Graphics

Born Free Desktop Wallpaper

July 19, 2015 By Alex Masica Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since I last posted. Around eight months, in fact.

It’s funny how I get so jazzed up to blog, and then, it quickly goes away. I’m not sure if it’s the time it takes to create quality content, the editing process, the blogging part, or the community building part. Maybe it’s a bit of everything.

Nonetheless, I felt inspired today to at least try to create one piece of content I could share. This free desktop wallpaper is what I came up with.

I love the picture of the flower. Paid with born free, I think it’s a great inspirational wallpaper that’ll keep you motivated during your daily life.

Download this picture for:

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My Neck. My Back. My Netflix And My Snacks.

November 4, 2014 By Alex Masica Leave a Comment

Anyone remember that steamy song with “my neck, my back….” in the lyrics? I’m not going to post the song here but you can find it on YouTube easy enough I’m sure.

A friend of mine sent me an updated version of the lyrics that fit everyone now to a tee: My neck. My back. My Netflix and my snacks. Raise your hand if you’re a Netflix binger! (I’m raising both hands)

So Pin this to one of your comedic boards (or maybe “words to live by” would be sufficient?) and hop in front of the tube. It’s Netflix time!

Bonus: if you need some snack recipes to go with your favorite TV marathon, check these out. They all look DELISH.

10 Apps I Currently Love

January 22, 2014 By Alex Masica 1 Comment

10 Apps I Currently Love

Feedly

If you’re obsessed with reading blogs like I am, you should be on Feedly. There’s probably a great debate between Bloglovin’ and Feedly (and all other feed readers, really). I think Bloglovin’ and Feedly both have their pros and cons but tend to learn more toward Feedly due to its cleaner design.

When I’m not at my computer, the app is a great way to continue to read my favorite blogs and sort them. The user interface has a little bit of a learning curve in my opinion, but once you learn the basics, it’s a great tool to have on the go.

Directr

Have any of you heard of this app before? I spotted in the App Store the other week and have been having a blast seeing what people come up with. Directr lets you create movies—without time limits—by piecing videos and pictures together, and then adding text and background music. I personally haven’t made any movies yet but if you take the time to look through the feed of random videos, you’re sure to find some you love.

Temple Run 2

Temple Run is probably now considered a “staple app,” meaning everyone knows about it, has the app, and has probably used it at least once. Temple Run 2 came out this past summer and offers a new adventure. I go through spurts where I play it nonstop, and I just got off one of those a few weeks ago. I prefer to play it on my iPad, but that’s just because the screen is bigger. The game is great on both your iPhone and your iPad.

OpenTable

When I’m in a hurry and forget to book a reservation for a restaurant (especially if it’s a hot spot), OpenTable always comes to the rescue. One of the features I love about it is that it will recommend other times for a reservation if the one you chose isn’t available. You can also enable notifications, so in case you make a reservation a couple of months in advance, you won’t forget about it.

AutoTrader

I’ve been looking for a car recently and AutoTrader seems to be the go-to destination to finding a car in a certain area. Before I found AutoTrader, I was researching individual dealership websites, which became time consuming and exhausting. I actually prefer the iPhone app over the desktop site. Don’t try out the iPad app, though. It’s terrible.

Google Drive

I recently started doing more with Google Docs, and Google Drive is where Google automatically stores all of those docs. It’s great to have because I can edit from pretty much any of my devices—iPhone, iPad, laptop, etc.—and since it’s stored in the cloud, everything syncs automatically. I love it for keeping random notes about blog topics, to-do lists, and for collaborating on documents with other people.

Confide

This is a brand-new app and I think it’s really cool. Confide is the “Snapchat for the office,” as it’s being called. Essentially, you type in a message, send it to the person you want, and then the person has to slide their finger across the message for it to appear, and then disappears once the message is closed out of. It’s next to impossible to take a screenshot of the message, too, since your finger has to be touching the message in order for it to be seen.

Pocket

A friend recently introduced me to Pocket and I don’t know what I was doing before I got it. Well, actually, I do remember what I was doing, and it was going crazy. Pocket lets you save websites to read later, even offline. Pocket saves itself as an email contact and then you send an email to Pocket with the URL you want to save, and it syncs with the app. Once you open the app, your stories sync.

You know, Pinterest has really upped its mobile apps over the past six months or so. I still remember Pinterest’s first iOS app and it was so clunky and buggy. But now, I love how intuitive everything is and how much easier it is to get around and share content. My only complaint is that the menu bar disappears when you start scrolling down, and it only appears when you scroll back up. If I had it my way, that menu bar wouldn’t ever disappear.

Studio Design

Studio Design is a photo editing app that lets you collaborate with friends on edits. It includes all the standard photo app features: filters, text, cropping, etc. What’s cool about it is that you add to your image in layers, similar to Photoshop. So it’s easy to go back and make a change (read: it’s not permanent until you push Save).

