The earthquake and following tragedy in Japan on March 11th 2011 will forever be a time that we all reflect on the sadness of the events, but also on the energy that the design community poured into helping Japan in any way possible. Today we’re going to look over 100 of the inspiring images that the design community created in support of Japan.

Do you have images you would like to share in support of Japan? Please post a comment, we would love to see them.

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.

Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities is a book that explores logos and branding identity through the eyes of David Airey.

About David Airey

I’ve been following David’s personal blog for quite a while. I love the personality and insight he shares in his postings about his logo design process. He is refreshingly open for discussion, and a genuinely nice fellow, as evidenced by all his thoughtful interactions in the comments section of his blog (which by the way he parlays into a chapter of the book). So when he asked me to take a look at his new book, I jumped at the opportunity.

Look and Feel

When I received my copy in the mail, one of the first things I noticed is that the book is the ideal size for holding and reading. This may sound like a trivial detail, but I like when a book just feels right. The cover sports an embossed logo and ample use of white space, it feels a bit flimsy, but holds up well enough.

Flipping through the book, you’ll quickly notice that a good amount of white space is used throughout. It’s a very quick read at just over 200 pages. The font may be a size too big for my liking, but I did enjoy the readability, and I loved the awesome examples that line the pages.

The Content

The book is separated into 3 logical sections.

• Importance of brand identity
• Process of design
• Keep the fires burning

All 3 sections are interesting and thoughtful, but the highlight for me was definitely the “Process of design” section.

David explains his entire process from brainstorming and research to delivering a finished product. He also shares invaluable advice about how to price and deliver your product. I especially enjoyed the techniques he shares about mind mapping and sketching. This part of the design process is crucial toward creating unique and lasting brand identities. When writing on the topic of sketching, David shares these thoughts.

You learned to draw before you learned how to use a computer. Why? Because it’s easier. It’s less restricting. And it’s more creative. You want a circle here? A stroke there? No problem. Just do it. Translating that same process to a computer requires unnecessary steps that hinder your creative flow.

The book is stacked with real world advice from a very credible voice in the world of design. It’s written in an extremely friendly, easy to read manner. Best of all, many of the discussions are backed by fitting examples that reinforce the principles being conveyed.

Final Verdict

Logo Design Love is a fast read, and an awesome addition to your design book library. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone looking to take their logo designs to the next level. David does a masterful job of explaining all the nuances, of what makes a timeless, iconic brand identity.

If you want to get a taste of the book before you buy it be sure to check out this free chapter. If you already have read through this book, I’d love to get your feedback, feel free to join the discussion below.

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.

Now admittedly the expectations that the iPad is already failing to live up to may be completely self-induced and spurred-on by social media murmurs. It may also be because Apple has this perceived public persona as an industry leader. No matter which way you look at it, the initial reaction shows that the public reception is off to a rocky start, and that is never the way you want to get things going. Even though the iPad launched at half the price it was initially rumored it would cost, which may have also played a part in the public’s inflated performance perception, many still feel it to be lacking.

Apple bills the iPad as bridging the gap between smart phones & laptops, and in the unveiling, Steve Jobs said that the iPad would have to be better in all of the following areas than both smart phones and laptops to be successful. Otherwise there’s no reason for it’s existence.

• Browsing
• E-mail
• Photos
• Video
• Music
• Games
• eBooks

So according to Apple’s founder, if the iPad does not provide a superior experience in each of these categories then it is a superfluous addition to the Apple product line, and unnecessary to the community. And so far, it seems to not be fairing well. Now the iPad has certainly demonstrated some pretty impressive and exciting technological advancements, that will pave the way for the future, but does it really deliver on the promises of the ‘amazing’ and ‘magical’ beat all performance? Not so much.

So What is Missing

Well many of the masses have spoken, and so far, they have been saying some key things are missing from the iPad. Some features that a large segment of the tech-craving public were really expecting to be included once the first release hit the shelves were disappointingly absent from the iPad’s arsenal. Seeming to suffer from a lack of a fixed focus or direction for the tablet, it seems to come up short in several areas where users have been promised greatness. It pushes its way into many areas for sure, but it often lands shy of fulfilling what users have come to expect from such a peripheral, and also what Mr. Jobs told us it would live up to. Here is a bit of a rundown on the reactions en mass.

Where Have All the Flash Apps Gone?

The first major fail that stung not only the online public yearning for this new Apple release, but also stung Apple in their big unveiling presentation, was the lack of Flash inclusion. Apparently, Apple is not a fan of Flash, even though it makes up a high majority of all online gaming and video content presentation. Unreliable? Really? Hello, pot. Apple called, apparently having forgotten their recent reliability issues with the iMacs and Snow Leopard to inform you that you are black. Even if the argument is made that most online based Flash would be unnecessary on the iPad anyway, we say, then don’t bill it as a media center, since a majority of people turn online for their media these days.

