My job is to craft interactive experiences for users. I plan, design and develop projects that they can easily use and engage with. I use intuition and research to create a path for them to follow. I use my development skills to make it all work. And I top it all off with the visual design elements.

This is why I now call myself an interactive designer. Because I don’t just design one thing – I design the whole experience.

Sales over the past year have been sparse. Priced at only $0.99, I averaged around four sales a day, with peak sales between 20 and 30 during the spring cleaning/moving season. In the year since I started, I’ve only made around $300 total. With development of the app stalled since March and sales declining, I decided this past week to try something: take Box It Up off of the app store and then release it as a free app.

The Result

In just two days Box It Up has received over 3,000 free downloads – more than all downloads completed in the past year – and has skyrocketed to become one of the top 50 Productivity app in the iTunes Store. It’s also been mentioned on numerous websites and forums, and has received a lot of positive feedback from users. With 10 times the amount of free downloads in two days than paid downloads in a year, it’s become clear to me that free apps will have a better chance of success in the iTunes Store than paid apps.

Lessons Learned

Next time launch an app as a free, ad-supported version, with an option for users to upgrade using an in-app purchase. Not only will you get more exposure, but it will be more profitable in the end.

What’s wrong with using a Facebook page as your website? Well to start, it doesn’t have the information I’m looking for. I want to know what the restaurant is like inside. I want to read their menu. I want to know how to make reservations. I want to get the feeling of the restaurant’s atmosphere through the design of their website. But I can’t do all this on Facebook. And the worst part of it all? Using Facebook alone can make it nearly impossible to find your company in Google.

If you’re thinking about skipping the process of building a website and moving entirely to Facebook, think again. People want to find your company online, and they want to learn more about you. But moving to a Facebook only solution might prevent that. Instead, use Facebook as an extension of your online presence – use it as a place to interact and engage with the people who like your company, and offer special promotions to your Facebook followers.

You’ll also find that I’ve separated my personal and business twitter profiles – with more personal stuff appearing on my @designerjohn account, and more business oriented items on the new @eightsixmedia account.

Take a look around and send me any feedback you may have. And as always if your interested in working with me on your next project, request a free quote.

Slicing and Dicing

For years I worked at a web design company that often sliced and coded websites designed by other agencies. I had to learn how to decipher other designer’s Photoshop files, and in a number of cases was delivered entire websites created in Illustrator. The problem? The designers who delivered Illustrator files were not familiar with web design at all – and delivered me print perfect layouts that had to be transformed into HTML. This lead to a number of problems including:

Font Sizes and Font Faces
I had one website that used a 10.5 point serif font that looked amazing when printed on paper, but didn’t translate well to the web at all. Besides being a non-standard font face, the 10.5 points was barely legible on screen. It’s easy to create fonts in Illustrator that look perfect, but they don’t always convert well to the online world.

Layouts that are too Big or too Small
One time I received a layout that had a minimum width of 1280 pixels (too wide for a lot of users) and because of the texture applied to it couldn’t be scaled to be smaller. Another time I had a site that was only 700 pixels wide, which ended up being smaller than what the client wanted, and again was designed without scaling in mind. Yes, this can happen in Photoshop too, but Illustrator makes it easier to make this mistake if your art boards are not setup correctly.

Messy Layers
It’s very easy to add new elements in Illustrator without properly layering them or labeling them. Often times I’ve found all website elements being included on the same layer and not being named properly, which made it nearly impossible to isolate the ones I needed when trying to save them for web.

Pixel Perfection
Saving elements for web in Illustrator often results in less than perfect looking graphics. Corners and edges will often look blurry, and I find slicing graphics more difficult than Photoshop.

Compatibility Issues with Files
Not everybody has the latest and greatest version of Illustrator. I still use CS4, while I have friends who are still on CS2. This leads to compatibility problems when transferring files between different designers, and can often result in design elements changing styles. This is much less of a problem in Photoshop.

CMYK vs. RGB
The default setting for Illustrator is to use CMYK for colors. If this is overlooked, colors will often not match when translated to the web. This causes headaches between you and the client, who often approve designs based on incorrect colors (which are often printed).

Printing Out Designs
My favorite problem of all: print-perfect layouts were often printed out on legal paper and approved by the client without them ever seeing what it would look like on a computer screen. On more than one occasion I was handed a stack of paper with all the different pages of the website printed on them, and was expected to make the website look exactly the same.

Photoshop and Smart Objects

Despite these objections, I do use Illustrator to help me in my design process – and so can you! Elements such as logos, icons, headline text and any other small elements are all created in Illustrator first and then placed into Photoshop as smart objects.

Smart objects give me the ability to scale items up or down without losing quality, and with the quick click of a button I can open those objects inside Illustrator to edit them. Smart objects also work well when placing photos or other large graphics into my designs.

What’s Right For You?

At the end of the day, It all comes down to what’s right for you. If you and your team are comfortable designing your websites in Illustrator, then go for it. But keep in mind that if you’re working with other designers, developers or agencies you might run into problems. All the issues I had with Illustrator nearly doubled the coding time and caused headaches for everyone, which is something all of us should want to avoid.

3D Text
A cool technique for creating 3D text using pure CSS3.

The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People
It can be a struggle to be creative sometimes, and this article does a good job of identifying a couple of habits that help stimulate many creative people.

Shoptoit.ca for iPhone
A company I used to work for – Shoptoit.ca – launched their iPhone app in Canada over the holidays. If you live in Canada and like shopping be sure to check it out, it’s a great resource for finding prices on the go.