Table of Contents
Why not? I spend most of my days trying to figure out design; whether I’m working with a junior designer trying to teach him/her a certain web design concept or I’m figuring out a stubborn front-end development bug, documentation on what I come across on a daily basis could be of good use to other designers in my field of work.
What to expect
There are three areas of web design in which I mostly focus on:
UI Design
Having designed over 100 websites over the past 6 years and lead a team of 4 designers over the past 3 years, this is an area where my experience stands out. Websites being beautiful is just as important as being functional.
Front-End Web Development
I’ve been coding website’s together since the age of 14; I love this. Being able to put my design brush aside and put on my analytical hat on is one of the parts that I love most about my field. I’m able to bridge that ambiguous gap between design and development from the perspective of both.
UX Design & Testing
Over the past year, I’ve spearheaded a sub-division of my agency that’s focused data driven website design and continuous improvement. I’ve been doing crazy, non-stop, A/B testing of all of my design patterns over a wide range of clients. Needless to say, some of the results I’ve come across have been pretty eye opening in terms of what the status quo is.
Design & Development Team Management
I run a team of 4 designers and 4 developers for an agency in New York City; one which I’ve put together from scratch. The rollercoaster has been breath taking, but the experience has been priceless. I’ll be touching on topics such as hiring, time management, process, & creativity among many others.
Giving back
Since early college I remember coming across website’s like Smashing Magazine & A List Apart and to those blogs, among the dozens of others, I give thanks; thanks for my career and the career of thousands of other designers & developers. It’s because of generous designers like Jeffrey Zeldman & Vitaly Friedman that we are where we are today. I am now returning the favor to the design community.
I'm Julian, a product design leader and developer with a habit for experimenting (I did some cool stuff at Thomasnet.com). I mostly write about what I'm working on related to product design, front-end development, and experimentation.
While you're here, I'm currently in the market for a design leadership gig. If you're interested in working together, hit me up, or feel free to share my resume.
Notes From the Field
Designing Multi-Sided Platforms
A comprehensive guide on designing the experience and growing the engagement of networked markets.
A Pragmatic Approach to Design Principles
How we took our design culture from executive-centric to user-centric with the help of pragmatic design principles.
Server-Side Split Testing for Static Websites
When to use, when to avoid, and setting up your A/B testing stack.
How We Adopted CSS Grid at Scale
From team buy-in to fallbacks, here's the approach we took at Thomas with the implementation of CSS Grid.
Don't Fight The Notch — Designing for the iPhone X
Coming to terms with the notch on the iPhone X and its effect on mobile design.
Lessons Learned After Running 300 A/B Tests on 20 Different Websites
Over the past 2 years I’ve dedicated part of my career to building a conversion rate optimization (CRO) team from the ground up. Here's what I've learned.