So that’s my list. What’s on your “I’m totally love these apps” list these days? Give me some suggestions in the comments below!

5 Free iPhone Lock and Home Screen Wallpapers

January 21, 2014 By Alex Masica Leave a Comment

I can still remember the first time I held an iPhone. I was maybe 18 years old and completely mystified at the Apple Store as I held that one-of-a-kind piece of technology. You have to remember, at this time, there was not other kind of smartphone technology out there of this caliber.

Sure, BlackBerry was all the rage (so funny to think about now) but nobody had created a phone that was completely touch screen and also doubled (er, tripled?) as a web browser and music player.

When I got my first iPhone, it took me almost two years to do any sort of customization to it. I refused to change the lock screen wallpaper and would not venture out into other ways to make my phone my own. In my eyes, the iPhone was perfect out of the box, so why try to fix something that wasn’t broken?

Now, customization is my life. New phone cases happen all the time, as does everything else on the phone that I have control over.

I have been making lock/home screen wallpapers for a long time now and thought this was a perfect time to share some of my newest designs with you. Seeing an inspiration quote appear every time I unlock my phone is, well, inspiring. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

You’re free to download any or all of these and use freely on your phone. All I ask is that you (1) share this blog post with your friends using the social sharing features at the bottom of this post, (2) follow along on bloglovin’ or feedly, and/or (3) give my blog a like on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram.

To download, click on the image to be taken to the full-size version, and then control click (or right click on a PC) and save the image(s) to your computer. From there, transfer to your phone in your favorite way (email, Dropbox, etc). If you’re downloading to your phone straight from this post, click on the image to be taken to the full-size version, and then press + hold until “Save image” appears.

Which one of these wallpapers is your favorite? Let me know below in the comments!

7 Free Facebook Cover Photos

January 14, 2014 By Alex Masica 2 Comments

I have been feeling really creative lately. I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t been doing as many freelance projects recently as I have in the past or if I just really miss designing, but that seems to be what takes up a lot of my thoughts lately.

And for some reason, whenever I start creating a digital piece these days, it usually revolves around social media, be it Facebook photos, Twitter backgrounds, blog tweaks, Google+ banners, etc. I love the customization you can do on these channels to really make it your own.

So I made some more Facebook cover photos. There’s really nothing better than a great cover photo to make your profile really pop. It literally makes me cringe when I see cover photos that are distorted, pixelated, undetectable, etc. I guess it’s the designer in me that gets how these things work, which makes me upset when I see poor cover photos.

All of these designs were made with flat design in mind, which is all the rage these days. You know when Apple jumps on the bandwagon (iOS 7, anyone) that something is cool. They’re also perfectly formatted and sized to be crispy clear on your page, and won’t interfere with anything else that overlays on the cover photo. The icons come courtesy of Studio4.

You’re free to download any or all of these and use freely on Facebook. All I ask is that you (1) share this blog post with your friends using the social sharing features at the bottom of this post, (2) follow along on bloglovin’ or feedly, and/or (3) give my blog a like on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram.

To download, click on the image to be taken to the full-size version, and then control click (or right click on a PC) and save the image(s) to your computer, and then upload it to Facebook. Everything is sized perfectly so no cropping or stretching is necessary.

Thanks, friends! I hope you enjoy these as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Have you seen any other great cover photo designs? Post a link in the comments—I’d love to see!

Welcome to the Family

December 31, 2013 By Alex Masica Leave a Comment

So this is that obligatory first post almost everyone does when they start a blog, right? You know, the one that gets them motivated and hopefully allows them to spill all of their feelings out to decide how to proceed. We’ll see how this goes.

I’ve blogged in the past, albeit not very consistently and without a unified theme. I was introduced to blogging in college, where I was required to do it for a few classes. Eventually, the idea around blogging caught on with me and I loved doing it. But still, I couldn’t find those one or two things that I thought I could consistently, week after week, month after month, write about without sounding like a broken record.

I’m hoping Better with Family will be the answer to that problem. When I started thinking about themes and topics for this blog, I think I wrote down about 50 different ones. Some were topics about one specific thing that I knew I couldn’t write much about but the others turned out to be the inspiration for writing today.

On this blog (or site, however you want to think about it), I will be chronicling my life as a 20-something and learning to live a life on my own terms. I’ve picked five large themes to focus on: food, life events, photography, home décor, and graphics.

These five themes seem to be what matter most to me. But with a twist, they’re also things that I think are important for everyone to share with their “family,” whatever that word might mean to you. To me, “family” encompasses everyone in my life who matters most—from my mom and dad to my best friends from college. I encourage you to share these events (and your own) with your family, whomever those people might be.

So thanks for reading. I’m not sure what this road looks like even six months from now but I’m excited to find out. Welcome to my family. I hope you enjoy the journey with me.