I Made This: Deviant Quarterly Review
A few weeks ago I went live with a brand-new project: The Deviant Quarterly Review is a real-life infographic of the hottest social media stories of the quarter. It’s curated four times annually by the awesome folks over at Social Deviant, where my friend Pavan Bapu works. The graffiti artist, CZRPRZ, painted the mural in...
UX Stuff That No One Really Thinks About [but that can make or break a site]
You should always have a link to the home page and the previous page on every page. True facts: a lot of people browse the web on an iPhone, and the iPhone doesn’t have a back button. Make stuff behave the way that people think it’s going to behave. Don’t make it look like a...
A List of Lists
Three things that happened in the last week that sucked My dog and I both had stomach flu within 24 hours of each other. I don’t even want to talk about it. I went live with a huge client project that’s bigger than anything I’ve ever made before, and the anxiety…oh, the anxiety! Potential security...
Things to Do More Of, In General
Share things digitally instead of printing them. Sometimes you need a piece of paper for something official [like the Social Security Administration or the license bureau], but aren’t email/Dropbox/Evernote/Zoho/Google Drive awesome? Hold on when you’re on public transit. Look a homeless person in the eye, even if you’re telling them you can’t spare anything to...
Faithful Friend: Comic Relief
My dog was very bad. This is his public shaming.
Attention Management, Part 2: Daily and Weekly Routines [In Which Amanda Lee Turns Into Her Dad]
All work and no play makes Amanda Lee a dull girl [who writes crappy markup, eats too much garbage trying to stay awake, gets snippy with her friends, and eventually falls asleep while sitting at her desk].
Attention Management, Part 1: Quitting
A quick administrative note: I started a brand-spanking new job this month and I’m having a blast. I’ll be doing front-end mobile development and design with these lovely folks, who are seriously some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever interacted with. I’m still kind of shocked they brought me on, and I’m working my...
Full Disclosure: I guess you can call me a “serial entrepreneur” now.
My Etsy shop, I Love Life I Love You, has sat unused for almost a year now. And I'm okay with that.
Measuring the Easy Stuff vs. Measuring What Matters
I went to a super-competitive nationally ranked school, and while I valued the education it gave me, it warped my view of what was within the normal range of acceptable intelligence. As a result, I felt an intense need to prove I belonged there, so I became obsessively focused on the minutia of the numbers...
Photos: Our House
I’ve been storing some of my books in my mom’s old train case. Before we had really bought any wall art, I found an old S encyclopedia at a thrift store, so I cut it up and put the pictures in frames. Pictured here: South America, skeletons, sailboats, and space travel. We are not fans...
I Made This: Deeper Context Logo
In the past couple of months, I’ve been helping my good friend Jeremy with his startup. Here’s the logo design we worked on: This is the first logo design that I’ve done that wasn’t super-cutesy and hand-drawn first. The typeface is one of my favorites from the League of Movable Type, and the symbol on...