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!

I believe getting an honest proof approval is one of the most intricate parts of the design process. It’s your first opportunity to collaborate and fully understand the client’s needs. It’s why I’ve written posts about how to use layer comps and reviewed RedMark.

Few things in the design world are more difficult than trying to get on the same page as your client. Let’s be honest, for most of us, communication is not our strongest attribute. So any time a product attempts to improve my communication skills it’s ok by me. This week I got the pleasure of testing out a product that is awesomely simple and helpful!

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.

Elegant Themes provides an interesting alternative to most premium theme sites. For the very reasonable cost of $19.95 per year you get access to all of their premium themes as well as the new ones they create in the future.

I love discovering awesome Photoshop brushes. So it’s good news that I keep learning about new Photoshop brush sites. However, the market for any service can very quickly become over saturated with too much of the same. Despite the volume of these type of sites, I try to give each one a fair shake to see if they separate themselves in any manner.

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 :).Last week, Angie and Robert were kind enough to write a guest post for MyInkBlog.

Blog Action Day is a charitable effort to raise money and awareness of poverty through the efforts of bloggers, podcasters and videocasters. The big day isn’t scheduled to kick off until October 15, however Styletime has gotten a jump start on the day by launching a contest filled with incredible prizes from the design community.

The overall growth of MyInkBlog has exceeded any of my early expectations. I am overwhelmed by how robust and helpful the design community is. This is also a really exciting time for me personally, as I’ve accepted a new job as a web developer for Niagara University.

I often find myself in search of some inspiration when I set out to do a new website. There’s quite a few options out there for website showcases. One, that I would highly recommend is, Best Web Gallery. The website layout is beautifully simple and they feature websites that are thoughtfully picked out.

I’ve been working hard the last couple days on some changes to the site. Most of which, will hardly be noticeable. Nevertheless, I want to constantly be working to improve the look, feel and function of this site. So here’s a quick rundown of what’s been tweaked.

In an effort to further develop MyInkBlog into a thriving design community I would like to open up this post’s comments for your ideas and brainstorming. I would love to hear what you think would make a great tutorial or article.