acketon

Hi Dima, this looks really good! I see examples for Storybook and Next.js. Would this work with other technologies and configurations? For instance is there a way to point it at an external dev sandbox to capture full page screenshots of an existing site... say a WordPress site or other CMS? I have a use case where I want to test full page screenshots but need the environment that is hosting a copy of the content/database to test against, not just the components used in the pages.

Director of Development | Boston University Marketing & Communications | www.bu.edu/id | Boston, MA | Full-time

We have an opening for a new position as Director of Development in the Interactive Design group of External Affairs. Our team of designers, developers, project managers, writers, strategists, and others build WordPress sites and develop tools and products for the BU community.

See: http://www.bu.edu/interactive-design/director-of-development... for details.

Boston University | Web Developer II | Boston, MA USA

Interactive Design is a piece of Boston University’s award-winning Creative Services group. We are looking for both designers and developers.

Web Developer II:

We are looking for a Web Developer II who’ll contribute to the development and deployment of both websites built with a content management system (WordPress) and static websites. If you’re passionate, conscientious and love to innovate, test, and launch interactive projects from large websites to editorial stories to mobile applications this is the place for you. What you’ll do: You’ll work with the project team to fulfill requirements based on scope, wireframes, and design comps, optimize code within the code base, collaborate on QA testing and bug-fixing, and assist with implementation and deployment. You’ll collaborate with other developers, designers, project managers, and photographers to build complex functionality–all while being around some really nice people. You’ll determine appropriate tools, methods, and solutions for projects, help inform project scope, and estimate effort to inform project managers in setting project schedule and deadlines. If you want to work with a creative team of professionals to develop engaging, results-oriented online products for high-visibility, high priority areas of Boston University, we want to hear from you!

See full descriptions and apply: http://www.bu.edu/interactive-design/join-our-team/

Boston University | Lead Designer | Boston, MA USA

Interactive Design is a piece of Boston University’s award-winning Creative Services group. We are looking for both designers and developers.

Currently hiring: Lead Designer, Web Developer II, Web Producer.

Lead Designer: If you’re passionate, conscientious and love to concept, design, prototype, test, & launch interactive projects from large websites to editorial stories to mobile applications, this is a place for you. You’ll work closely with a team of copywriters, project managers, photographers, and developers while ensuring the project meets high standards of quality and addresses the client’s strategic goals. All while being around some really nice people.

What you’ll do:

You’ll work on designing interactive projects of many different sizes and complexities. For some of our largest, and most immersive projects you’ll take the lead and create great sites like the College of Communications (http://www.bu.edu/com), or Questrom School of Business (http://www.bu.edu/questrom). You’ll design stories like this one about searching for new physics at the LHC (http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/new-physics-large-hadron...) or explain climate change lessons from Venice (http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall14/lessons-from-venice/).

* Participate in all aspects of the interactive design process: Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Experience, Visual Design, and Frontend markup.

* Collaborate with developers to build complex functionality.

* Supervise the work of collaborating team members to ensure that client and institutional branding objectives are achieved;

* Maintain a state-of-the-art understanding of current and emerging tools and technology.

* Design both small to large university sites and longform, highly interactive, narrative editorial stories for several in-house editorial channels.

* Create great design, while still having a life beyond the office.

See full descriptions and apply: http://www.bu.edu/interactive-design/join-our-team/

Online grocery delivery is still only in limited, typically wealthy areas and is still more expensive. I think it also caters to people buying higher priced items such as more expensive meat or seafood, where the cost of delivering it is a small percentage of the value. Let's assume for a box filled with $5 and $10 items such as chicken, steak, coffee, etc that the delivery cost is $0.25 or $0.50 per item... that might not be a big deal for people here. But say you're buying boxes of $1.00 Rice in a box, or cans of beans and the cost of delivery makes a bigger difference in your cost per meal.

Items sold in online grocery services are also marked up higher than they are in stores, for example: "Celeste Frozen Pizza is 99-cents at ShopRite, $1.29 at Peapod and a whopping $2.69 at FreshDirect"(source: http://6abc.com/archive/8983520/)

It also assumes that people can be home for the delivery, neighborhoods like this might not be the type where you want $50 to $100 worth of groceries sitting outside your apartment building.

Making the actual payment is another thing to consider. Not everyone has credit or debit cards. It looks like online grocery sellers also can't legally accept EBT, Wic or other food programs for online grocery delivery: https://www.facebook.com/notes/peapod-delivers/why-we-dont-a...

Online groceries require planning, time, and at least for the foreseeable future will come at a premium cost. It's great for certain people but I hope it does not become the only option for groceries.

It's not just he car... most of these cities are not affordable to live in when you have kids. A 1 or 2 bedroom is fine for a young & single worker or a young couple. But bigger apartments have been converted into dorm style living in many cases since rents have shot through the roof.

