-safe fonts, it was quite liberating to have an exhausting array of choices at my disposal. I eventually selected Ronnia condensed bold.

The sidebar headers are a serif font stack headed by Palatino. Other meticulous decisions were made on spacing, contrasting levels of grays, and the new, more vibrant blue that you see for the links.

Comment Improvements

I also spent a considerable amount of time trying to improve the comments area. After all, you folks and the discussions that you help create, are vital to the health of this blog. I made an effort to improve the styling, and added threaded comments. So you can now directly respond to anyone’s comment.

Having Fun With CSS 3

I’ve spoke often on this blog about how awesome I think the features in CSS 3 are. It rocks that only 17% of my visitors use IE. That gave me plenty of confidence to use styles like rounded corners and box shadows. It’s nice to add a bunch of progressive enhancements knowing that many of you will get to enjoy them.

I didn’t completely ignore my IE users. I added DD Roundies to the corners for most of the divs that needed them, and I did my best to make this site look good in IE 7 & 8. I did run into a few unexpected, frustrating issues, but I suppose those areas will just have to be examples of graceful degradation. As far as IE 6 is concerned, I very consciously did not support it. The joy of running a design-focused blog is that less than 3% of my readers use IE 6. And if sites like YouTube can stop supporting it, then I think MyInkBlog can as well :)

Author Pages

MyInkBlog is far from a 1-man-show. There are a lot of talented authors that drive the content on this blog. I wanted to add more ways to highlight who they are, and what they’ve done. Every author now has an author page with their bio, links, and the articles they’ve written.

Category Navigation & Search

I have future plans to organize the navigation even more efficiently, but for now I’m happy to have the category links in a more prevalent location. I hope that moving the nav to the top of every page helps you find what you are looking for even quicker. In the same breadth of usability I moved the search bar to the header.

Big Ole Footer

I really like the trend of designing big, informative footers on blogs, so I decided to join that club. I figured it was a great place to add some inspiration, twitter updates, friend icons, and site info. The footer was one of the places on the blog that I tried to infuse a little more personality, but I hope that shows throughout the site.

More On the Way

I’ve got a bunch of future plans bouncing around in my head, but if I tried to accomplish everything at once I may never actually launch this redesign. I’ll leave those plans as a teaser for next time. On a side note, this is actually my 3rd version of MyInkBlog, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a screenshot of how terrible the first version looked.

Your Thoughts & Feedback

I’m really looking forward to getting your feedback. Staring at your own design too long makes you blind to the obvious bugs and usability issues that persist. So drop me a comment and give me an honest assessment of what you think. Hopefully I can use your invaluable feedback to improve and refine this design even further.

Best of MyInkBlog, 2009 Wrapup

Andrew Houle — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:59:42 +0000

2009 marked the end of a swift moving decade. For MyInkBlog, it was filled with big statistical growth and lessons learned. I am thankful for all the awesome readers and guest authors that helped make this community fun and possible.

The end of the year is always a great time to look forward and make resolutions (I have plenty of those), but it’s also a good time to look back and reflect on the year that was. Here is a month by month roundup of the 2009 highlights for MIB.

Some 2009 Statistics

Top Post of the Year (193,704 Views) – 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts
2,100,000 Views
110 Posts
8,200 Subscribers

January

A Discussion On Web Maintenance Contracts

I love getting the design community perspective on gray areas of webdesign, and dealing with web maintenance contracts is certainly qualifies. The advice given in this group interview was superbly helpful and a great way to kick off January.

Create A Photoshop Action For Screenshots

I don’t think Photoshop actions get nearly enough pub around the interwebs. They are really useful and powerful, but they are generally treated like the dorky, unnoticed brother of brushes. This tutorial showcased an easy to create action for saving you time when you need to style lots of screenshots.

February

Create a Sleek Pressed Letter Design

February featured a couple of popular tutorials, including this one which showcased how to create a slick letterpress design on a colorful space background. This style was one of the most popular trends of the year.

Design A Fresh Blog Theme On The 960 Grid

This was my first effort at doing a site design in Photoshop tutorial. I actually just finished the coding of this site and plan on releasing the coding followup to this tutorial sometime soon.

March

4 Principles of Good Design for Websites

This was one of the most popular posts I’ve ever had here on MIB. It reached the front page of Digg, which predictably overloaded my (at that time) shared server. This helped push my switch to a dedicated server, I was also introduced to the entertaining, yet blindly arrogant array of comments from the infamous Digg users. Nevertheless, the post was mostly well-received, and it’s one of my personal faves.

April

Design a Realistic Chalkboard in Photoshop

Sometimes it’s just fun to design things in Photoshop. This was a fun little project on creating a realistic chalkboard. The tutorial shows off how to combine simple layer, texture and filter techniques to create a pretty polished piece of digital art.

