For the last few weeks I’ve been “unemployed.” Some of you may know that recently I was working with a startup full-time as their design lead. What many of you may not know is that, for reasons out of my control, our investors decided to pull our funding. So is the life at a startup. I knew the risks going into this. I just never would have thought I’d find myself in this position so soon. It’s a bummer really. The time I spent there was an incredible learning experience, not to mention a lot of fun. The team holds no animosity with one another. In fact, one of our biggest disappointments is that we won’t have the opportunity to work with each other anymore.

That being said, I wanted to take a moment to talk a about what’s next for me. As of this week, I’m officially “going solo.” Moving forward I will be focusing my time and energy on full-time freelance/contract work.

For years I’ve considered making this move. Just ask some of my closest friends, whose countless dinners and drinks have been spent weighing the pros and cons. I’ve always craved the independence, but never had the guts to quit a cushy job to pursue it. As much as I regret the series of events that left me in this position, part of me knows that I may never have taken the leap myself.

As with any new venture, I’m nervous and excited at the same time. Even so, I’ve never been more optimistic. I have plenty of work on my plate, and even more in the pipeline.

As always, if you’re interested in working with me, have a question, or just feel like saying hello, please feel free to get in touch.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love @dribbble. It’s really grown into an incredible community of designers and creative professionals. I was really excited for the small Salem, MA based team when they recently announced “Pro” memberships. I won’t go into all of the details (you can learn more about Pro accounts here), but I think Dribbble Pro has the potential to be the place to showcase work online. With the ability to give shots context and/or supplementary assets via attachments, or grouping various shots together as “Projects”, I’m finding more and more that the best representation of my work, process, and style is through my Dribbble account. I’ve tried for years to do this with various iterations of a portfolio site, but something has always had to give. If the work was thoroughly showcased, it inevitably became stagnate as updates where always at the last thing on my todo list. Or, if the work was up-to-date, it was often thrown up haphazardly. Dribbble has already found it’s niche as a place to see what designers are “up to” currently, but it’s quickly growing as a tool for finding work, meeting other’s in your field, and now, showcasing you work in a less superficial way.

With all of this in mind, I’ve recently simplified things a bit. Moving forward, my site will exist primary as place for me to share thoughts, media, etc. (a.k.a a blog) as well as serve as a portal to the various places I “live” online. That’s it. No more long-winded “About” page. You can learn a lot more about me by following me on Twitter, Rdio, or Gowalla than in a few short paragraphs. I’m also trying something a bit more risky. No more dedicated portfolio. If you’re interested in my work, follow me on Dribbble, or check out some of my projects there.

While I understand that convention tells me to hand all this to my visitors in some neat package (particularly one that makes me look good), I genuinely don’t believe that is the best way to get to know me, my work, or my abilities. As someone who gets a lot of work through my site, I admit I’m curious to see how this will affect me professionally. Admittedly, it’s a bit of an experiment, but one I’m hopeful will create a more organic relationship between me, my clients, and visitors in general.

Last year I posted my top ten tracks of 2009. This year was an equally, if not better, year for music, so narrowing down the list was a bit more challenging. Instead, this year I chose to create an Rdio (my new favorite service) playlist featuring some of my favorite songs from the past year. I’m still adding to the playlist, so be sure to check back from time to time.

One note however, “Heat and Hot Water” by ARMS, which was one of my favorite songs this year was not on Rdio. So you’ll have to check it out here.

Hope you enjoy the list, and happy new year!

Lately, there has been a frenzy of praise and complaints for Twitter’s new design. While my personal account (@kevinjohngomez) has yet to see the update (cough, come on, cough), I have had the opportunity to kick the tires a bit with a few of my other accounts. I certainly feel the new design has it’s flaws, but I think it’s critics are giving #oldtwitter more credit than it deserves.

The old Twitter was great (emphasis on “was”), but over the last year Twitter has introduced so many new elements/features (e.g. who to follow, sorting your tweets/mentions, search, lists, trends) that the side bar has become a complete mess of content and actions with little or no hierarchy. The same can be said for actions on a given tweet or user.