Many cities like Boston, NY and SF are trying to add affordable housing but that seems to be either a few units for very low income people or micro-units that are just a couple hundred square feet. Unless you make a huge amount of money I think most families get pushed to the suburbs to try to find somewhere they can afford to live.

I'd like to see better designed suburbs that combine dense larger housing with public transit to connect the suburb communities with each other and the city they encircle. We need a size of home between the micro-apartment and the 2 million dollar mini mansion.

I'd love to be able to take public transit into Boston from my place in the suburbs but train stations only have a few dozen parking spots and the bus service is limited to the city areas. So I drive for now.

Having children can provide a huge boost to your motivation.

I am also at BU (staff) and my wife and I had our first child this past spring. Our benefits are good compared to my past employers, and I took a few weeks of paid vacation time so I could stay home with my wife and help after her c-section. I'm glad to hear that there is leave available for graduate students as well. Are the 60 days of paid leave for sick time or paternity leave? I had not heard that anything changed recently with the rules around time off.

Best of luck to you and your wife!

I do a bit of freelance design work each month, but I've been working on a few products for designers to generate recurring income and solve some annoyances I have in my workflow and tools.

The first ( http://www.mockuprocket.com ) is close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release. The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates for each client so you can setup branding and so forth.

I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make a few bucks on it.

My wife is a self-published fiction author (http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI & http://www.stephanievoid.com ) mostly young adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation engine or something.

She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.

We are here. I check out some of the designer job posts, often I find they lack key information such as a location. Not everyone on here is in San Francisco. As to why you aren't getting lots of candidates...I'd say there is a lack right now of experienced designers interested in the startup community.

I also think that a lot of designers are not as into the hacker culture as much. Many come from backgrounds far removed from the explorative, geek & techie culture and just aren't as interested in those aspects. I know from my own experience I was a huge geek as a teen and was as interested in computers, hacking and coding as I was with design. But when I went to college I'm pretty certain I was the only one in the department at the time that was even interested in working with the web and building things. Some were afraid of the web and stuck to print design, and some just didn't have the background or interest. Unfortunately even those that were interested in it could not learn what they needed since the design program did not teach much of anything to do with the web.

Ultimately I think because of this there is a lack of designers with web experience and the hacker/entrepreneurial desire to be part of the startup community. It's something that I wish would change and I try to encourage designers I know to get more interested in building things for the web... to be more entrepreneurial, more geeky.

I see you have an option to crop the image... but what about offsetting the crop? I've looked at a few of these services and no one seems to give that option. I can process it myself but it would be nice to do it in one api call. For example set viewport to 1200 x 1900, crop to 300 x 400 at 500px from the top and 300px from the left. Or some coordinates from top and center perhaps...

Hi Neil,

It's a tough thing sometimes to find partners. I think for me...and perhaps other designers, is that to partner with someone and make that level of time commitment requires a good bit of trust. The easiest way to develop that is out of an existing work or social relationship. If you don't have that then I would recommend hitting up some design meetups. You'd be surprised how many designers have ideas for apps or startups and would love to connect with a developer to work on their ideas as well. I'd also hit up designers on dribbble.com, you might very well find someone that is interested in working with you.

I think no matter where you find them....you have to be able to present your idea and proposal well. In this question posted here you haven't really mentioned much about what it is you want to build. You need to find someone who not only will work with you on something...but will develop a passion for it just as you have. But to do that you need to do a good job of selling it to them. Show them why it is cool, innovative, and profitable. You'll be much more likely to get a true partner vs someone just doing some mockups for the hell of it.

Whatever you do...don't present it as an option to "build their portfolio" or "gain experience." While that can be beneficial to some young designers....you probably also don't want a very young designer that doesn't have the needed experience to help you design and develop a viable product. Remember, a good designer is going to do more than just make it look pretty. They are going to be designing a brand, a tone, and a good user interface for the product. And a great designer will be working hand in hand with you on the user experience, marketing, and front end implementation. That sort of experience and expertise would normally cost you good money...just as your development experience is worth the money. So instead find a different way to frame it other than a "portfolio piece" or the promise of future revenue or "future paid work." There are too many of those kinds of project requests nagging designers all the time. (not saying you are doing that) I get emails or calls like that every week with people wanting their logo or website for free or a hundred bucks.

So how do you propose it? Figure out what it is about the app that drives your desire...chances are a designer can relate to that as well and perhaps might share the passion. If it is going to make something easier for consumers or disrupt an industry you will probably find others interested in doing that same thing for the same reason as you.

Also, make sure you present your own skills, credentials and accomplishments...just like you'll be looking at the portfolios and past work of a designer when trying to find and screen a partner...they too need to see what you are capable of. What apps have you created so far...as side projects or for your day job? Show them why you are worth working with.

Good Luck!