Simple Pleasures

Every once and awhile it’s good to take a moment and think about all things in life that make you happy. A lot has happened in my life over the last few months. It’s been extremely busy and exhausting juggling schoolwork, projects, work, sorority obligations, friends, the drama that comes from friends, family, expenses, stress, break-ups, and a number of other things. During all this it’s easy to lose sight of what is important and special underneath all the noise.

I spent a load of time over the Christmas holiday thinking and relaxing. Now that I’m back at school and things are beginning to pick up speed again I have been thinking about all the little things that give me peace of mind. I find that making time to spend with my close friends is extremely important. We all have different majors ranging from art and design to biology/pre-med, social work, and history. There’s always something to talk about and good feelings to spread around. I’ve lost a couple of my friends this semester. Certain academic and health reasons caused one to have to move back home and my best friend of 11 years is going to be studying abroad in the Czech Republic.  Not having her around especially will be hard.

I have also made a promise to draw more often. I’ve drawn ever since I was little and I did it for fun then. Why not do it for fun now? I plan on trying to do a drawing everyday or close to it. It’s a good way to just let go and get away from the computer. Doing something creative and expressive that doesn’t involve file saving and vectors is a lovely release. I realized this last semester in my painting class.

I also plan on spending more time on my music. It got away from me last semester and became more of a chore than a hobby. I received a keyboard for Christmas and I hope it will inspire me to do more. I don’t know how to play the piano yet, but I hope to learn a little bit. (I did learn a little bit of “Silent Night” over the break!) I used to strive to be a really good singer, but in the last couple years I’ve let that fall by the wayside. I want to renew that spirit because it always left me feeling very accomplished.

So these are some of the simple things in my life that bring me great joy and peace of mind. I hope they don’t get lost in the mix of this semester. Instead of losing track of them, I hope to use them as fuel and inspiration for my daily life and work.

Sock Monkey inspired CSS Design

I have always been attracted to simple web designs. I don’t particularly care for a lot of different typefaces appearing on the page or crazy color schemes and images. The content is what a visitor is looking for so it should not be undermined my the design, it should be complemented. I also enjoy subtlety amusing themes. What could be more amusing than goldfish? Or sock monkeys? Or fluffy carousel horses? For some reason those three things make me smile. I began to think about the design and decided that a plain white background would be my work space. This would mean straight black text would be out of the question since I don’t want to blind viewers with such high contrast. Once I settled on the sock monkey for a theme, I needed an image or art to fill the theme. Everything I came across on the web was pretty cheesy or childish. So I decided to take my own images. Since my actual sock monkey stuffed animal is far far away in my home town, what was I to do?? Then I looked down. Sock monkey slippers. Done.

The image of the slippers is meant to be fixed at the bottom of the browser and the text will scroll behind it. the red headlining text matches the red accents of the slippers and the brown text is low contrast enough to be readable against the white background. After going through some typefaces that seemed to be fun and possibly fitting, I found that wacky intricate fonts for the headlines was not going to be the solution. They came across as to busy and childlike. So I decided to stick to the simplicity and settled on Helvetica Rounded for headlines and Helvetica Neue as secondary body copy. Sock monkey theme PLUS comfy slippers. My viewers can now slip their toes into some cozy slippers, and enjoy the site at their leisure.

The Adventures of Class With No Proffessor: Episode 3

This is the fourth class without Leslie in town to teach us. We were visited by some of the front end developers/engineers including Stephen Bush (a former UTC student) and Noah Burney from Medium and Jason Fritz from Tubatomic.

They all had really awesome attitudes and introduced us to the behind the scenes work that goes into how a website looks. Meaning, they gave us a brief intro into HTML, XHTML, and CSS. All the technological stuff!

They started by explaining to us what different coding scripts mean and what they do. They explained the structure of the coding and differences between HTML, XHTML, and CSS.  We wrote some coding for a site that changed the text box color, background color, typeface, text size, leading, navigation bars, adding in images to be links in the navigation bars, etc.

The guys were really helpful and informative and definitely extremely intelligent. It’s so interesting to me how this kind of things comes to easily to some people and makes perfect sense. I am not sure how I personally feel I will react to it since this was only an introduction. Maybe it will totally work or maybe I am only meant to design…time will certainly tell!

The Adventures of Class with No Professor: Episode 2

Day Two: Web Media is left to fend for itself…

Today’s class was visited by Josiah Roe, president of Medium design and Bekka Reese a graphic designer at Medium (http://thisismedium.com/people/).

Josiah made a a presentation discussing information architecture, site maps, etc. and how the play huge role in their web site design process. The presentation included many examples of their work over the last year or two including sketches, drawn out wire frames, site maps, digital roughs, and of course, the finished products.

They gave us a lot of incite into how the actual design process works when working with clients who desire specific elements in their design and also how huge a project can really be. One specific example was the site that they are designing for a Japanese company that sells large engines and other sorts of equipment. They showed us only a small portion of the site map, but we were told that there were quite a few more. I cannot imagine working with that much content for a site and trying to make it easy to navigate and functional at the same time! No wonder it takes a team of designers and programmers and months to put the project together.

