All Posts in Best Practices

05/09/2018 - No Comments!

Navigation Best Practices — Web App Design 101

Successful navigation orients users and empowers them to move efficiently.

Part One covered Layout Best Practices. Now let’s get into some tips on how to design navigation structures which are both intuitive and predictable, making them more user-friendly.

The purpose of a product’s navigation is two-fold.

  1. Help your user easily get to where they need to be.
  2. Provide visual cues as orientation for where they are now.

The ultimate goal of a navigational structure is for new and returning users to be able to figure out how to get around a digital product easily and efficiently.

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09/29/2017 - No Comments!

Web App Design 101 — Layout Essentials

I’ve been completely focused on designing complex web applications and dashboards for years now and I’m realizing there isn’t much education in this niche. I’m hoping to share some of the essential web application design tips, tricks and design theories with this new series–Web App Design 101.

Hit the comments if there’s anything specifically you’d like me to write about.

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03/22/2017 - No Comments!

Design for Style Guides

How to craft and document modern component libraries

A primary point of contention in the product design to development workflow comes at the point of hand-off. As a project deadline looms, designers are typically scrambling to write specifications and export the necessary graphics to ensure the intended pixel designs are fully realized in the browser. This stage of a project is fairly fragmented industry-wide with each team doing their own thing with their own tooling. It’s a difficult stage that is regularly underestimated in terms of the time needed for proper completion.

In my experience as a product designer, front-end style guides are the missing deliverable at this stage of a product’s development. When supporting teams of developers, a style guide as design documentation is invaluable in contributing to a project’s long-term success.

When supporting teams of developers, a style guide as design documentation is invaluable in contributing to a project’s long-term success.

That said, I’d like to outline my approach to designing component-based systems with style guides in mind. Each project and the folks involved are unique, so be sure to bend and mold this process to your own situation. Design documentation doesn’t need to be perfect or even beautiful. It’s sole purpose functional, to ease the transition from designers to developers.

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02/18/2016 - No Comments!

What makes a product designer?

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While titles in the digital design space continue to be a hot topic of debate, some things remain constant. Designer’s primary disciplines are less and less clear cut as our industry shifts and there is increasing demand for those who can spread themselves thin and touch many aspects of the creative cycle.

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01/08/2016 - No Comments!

Choosing & Charging Clients

If you’re in a product design or strategy role, this article should help you to hone in on who to work with and how to charge them fairly. This applies to those that have made the switch from a simple user interface design role to one who provides product design services.

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Letterpress poster by Erik Spiekermann – website.

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01/07/2016 - No Comments!

Leveling Up: From UI to Product Design

Setting arbitrary titles aside for a moment – this article is really about the transition many designers make between simply designing for beauty and designing for something more. It’s about the true role of a designer in problem solving and how that relates to communication with the client and user.

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12/10/2015 - No Comments!

How Creativedash Uses Boards

Originally published by InVision on their blog.


We’re Creativedash, a team of designers and developers working out of our studio in Roseville, CA. We’re focused intently on creating emotional connections between users and products through beautiful and intuitive experiences. We’re a small, close-knit team with more than a century of combined experience in nearly all aspects of product, from design to development.

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08/18/2014 - 1 comment.

Sass for Web Designers

Wow - another great book from the folks over at A Book Apart. After reading most of the series up until now, I was more than excited to hear of their newest release - Sass for Web Designers. If you’re not familiar with this series of books, I cannot recommend them enough. They are, as told by ABA themselves, brief books for people that make websites. They act as quick, concise reads that can ramp up a new skill for a web designer of any skill level.

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07/16/2013 - No Comments!

Responsive Retrofitting, Case Study

With or without justin productions logo

Recently, I revisited a side project website that I had built for a close friend of mine some years back. I'd originally used WordPress as a content management system; being that my friend had experience with it and an intention of blogging as a creative outlet. Since crafting the original design, I've learned a lot of new & powerful CSS skills. Most importantly, a working knowledge of responsive web design and some advanced CSS3 properties. I'd been looking for an outlet to apply these new skills, and decided to revisit this project.

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