10 Awesome Free Sans Serif Fonts

This post marked the 1st of a 5 part series on awesome free fonts. Each post showcased my 10 favorite fonts in 5 major categories. The other 4 categories were: serif, script, hand-drawn and grunge.

May

A Showcase of Popular Web Design Trends

A compilation of some of web design trends that made up 2009. See if you agree with some of the trends with saw, and at the very least get inspired by the awesome examples showcased.

June

Left-Brained vs. Right-Brained – The Developer/Designer Paradox

In this post I had some fun with the inherent differences between developers and designers and how that relates to left vs. right brained tendencies. It was interesting to see how many of the readers felt they fell somewhere in the middle.

Logo Inspiration With Clever Typography

I love logos, and it’s clear from the success of logo showcase posts like this one that you do as well. This roundup features logos with clever typography. I focused a lot on logos that make good use of negative space.

July

Add Progressive Icons to Your Site Using :after pseudo-element

This tutorial shows you how to dynamically add icons to your site using the css psuedo element. It’s a really simple way to improve the usability of your site.

August

Managing Your Time: A Design Community Discussion

In this post I reached out to the design community to get some advice about the best practices for time management. Although it’s a skill I’ve yet to master, the incite of other designers proved to be quite helpful.

September

Design a Slick 3D Ice Text Effect

The 3D effects that you can create in Illustrator are powerful. This tutorial is my attempt to experiment and learn some of the possibilities. I also take the text into Photoshop to add some cool (pun intended) textures and filters.

October

3 Powerful Ways To Make Typography Talk On Your Website

Sneh from Little Box of Ideas guest writes this dynamic post on 3 ways to make your website typography more powerful. I love the attention to detail and clear examples that are shown.

Create a Stunning City Skyline Made of Text

In October Ben from Digital Art Empire also droped by for a guest post. His first tutorial of many to come here on MyInkBlog. This tutorial shows you how to use a combination of layer masks and adjustment layers, with some cutting and selection methods to produce a stunning typography cityscape.

November

6 Ways To Take Your Webdesign From Good To Great

This article was somewhat of a continuation of 4 Principles of Good Design for Websites. It turned out to be madly popular in it’s own right (without the help of Digg). In the post I discussed ways and showcased awesome examples of how to make your webdesigns great.

Getting to Know Clipping Masks and Layer Masks in Photoshop

This is a fantastic post that will help you get a better handle on the differences and similarities between layer and clipping masks within Photoshop. In the end, both techniques will be used to produce a cool design and further emphasize how to properly use both types of masks.

December

Building Clout for Your Design Blog The Bard’s Way

Rob Bowen’s writing style is distinctly different and refreshingly original. In this clever post he calls out a post that suggests you “make your online interactions not about the substance and the content that appeals to you or through thoughtful sharing of your true opinions and ideas, but by essentially name-dropping and instigation through automatically taking up opposing stances with the post’s author.”

My Tutorial Featured in MacUser Magazine

Andrew Houle — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:26:48 +0000

I don’t usually do ‘pat on my own back’ style posts, but I really wanted to share this news with MIB readers. Recently, I was approached to contribute a tutorial to MacUser magazine. Needless to say I was humbled, and jumped at the opportunity to be published in the popular UK magazine.

They asked me to recreate a tutorial that I first showcased here on MyInkBlog entitled, Create Photoshop Brushes for Coffee Stains and Splatters. The tutorial teaches users how to create coffee stain and splatter brushes from scratch using Photoshop and Illustrator.

The Spread

Here are some photos of the magazine my tutorial appeared in (the front cover, and the article itself).

MyInkBlog Now on Facebook

Andrew Houle — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:34:20 +0000

About a month ago I finally started a Facebook page for MyInkBlog. It was a long time coming, and has already proven to be quite helpful in communicating with the design community, and sharing the word about MyInkBlog happenings. I hope you’ll consider checking out the page, and joining the group.

More Shameless Self Promotion

As long as I’m on the self promotion bandwagon, here are some other ways you can stay connected…

Other News

I also wanted to remind everyone that we have teamed up with CodeSublime to offer an awesome contest giveaway of a free PSD to WordPress conversion. We are still looking for submissions, so obviously your chances to win are looking awfully good right now. Check out the post details and submit your design for a chance to win.

A Thanks To Our Valued Sponsors

Andrew Houle — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:00:20 +0000

Thanks for the Support!

I’m so thankful for the sponsors here on MyInkBlog! Without their support it would be financially impossible to keep things running. But they serve as more than just a support system for blogs like mine. They also provide very useful services for readers just like you. I thought I should take the time to thank them, and let you know a little about what they offer.

A Little About our Sponsors

Pixel Crayons

Pixel Crayons is a PSD to HTML service offering pixel-precise hand-coded markup services, implementation of designs into various themes/CMS/shopping carts/blogs and website re-coding services.

