Recap: The people of Hawaii woke up to a terrifying alert Saturday morning across their phones, radio, and TV screens: “BALLISTIC MISSILE…

I’ve struggled with writing for a long time. I’ve had lots of starts and stops. It’s “time-consuming,” I’m not very good at it, and often, like a chore, I put it off because I have more important things to do. Unlike chores, I don’t eventually have to write. …

Taking a break from writing code. I wanted to quickly talk about the idea of always doing “research.” This came up as a topic on TheDesignSuperpower episode #9, but I wanted to expand on this. For me at least, there’s two kinds of research: user research and competitor research. Both…

Logo development is something I’ve never really done professionally. It’s fun to think about, but I’ve always worked with excellent visual designers and illustrators who know what they’re doing. I thought it would be a fun challenge to do this myself. Of course, coming up with a solid, polished logo…

Voice and tone is an important part of content strategy, especially for an app dedicated to writing. I have to be careful to set the stage for the voice and tone, since a lot of it will be driving the content and appearance of the page. Voice, tone, and visual…

In the process of building Novel Monkey I’ve been referring to many useful articles and resources. For mostly my own benefit, I’ll list all of them in here as a handy resource. Branding Psychology: https://medium.com/@nucreative/the-psychology-of-logo-designs-infographic-fb17ae014d11#.9aogpj835 Brand Styleguide Design: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/designing-style-guidelines-for-brands-and-websites/

It’s not much, and it’s kind of janky—everything is kind of janky, but I decided to throw up a temporary splash page. So there’s that! Now all four of you following this dev blog, go forth to novelmonkey.com and boost my Google Analytics to the teens! Purpose of a Splash Page Initially it seemed quite…

Ok, I’m the kind of person that wants to sit down, think about things, and make sure I design and build it right. It has to be just right, pixel perfect, and the code has to be clean, legible, and functional. I feel like I could write a longer, more…

This is what I wrote from another post: The Grind I kind of understand why they call it the grind now. You’re just doing a lot of work — you’re doing ALL the work, you barely feel like you know what you’re doing, there’s so much to do, you have no idea…