The main problem this presents for Apple is how difficult it is to top all other browsing experiences without the use of Flash, given that so much of the web is Flash based. Like it or not, it plays a large role right now in our online lives. We understand why many people do not want flash on their Apple devices since it tends to be glitchy and somewhat of a resource hog. However, if you really want to offer the best browsing experience then perhaps the choice should ultimately rest with the user? It seems the better route would be to at least offer it and let the user decide whether they want to utilize it or not. So while it may provide a better browsing experience than the smart phones, it does not beat a laptop.

High-Tech Finger Painting!

As a drawing tablet, the iPad does not rank that high either, given that you cannot use a drawing utensil on the screen, only your fingers. No stylus and a lack of the standard software that digital artists have come to rely on, basically calls on digital artists seeking to use the iPad as a drawing tool to refamiliarize and relearn what they once knew. Apple made sure that the only software that is compatible with the iPad is proprietary, so the usual tools most designers turn to won’t be able to run on the iPad. So it certainly cannot stand alone as a drawing tablet, despite the drawing demo that was offered in the keynote presentation.

Got Widescreen?…Not if You’re an iPad.

When it comes to the video category, Apple and their media campaign really boasts on the interface of the video player, but it takes more than an interface to make the ultimate video playback user experience. For one, you have to a true widescreen video ratio not the 4:3 aspect ratio that the iPad contains. The images are clear, yes, but if your videos tend to be purchased in the 16:9 widescreen ratio then they will be adjusted to fit, not fully displayed. Again, how does this rank as optimal over other devices.

Also if you were expecting to watch any widescreen movies, then hopefully they are not Flash based, or you are going to be doubly disappointed. But there was not a lot of clarity on whether or not you would be able to play any videos other than those you have acquired through, any guesses…that’s right, iTunes. If it is possible to play other sourced material, there is little wonder why they have remained tight lipped over it, because they are really excitedly pushing the three Apple stores you can automatically access via the iPad to purchase your media from. Cool, maybe, but cool enough? Not likely.

Not Much of a Multi-Tasker!

Another complaint that has initially come to the forefront of the iPad con list, is the devices inability to effectively multi-task. In one of the stronger showings during the keynote presentation, the e-mail feature, which seemed promising, could have been impacted by the iPad’s inability to function on numerous levels at a time. With everything the e-mail app could perform, one that was not demonstrated by Jobs was the inclusion of an attachment. Given the drag and drop functionality that appears throughout the multiple app interfaces, it seems that the attachments would be easy to not only include, but to demonstrate.

Perhaps we are reading too much into this omission, but it seems like in order to be able to drop an attachment in to your e-mail, you might need to be working in multiple apps at once. However, that does not seem to be where this device steps up to the plate. This seems more like where the device twists its ankle on the way up to the plate and never quite makes it up there. Again, this is another area where the iPad does not deliver better performance over a laptop, even though this was not one of the benchmarks Jobs mentioned was a deal breaker. But for techies, this may just break a deal or two and turn some users away.

All Capable Readers Step Forward…Not So Fast iPad!

Jobs mentioned that the iPad’s ebook reader function was another area where it was superior to both laptops and iPhones, but most ebook readers are not using those for the majority of their reading. Not if they are in fact avid book junkies. Fans of ebooks and readers were eagerly anticipating Apple’s contribution to the market, but also have been left feeling slightly slighted by the iPad. You see they were expecting it to not only live up to other readers, but to perhaps surpass them. They were not expecting Apple to compare their apples to oranges to see which made better applesauce, and hype their product as superior.

Perhaps if the comparison was made with other peripherals in that line, then the promise of superior delivery would not have been able to be boasted about as readily. Again, the handy bookstore is neat and all, but it is not enough to outrank other e-readers by far. Going with the backlit option and not offering an e-ink based interface highlights this failure, effectively shining a backlit spotlight as the iPad falls short of fully delivering on this product use directive. For heavy readers, e-ink is the easier on the eyes option that the ebookworms tend to appreciate and prefer.

USB Input & Card Slots A No-Go

Many were expecting easy expansion or at least common connectability with the iPad, but once again, they didn’t get it. With no built in USB connections, and no slots for sim cards to plugin, the iPad does not really deliver on either of those standard extras consumers have come to expect from their comp-related gizmos. Especially one that bills itself as a media center. We tend to expect to be able to connect it with our media hubs (which for a lot of users, means their computer or external harddrives), but this was not a design priority it seems, when they released it into a market saturated with more accessible gagdets and gizmos.