Wix

Wix is an easy to use Flash website builder with a drag and drop builder. They have free and premier plans.

SonarHQ

SonarHQ is a feature rich survey builder to get useful feedback about user experience. The data is stored and elegant reports are produced.

Clover

Clover is an affordable content management system specifically designed for ministries.

PSD to HTML

PSD to HTML converts your designs into valid XHTML and CSS. They will also create themes and templates for many of the major CMS platforms.

LightCMS

LightCMS is a content management system designed for designers. They offer an easy to use interface for affordable tiered pricing.

Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes offers over 20 beautiful premium WordPress themes coded in valid XHTML and CSS for only $19.95 per year.

MOO

MOO is a printing company. They offer beautiful prints at very reasonable rates.

Castle Ink

Castle Ink offers a wide selection printer ink cartridges at discounted prices.

Host Color

Host Color is a people friendly hosting company that features very affordable shared, VPS and dedicating hosting plans.

Contempo WordPress Themes and Website Templates

Contempo WordPress Themes and Website Templates is the home for a nice selection of creative premium WordPress themes and XHTML templates.

Realize the Web

Realize the Web offers a variety of services based on web design, coding, graphic design and PHP site-specific scripting.

Site Update: Why the Recent Downtime?

Andrew Houle — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:33:32 +0000

Some of you may have noticed that MyInkBlog was down the last couple of days. Unfortunately, when I switched hosts from StartLogic to the awesome guys at Eleven2 I wasn’t able to transfer the domain name as well. So when I canceled my StartLogic account I had no way of knowing that my domain name was about to expire.

I really don’t have anyone to blame but myself. The moral of the story is to pay close attention to your domain renewal. It cost me two days and $160 to get it out of the redemption period.

Other Site News

With the site being down it did give me the chance to work on my redesign. Which is coming along rather nicely. I’m currently coding the HTML and CSS, I’ll be WordPressing it soon. I’m hoping to release the new design in 2-4 months (very tentative). I also got a chance to work on the second part of my tutorial on how to Design A Fresh Blog Theme on the 960 Grid. This second part will be released soon, and it will show you how to code your design in HTML and CSS.

MyInkBlog Turns One + A New Addition!

Andrew Houle — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:08:00 +0000

The Happy New Family!

On May 9, 2009, my wife and I celebrated the birth of our first child! He decided to come see us a full month early, and was less than an hour away from being my wife’s greatest Mother’s Day gift she’ll ever receive!

No shocker here (especially for those of you with kids), but it will take a little time before I can get back into the full swing of things here on MIB, as I happily transition into fatherhood. However, I anticipate that I’ll continue to blog about once per week, and I hope to have some contributions from a few guest writers along the way.

Happy Birthday MyInkBlog

MyInkBlog has grown up considerably since I started this project/experiment 1 year ago. I honestly couldn’t imagine back then, the direction and success of MIB. I began this blog mainly as a lab to further experiment with WordPress. However, it has turned out to be so much more informative and rewarding than I had ever anticipated.

The blog now averages about 130,000 views per month and the rss readership has grown to over 4,000 awesome readers. I have gone through two major design iterations and have been making small, incremental changes since then.

I have plans to continue improvements in both the design and function of this blog this year. Stay tuned for a new logo, header and navigation, all of which is getting closer to being finished.

Thanks For A Great First Year!

Thank you to all the loyal readers and contributors that have made MyInkBlog very enjoyable and rewardable this past year!

Interviewed on Colorburned + Site Update

Andrew Houle — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 03:25:55 +0000

I’m honored to have gotten interviewed by Grant from over at Colorburned this week. His questions cover the gamut from blogging to my workspace. While your over there, make sure to check out Grant’s blog. It continues to grow and impress, as he churns out cool vectors, interviews and tutorials. And if you’d like to learn more about Grant and Colorburned, be sure to check out an interview he did right here on MyInkBlog not so long back.

Site Changes

I’m still in the process of making doodles on scrap paper, so I’m a long way off. But I’m getting excited about the ideas I have for a redesign of MyInkBlog. I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have for how I can improve the blog here. Please feel free to drop me some comments about what you’d like to see changed or added.

Looking for More Contributions

One of the areas I plan to improve with the future redesign is the recognition of the guest authors on this blog. For now I have an “about the author” at the bottom of every post. If you’d like to contribute by writing a guest article or tutorial I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email to info@myinkblog.com. For additional details check out the contribute page.

My Interview at Arbenting!

Andrew Houle — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:11:39 +0000

I just got interviewed by Angie and Robert Bowen over at Arbenting. I’m stoked they asked me, it was so cool. Hopefully, I came up with some interesting answers :). You can view the interview in it’s entirety here.

Last week, Angie and Robert were kind enough to write a guest post for MyInkBlog. Their entry focused on design trends and creativity. It’s a real enjoyable read and can be viewed here.