hi, my name is chad

In order to remain creative, staying curious and looking for inspiration all around you is crucial, not just in the latest showcase of fashionable WordPress themes. Read a book, perform a scientific experiment, listen to music you haven’t heard before, walk through a new neighborhood, or experience a foreign culture. Widening your horizons beyond your favorite websites and finding more than one source of inspiration is critical to making original, lasting designs.

(Source: uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com)

This my Dribbble shot from yesterday. I am designing a UI set and these are the first 3 elements. Click image or below to view on Dribbble!

http://dribbble.com/shots/283733-Orange-Buttons

I just got to be apart of an awesome project with some of the best web developers I’ve ever gotten the chance to call friends, and one of these guys showed me this little gem!

This is an awesome template that will automatically set up your markup structure, css framework and get you ready for dev in all browsers. The more and more I learn about HTML5, the more and more tools like this speed up the build & overall production. 

Special thanks to Ryan Jarvinen (http://ryanjarvinen.com/) for the hook ups on this awesome tool. Check it out, and look at their resources! The team that built this was thorough and everything is well documented. Happy coding!

Icon Dock has a set of your standard Social Media Vector Icons that they are continuously updating with all the latest goodies. I was stoked to see Spotify, Dribbble and Forrst in their update, amongst many others! I was so stoked on this set (again) that I had to post it as some freebies.

Please give them credit if and when you use their icon set in your pages. You’ll totally recognize this set because I use it in almost all of my projects. They are clean and pixel perfect, and go with most designs/layouts/aesthetics. 

Check out some of the updates below, and hit the download link at the bottom of the post to directly download the goodies. They come sorted by size & in PNG format, but also Icon Dock has included the EPS files! So launch Adobe Illustrator and go to town tweaking this guys. They also have a ton of other cool and super useful resources as well. Check them out!

Current Update:

Stop what you are doing. Right now. Go to http://layerstyles.org/ and go. to. town. In-browser image editing that kicks out your CSS. 

WTF

Go. Now. 

This week’s freebie comes from a sweet lil’ tool I found on the interwebs. I wish I remember who linked me to give them love, but I just quicked sent the clip to Evernote and didn’t grab the source. 

But anyways, for those of us that build the internet, you will instantly understand how amazing this tool is! 

If you don’t get it, then you probably don’t make websites. Or you should stop. 

Click here to start using the Modular Grid Pattern!

This is something even I have fallen into in the past. So negate my usual “I’m smart you’re stupid” tone and let uncle Chad give you some advice.

More and more I’m seeing people start a small business or launch a personal blog or site. And a huge part of this effort is usually to engage and build an audience on a very personal level.

So please listen to me when I say, stop writing about your self in third person! It’s rarely appropriate and it comes off as… Impersonal!

Speak directly to your audience and ask yourself, “how does this content lead to interaction, both online and in person?” If you don’t have a good response, you might not have good content.

You don’t write your resume and cover letter in third person do you? When you blow up, let mashable write in third person about you. For now, you stick to you in the first.