New Twitter’s design is not over complicated, Twitter is. This is especially evident when compared to Twitter original functionality. The addition of features have created new usability challenges for the Twitter design team, challenges that until now have had poorly considered solutions crammed into the existing user interface. So while many of us like to think of old Twitter as something pure and simple, it was quickly evolving out of control.

In an attempt to solve this issue, as well as introduce new features common to many Twitter clients (e.g. in-app previews of external content), the designers went back to the drawing board. While I’ll be the first to admit that there are aspects of the new design that are still a mess (e.g. the display of related tweets) the issue is more that the content is unnecessary than it is poorly designed. People love Twitter because it’s a realtime conversation, not because of lists and trends.

Twitter is heading down a dangerous path here. They are on the verge of feature bloat, something that can destroy a good design and turn off even the most devoted users. I’m not saying that Twitter necessarily has a lot of features, but rather more than it really needs. If the designers can’t manage to incorporate these features in a way that doesn’t hinder the user experience, they shouldn’t be adding them in the first place.

At the end of the day, none of this really matters. If Twitter has one thing working in their favor, it’s that many users do not interact with the application through it’s web UI, but rather third party and proprietary apps. Most of this will all blow over once everyone has had a chance to play around with the new design, bitch, and go back to their app of choice. For me, that app is Tweetie, and in the end, Twitter can wow me all they want with their new web interface, but I’m still not going to use it.

I recently set up a Formspring account out of sheer curiosity. To my surprise, someone asked me almost immediately, “What do you think of dribbble.com?” I mentioned in my response that I could write a whole post to answer that one, so here’s what I said.

For years designers have been scouring CSS galleries and showcase sites for ideas and to keep up with trends. This has led to not only the imitation of certain styles and techniques, but entire concepts. Even I’m guilty of spending to long on an “inspirational” site, only to see far to much of it manifesting in my current project. Dribbble is great because it only gives you a taste of what someone is working on. You might see a shot and think, “Wow, that’s a really interesting text style.” From there you might begin to experiment with the technique in your work, integrating rather than imitating. While sites have been striving for years to inspire, Dribbble finally found the right balance.

Another reason I enjoy Dribbble is that it takes the inspiration and critique process and makes it social. Here you’re in a community of like-minded artists who can actually help you generate & evolve ideas. This is rewarding both socially as well as artistically.

Finally, I think Dribbble is just an interesting way to keep people up-to-date with what you’re working on. The same way Twitter has done this for thoughts, and Foursquare/Gowalla for location, Dribbble is another way to express who you are.

Feel free to check out my work on Dribbble.

Recently I spent almost 2 hours “un-friending” over 400 people on Facebook. This incredible length of time was not spend deliberating on the merits of those who I “un-friended,” but rather manually doing the “de-friending.” You see, Facebook sees this action as a negative use of their platform, assuming that the less friends you have, or the more you delete, the less incentive you have to use the service. However, this process in fact can make a user’s experience more meaningful and for me, was just about my last attempt to keep the increasingly irrelevant “social network” a part of my online life.

Lets think back to 2004 (the year I joined Facebook). At the time, most social networks, including Facebook, relied on “connections” (e.g. making “friends”, commenting on eachother’s “walls”) as incentive to use their service. This faired well for a time, as reconnecting with old friends and family was exciting, but eventually the “social” web changed. Being “social” online became more about realtime status and geo-location updates than it did “connections.”

In an effort to keep up, Facebook copied just about every “next big thing” over the last few years. They started with photos and videos (Flickr & YouTube), then copied Twitter (status updates, and Foursquare (geo-location). Each step of the way bogging down their platform with bastardized versions of what has made the modern web great. Now, Facebook is just another feed aggregator serving up content from the over 500 “friends” (or contacts) I’ve made over the years. I use to love Facebook because it was a clean, interactive contact list of practically everyone I’ve ever met. Now it’s a constant feed of photos, videos, and status/location updates that I never asked for. If these features had always been a part of the Facebook model I would never have become “friends” with most of the people I did. I used Facebook to make “connections” and now these connections are flooding my inbox, wall, and feed with garbage I don’t care about. I may have liked the contact info for my grade school friend’s brother, but that doesn’t mean I want to see what kind of pirate they are.