The Proprietary Paradigm

By now, Apple is well known for their tendency to stick only to proprietary software and peripherals, and the iPad furthers this paradigm down to the letter. From the only browser option available being Safari, to the only apps, and perhaps even the media, available on the tablet are the ones from the Apple store. Given that Flash is not going to be playing a part of your iPad gaming experience, new games are in development specifically for the iPad, turning its gaming experience into an impressive one. But a proprietary one. Once again, this does not allow for comparison with other gaming experiences on the laptop and smart phones since they will not be available anywhere else.

And while again, some of the gaming looks intriguing, the motion controls seem oddly similar to the Wii, which as some of you may know if you have played on it requires quite a bit of getting used to, and this may prove to share that burden. Also, with a handful of peripherals and attachments available to complement or complete the experience (i.e. the tactile keyboard peripheral and more) the user ends up having to continue down this proprietary path that Apple loves to push so much to make the most of their new toy.

Long Story Short…

Perhaps they thought the Apple name alone would drive consumers their way, and who knows, it may still go that route. But overall, some of the online populous are feeling the disconnect left by this lack of follow through and forethought. Unless the worse option is true, and they simply wanted users to have to buy a few expensive side-kicks to what some are already dubbing ‘the iPhone you can’t carry in your pocket’, just to make a few extra dollars. When portability is already an issue, do you really want to exacerbate that with additional cargo for your user to have to carry around? Apparently, if you are Apple, you do.

Also, it seems like if you really are billing this as not for your average techie, but more for the common user, wouldn’t common connectivity have been a major focus? The more proprietary it becomes, the less common the user it appeals to. Your average user would want a peripheral that they had more control over, and more crossover capabilities with the other electronic peripherals, especially if they fall under the same ‘media center’ heading that the iPad is supposed to. Also, they would expect their new fancy ‘top of the line’ media center from Apple to at least be compatible with the flawed technology that powers over 70% of the media web users attempt to access. So it doesn’t exactly fit the bill as we have come to know its scope.

While there are some fantastic new tech developments that like we said, may open new future doors, the iPad does not meet Steve Jobs’ modest benchmarks to prove its existence is necessary. And though it may shine in a couple of areas like digital photo albums and the like, does that make it worth its price tag and place in the market? Not according to Apple’s owner, but again, only time will tell at this point. What are your thoughts?

More on the iPad

• Cnet Editor’s Take: Apple iPad
• Apple iPad: The definitive guide (so far)
• Apple iPad: Everything You Need to Know
• Developers, not Apple, will make or break the iPad

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

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

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).

More Shameless Self Promotion

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

• Twitter
• RSS Feed
• RSS by Email
• Flickr

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.

What is Sizzle Anyway?

John Resig and the jQuery team recently released Sizzle, a new CSS selector engine as a spin off from the jQuery project, announcing its release when jQuery 1.3 was made available for download.

The component is a standalone project, thus allowing other library’s owners and developers to collaborate and join the Sizzle development to eventually take advantage of its advanced options and ease of use and implementation. Sizzle supports CSS3 and unicode selectors as well as a number of regular expressions to match the desired element.

The Basics

There’s actually no reason you should learn how Internal or Extension APIs work unless, of course, you want to develop your own plugin, or add support for your library. Though, the Public API is what is really important, at least for now. It’s what you can use to retrieve elements that match a certain regular expression or simply a CSS sleector.

jQuery, including Sizzle from version 1.3 upwards, is one of the most common examples of the great help Sizzle can be for a developer.

The syntax goes something like this

• jQuery (String selector, DOMElement|DOMDocument context)

While using Sizzle as a standalone, it would become

• Sizzle (String selector, DOMElement|DOMDocument context, Array results)

Alternatively, Sizzle can be called passed to an existing array and the results will be appended to that array

• Sizzle.matches (String selector, Array set)

It’s easy to see how helpful a couple of lines of code dropped into almost every package can lend a hand toward dealing with selectors and DOM elements.

Selectors for Dummies

That’s right, this is actually about both jQuery and Sizzle, but most importantly about Sizzle because in the future (since I don’t know any library that already does), there could be other libraries using Sizzle, as it’s open soruce, light-weight (3KB) and easily dropppable into different host libraries.

Apart from the well-known CSS selectors you can make use of, here are some others that struck my attention.

