Thursday, August 30, 2007
People in airports use PCs. People at design conferences use Macs. I made these observations and more at An Event Apart in Chicago, IL.
I flew into the windy city on Sunday in preparation for the conference the next two days, and stayed at the hostel downtown. It turns out that hostels (this one, anyway) are great places to meet young, adventurous people from the world over. I met folks from China, New Zealand, Poland and nowhere at all. Hostels may not be for everyone, but they sure can make a trip more fun.
It’s a strange and wonderful thing to be in a large room packed full of fellow design nerds. The computers at the conference were both PC and Mac, but there was definitely a large presence of glowing Apples. I didn’t see one Apple computer at either airport.
The conference was two full days of lectures, lots of food, and lots of people. It was neat (and mildly surreal) to see people like Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy Keith, Jason Fried, and Jim Coudal in …
Friday, August 24, 2007
I picked up my new business cards from the printer yesterday! I’m really pleased with how they came out. The folks at Derby City Litho do a fantastic job and have great customer service.
Last year there was a tutorial being shared across the Interweb for making little boxes that hold business cards. I recently came across the site again and I decided to make some too.
The tutorial calls for using paint chip cards from your local paint store, but it was too late for that. So, I used the cover paper from some Veer catalogs I had saved. I’m really happy to have these little guys and I’m pretty sure these are really awesome. Here’s how they came out (with the new card inside). The image will take you to full size photos on Flickr:
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Five days from now I’ll be on my way to Chicago for two full days of web standards, best practices, inspiration and who knows what else. It’s An Event Apart — and I’ve been waiting two years for this!
In 2004 I happened upon an orange book (now green, in it’s 2nd edition) called Designing with Web Standards written by a man named Jeffrey Zeldman. For a few years prior I had immersed myself in web design. I was currently working in-house on some web projects for our city’s Parks department, and had been so captivated by these newer methods of building websites that I did everything I could to implement them into my work. I found Zeldman’s site; an online magazine about web design called A List Apart (also founded and published by Zeldman); Cameron Moll’s journal; John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and others, learning everything I could about this new practice called Web Standards.
About a year later, the fine folks at A List Apart formed the traveling conference called An Event Apart, and I wanted to go. Oh boy, did I want to go! But I couldn’t. …
Monday, August 13, 2007
A brand new website for Dressed In Value. It’s been many weeks of sporadic hours raking over the details, and I’m glad to finally unveil it to anyone who might bother to take a look.
This website used to be a photographic journal that was shared with many who seemed genuinely interested. And now, years later, it’s homebase for my design work. Through this I hope to become more involved with, and contribute to, the non-stop dialogue among respected peers across the Interweb. And more immediately, I hope to contribute to the design needs and interactive aesthetic of my own city.
Pray I do well.
