Kim Slawson: Designer & Developer

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Creative

Kim Slawson

Design

Optimized user experience for mobile, web, and print media.

Development

Quickly, accurately iterates from mockup or vision to reality.

Contact Kim to discuss your needs

Profile

A designer and developer proficient in both screen and print media, Kim espouses simplicity and consistency. He speaks for the user, whose needs inform the design and development process from start to finish.

Kim’s work includes websites, product design, print design, logos and branding. He has experience working as a freelancer, with agencies, and directly for his clients. ▌

Strengths

UI/UX design

Kim brings deep, cross-platform expertise in mobile, web, and print design, delivering intuitive, high-impact user experiences tailored to each medium.

Front-end development

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, oh my! Kim is a standards-bearer throughout the whole process. He even dreams in code*. As fun as this sounds (and looks in movies) in real life most of coding is debugging, not exactly the stuff of dreams.

Typography

Typography isn’t just a minor detail of a design, it’s the backbone. Kim sweats the spacing, the rhythm, the weight of every glyph. Bad kerning is a personal affront. Comic Sans? That’s war.

* no, really. He dreamt of vertical floats and combining horizontally-flowed and vertically-aligned elements only to wake up to the reality of poor browser support for layout of CSS-transformed elements.

Portfolio

Selected works including digital design, websites and webapps, print work, and product design.

Colophon

This site was developed in Midcoast Maine with love and care (and plenty of coffee). I couldn’t have done it without the help of the following:

Solarized color palette<br>--><br>Solarized color palette

Precision colors for machines and people. (Thanks, Ethan)

Vim

The ubiquitous text editor. (RIP, Bram)

CSS Responsive Grid Overlay

A lifesaver for making sure that your columns and baseline grids are laid out properly. Go ahead! Try it for yourself on this site:

Baseline grid

Blog

My (very) occasional ramblings.

Filter by tags:

AllDesign Development Philosophy slawson.org

July 2026

Build in Public

What if you shipped the thing before it’s ready? 😱

July 2025

Lorem Ipsum, Reloaded

What if a young hacker wrote placeholder text?

June 2025

New Site, Who Dis?

Same great brand, less jQuery Mobile.

December 2016

Shorthand Stack: Font Shorthands for Consistent Metrics in CSS Font Stacks

Prevent layout inconsistencies across typefaces and platforms.

July 2013

CSS Clock with Connected Hands

Proof-of-concept clock animated with CSS.

February 2013

They Might Be Giants Interview

In which I briefly come out of radio DJ retirement to interview John Flansburgh.

Previously…

Older blog entries are available at the archive

Blog ›<br>Build in Public

Tagged:

Design Development Philosophy

My thesis: If it’s important, build it in public for the world to see.

“But,” you say, “then everyone will see my mistakes!”<br>Yes, they will, and it will make your work better. But the truth is it’s not about the work or the quality of the end product. You will eventually arrive at roughly the same product whether you are building in public or private. The difference is in how it feels. Honestly, if you build something in private, you might not ever even release it.

“What? Why not?” Because of fear.

Fear is the mind-killer. “It’s not good enough.” “It’s not ready.” “It’s not finished.” These are all intrusive thoughts that will stop you from shipping a version 1.0, let alone improving it and polishing your craft.

This advice is less technical than you might expect, and more philosophical. It bypasses those intrusive thoughts by not giving them a place to germinate. When your new thing is out in the world, it’s vulnerable and incomplete and it’s up to you (and others, if it’s open-sourced) to form it and shape it and build it correctly. Iteration is a process that improves work over time. It’s a virtuous circle — a tightly-coupled feedback loop that enhances your output tremendously, pushing it far beyond the original ideas that birthed it.

It’s a psychological trick to keep you motivated and keep you building. It’s a bit of legerdemain, a mental sleight-of-hand that, while not a technical solution or domain-specific skill, will increase your productivity and the quality of your work immensely.

In contrast, the (fallacious) feeling of being entitled to a well-earned rest that a creator gets after putting a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into a project in private acts as a demotivator to improving the project. Counterintuitively, work that is published early and often, flaws, warts, bugs and all, often ends up in a far better state far quicker than work judged too “precious” to publish until it’s “perfect”.

“And who draws a perfect circle anymore?” –Farley Flavors, Shock Treatment

OK, but… what do?

What does this look like in practice? It doesn’t mean...