For example

• Sizzle (‘li:nth-child(3)’) // selects li elements which are third child within their list
• Sizzle (‘li:nth-child(odd)’) // selects all odd element within a list (‘even’ works the same way)
• Sizzle (‘li:nth-child(3n)’) // slelects every third li element
• Sizzle (‘li:nth-child(3n+1′) // selects the element after the third li element

A lot more can be done

• Sizzle (‘:option:not(:selected)’) // selects all unselected option elements
• Sizzle (‘select[name=list] :not(:selected)’) // selects all unselected options within the select element named ‘list’
• Sizzle (‘select[name=list] :not(:selected):contains(hello)’) // selects all unselected options that contains the text ‘hello’ within the select element named ‘list’

What Now?

The extension API’s also worth a closer look.

A collection of regular expressions to be used for finding or filtering elements. The name of each of the regular expressions should correspond to the names specified in the Sizzle.selectors.find and Sizzle.selectors.filter objects.

— Sizzle documentation points out

So, in order to add a new find function, you’ll need to add a regexp to ‘match’, a function to ‘find’ and a hook to ‘order’.

Sizzle.selectors.match = { NAME: RegExp }
Sizzle.selectors.find = { NAME: function (Array results, DOMElement|DOMDocument context, bool isXML) }
Sizzle.selectors.order = [ 'NAME', 'NAME2', ... ]

• ‘results’ is the array of results returned from matching your regular expression
• ‘context’ is the DOM element in which you want to search (defaults to ‘document’)
• ‘isXML’ is a boolean value letting you know whether you’re operating with an XML document or not

Basically, what you have to do is find a regular expression that works for your case and add it to ‘match’; create the function in ‘find’; specify the order in which ‘find’ functions should be tried (the typical having ID first, being the fastest and the one with the smallest amount of results — 0 or 1).

Filtering statements are somewhat different. You first need to add a regular expression to the ‘match’ object, a function to ‘filter’ and optionally another function to ‘preFilter’.

Sizzle.selectors.match = { NAME: RegExp }
Sizzle.selectors.preFilter = { NAME: function (match) }
Sizzle.selectors.filter = { NAME: function (element, match) }

An optional ‘preFilter’ function allows you to examine the matched array from the corresponding regular expression and returns a new matched array. This allows you to avoid some of the repetitive processing that might occur in a filter function. The result of the filter function should be true or false (element matches the selector or not); the regular expression passed to the filter function automatically takes into account the results of the preFilter process

Final Thoughts

Yup, this was just the tip of a much bigger iceberg and I invite you all, if interested, to check out some of the (scarce) Sizzle documentation, the (mostly inactive) discussion group, and the jQuery selectors cheatsheat, eventually trying out for yourself what Sizzle is and can do.

A Brief Intro

Most of us in the design community love working on projects, but dread the small rather important details like time tracking and invoicing – at least I do. My lack of zeal for invoicing has led me to look for ways to make that part of the job a little more tolerable. So when the guys over at Billings asked me to check out their invoicing app, I was more than happy to give it a try. Through my exploring, I’ve found that Billings is a simple and professional way to customize and take control of your invoicing.

First Impressions

At first glance Billings is rather sleek and wonderfully simple. During the intitial startup you’ll be asked to step through a setup wizard that will get you up and running quickly. You can add clients via your contacts in your address book or import from Daylite. Which is a cool project manager app from the same folks. No worries, if you don’t add everything you need through the setup wizard, changing these configurations at a latter point is a breeze.

Once you’ve added in a client, it’s easy to start a project. One of my favorite features it the time tracking system. You can start and stop the menu bar timer as much as you need during a project no matter what application you are in. You can also specify an hourly rate, and the invoicing system will dynamically bill the amount based on the time spent on a project.

More Cool Features

For your invoices you can choice from a slew of professional looking templates or upload a customized version (which is definitely the preferred route for branding yourself). Sending out an invoice is just a click of a button. When clients are past due they display in red. Once a client has paid, you can add a payment and Billings will produce a receipt and log all the details. And by the details, I mean Billings will produce elegant reports on everything from top clients to overdue invoices.

If you are billing a client for the same amount each month then the reoccurring invoice feature is awesomely convenient. Billings will give you a reminder the day the invoice is set to be send out, and then its one click to send it out.

The Cost

Many of the other popular invoicing options charge on a monthly basis. I’m sure plenty of you reading this are all too aware of how quickly pay per month apps add up. Billings is extremely reasonably priced at $39.99 per user. As far as I’m concerned, a one time license cost is a huge selling point.

Conclusion

Overall, Billings is a fantastic option for affordable, simple and painless invoicing. That being said, I’d be remised if I didn’t mention that their are a ton of other online invoicing apps worth checking out. I’ve tried or heard quality things about Freshbooks, Ronin and The Invoice Machine, just to name a few. It’s always wise to do your homework and try out a few before committing to the first one you try.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you use for invoicing? Have you tried out Billings? What has your experience been?