What’s so great about the “follow” model vs. the “friend” model is that I’m not forced to care about the people who are interested in me. This sounds harsh, but it’s true. I don’t expect someone to follow me on Twitter if they don’t find what I have to say interesting or entertaining. So why am I expected to care what you post online just because we met once at a party, or because you dated my girlfriends best friend?

This is why I finally purged so many of my “friends” on Facebook. And while Facebook intentionally makes this process difficult in fear that it will make the experience irrelevant, I would argue it’s a last ditch effort to make the experience relevant at all.

You might ask, “Why not just delete your account if you think Facebook is such a piece of shit?” And believe me, I would love to, but unfortunately it’s a window into a lot of things that are going on with my close friends and family who are not savvy enough to use other social tools. For now I’ve given up on Facebook as a tool for making social connections online, and accepted it for the inferior realtime tool it was never meant to be.

Back in 2008, as a naive college student, I launched Weefolio. It was a basic portfolio builder for all sorts of artist, not just the traditional or techie. I spent the better half of my senior year learning as I built. What resulted was a shiny app with some positive initial feedback, that didn’t do a whole lot. Needless to say, I was stunned as the app gain attention from blogs, and the user base began to grow steadily. What was meant to be a 400-level student project for me, was resonating on some level with the online community.

Inevitably the traffic slowed down, and users began to realize the poorly-built app’s limitations. But something stuck with me. I couldn’t help but wonder why such a simple idea gained so much initial momentum. After all, this was as basic a portfolio builder as they came. What was all the fuss about? I began to look into some of the alternatives.

Currently the portfolio “big guns” seem to occupy two very extreme ends of the online spectrum. On one hand, you have Carbonmade, easily one of the most popular online portfolio apps. Carbonmade makes managing your portfolio fun and simple, while limiting personal creativity and expression in the actual portfolio itself. On the other hand you have apps like Squarespace, a robust & powerful CMS with edge on design & creative needs. I felt that most of these apps we’re either over simplified for their user base, to the extent that they offered little or no individuality, or incredibly customizable and completely out of reach for the non-technical. It seemed like the market portfolio builders should really be focused on were being completely snubbed.

I spent a while thinking about this problem. I had been wanting to rebuilt Weefolio for some time, but I wanted to be sure I came at it differently. I didn’t want to try and wedge into a niche, I wanted to create a niche.

I began using Tumblr a while back, and I couldn’t get over how well they catered to both a technical community (with many user building their own themes) and non-technical community (users using pre-built themes). They seemed to have the best of both worlds. Now, many serious bloggers or developers could argue that Tumblr is not nearly powerful enough to be seen as a serious platform, but it’s not trying to be. It’s trying to be a simple blogging tool with all sorts of great social and customizing tools built in. I decided to approach Weefolio the same way.

Last year, @mcmaloney & I began work from the ground up on an entirely new Weefolio. We launched in April, and just recently pushed a major update. The new Weefolio is not a powerful CMS. It’s not limitlessly expandable. It is what it is, a simple way to manage and display your work online. We made theme building simple, and familiar for those with even minimal technical experience. And we’ve created a theme gallery that we hope to grow in the coming months to meet needs of everyone else in the community.

We’re constantly trying to improve on what we’ve created, and are really excited about where Weefolio is going. We want our users to be involved in the process, so I hope you can check it out. If you love it, please tell your friends. If you hate it, please tell us how we can change that.

Oh, and don’t forget to follow us @weefolio or find us on Facebook!

Just had a startling revelation. As I was browsing my iTunes library I couldn’t help but notice that I tend to acquire most of my music through alternative sources (wink wink, nudge nudge), with a few glaring exceptions. The only music I tend to buy on iTunes are singles, because I’m not interested in the whole album and $0.99 is kind of a no-brainer. This means that the only music iTunes really thinks I’m into is 80s one-hit-wonders and pop guilty pleasures. iTunes must think I’m a chump!

If my life were a movie this part of it would likely be a sequel called “Kevin Goes to London.”

I’m off to London tomorrow, and heading out Monday morning for Knowle Manor with Mint Digital for their annual WebApp Weekender, even though this year it’s actually a week-long event where we’re building iPhone Apps. So technically its really more like App Week. Whatever the case it should be a good time.

You can follow the action at the Weekender blog and here as I’ll be documenting at both.

Anyway…later, America!