They also told us about how a beautiful design can be totally taken over by the company and changed into something it is not. I won’t name the site, but I will say they would have been much better off not making the changes that they did.

Josiah, even in his sleepy state, was kind enough to leave us with some excellent incite and some great resources on Basecamp.

Thank you Medium!

The Adventures of Class with No Professor

Day 1: Leslie…Gone to a land down under

Web Media class today was taken over by some of the professionals of Chattanooga’s Tubatomic (http://www.tubatomic.com/) and Medium (http://thisismedium.com/) in lieu of Leslie Jensen-Inman’s quest to spread the good word of Web Education across the world.

Our guests were Alex Ogle and George Bairaktaris of Tubatomic and Mat Turner from Medium, formerly Tubatomic. They talked about how they got into their respective fields and what they currently do. All three of these gentlemen had something really awesome to say and all came from really interesting backgrounds. I always think it’s interesting to hear about how people who are currently involved in web design, and all the fun things that go along with it, got to where they are today. As Mat pointed out, we as students are at a great point because of all the progress that has been made in the last few years in web and technology. When they started, there weren’t these advancements so their climb is totally different from what ours will be. This totally blows my mind in a weird way that I can’t quite explain. There is no way I can judge my future by their past because things are so totally different!

They touched on all sorts of things from user interfaces, freelance and in house work, to cartoon cat heads and space. One thing that Mat said that stuck out to me, was the emphasis he put on the fact that being able to do good design and work and being involved in the world doesn’t matter where you are. You don’t have to go to New York or L.A.. This makes me feel a lot better in some way.

Something else he said that was really nice was, he felt heart in the room. I believe we each have a great deal of passion for what we do and I love  that someone from the outside can feel it too.

We plan on having a resume done by the end of their time with us an we even created our own social networking site called…wait for it….”GADZOOOO-K’S: Household Space Travel”. We even came up with a tagline: “Wet your biscuit”.

Look out for it.

It’s gonna be big.

DIY Summit Reflections…

My overall experience of the DIY Summit (http://www.environmentsforhumans.com/diysummit/) was pretty interesting. It was quite unique being in a room listening to people present live that were miles apart from one another. Although a lot of information was over my head, I still took a lot away from the talks.

First of all, all of the speakers were incredibly good. Not only did they present well via web cam, but there actual slide presentations were great. I also appreciated that the majority of them gave the URLs to find their slide show. I can imagine it would be difficult to sit in front of a computer screen and present while not being able to see or hear your viewers. I know Dan Rubin felt a little crazy, and I’m sure I would too!

I took a piece of inspiration from just about every speakers presentation. One thing I picked out from Kelly Goto’s (http://www.gotomedia.com/index.html) speech, was to be fearless! Also finding a flow with yourself and others within your work flow has nothing but a positive impact on your productivity. I’m definitely going to try and find more “yoyu” time for myself to reflect and think between projects or process to continue the creative flow.

Dan Rubin (awesome) gave an incredibly informative and exciting presentation. Although I took a lot of notes and listened to his advice about mastering details in interface design, the one thing that truly stuck out to me had nothing to do with his topic at all. He said the more advanced you become as a musician or singer, the more time you spend on the basics, practicing vowels and consonants and warm up exercises. This is an easily transferable metaphor into design, but it reminded me that I really needed to practice my voice and songs for my lesson and actually spend time on those little things to become better at what I do.

Lea Alcantara (http://artofselfbranding.com/) was one of my favorites. She gave a lot of useful tips and rules to follow when creating a self brand on the internet and as a designer. I took away that it is okay to cater yourself to clients you know you can work with and that is actually better for you and the client because you’ll do better work and they’ll get what they want. Creating a “brand promise” was something she stressed. It’s a professional and personal persona that can live up to the expectations of potential clients. My favorite thing she said was that in order to fully develop your personal brand is to persist through the CRAP. C-criticism, R-rejection, A-assholes, P-pressure. And also find inspiration off the web!

DIY SUMMIT Speaker: MATT HARRIS!

Matt Harris, a web developer from Hampshire, South England, is one of the DIY Summit’s speakers. He will be speaking on the topic of Using WordPress for Content Management. He makes use of his talents and time making websites for different people and schools making use of internet linking tools and utilities, or wrangling PHP, Python, CSS and HTML.

On top of being a brilliant programmer and web site guru, Matt Harris is also a promoter of web standards. He is a consultant for many different educational facilities and helps them further their development in IT departments and expanding their web systems. He goes beyond just helping schools build their infrastructures by being a promoter of standards based design directed for the teaching and learning of the schools and also by promoting all sorts of new technologies. His goals include for pupils to have their own personal web space and to eventually for all schools to have integrated learning and management systems. This would allow for broader educational opportunities, web portfolios, collaborative working and parental involvement.

His passion for the web and techy geekiness extends off the screen. He enjoys teaching his AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt) to dance and speak. He spends time traveling between the US and England promoting and speaking at professional web conferences like DIY Summit, Web Directions North and dConstruct and also dropping pearls of wisdom at smaller venues  like Barcamps and Geek Nights. Even further beyond the computer screen and keynote presentation, I hear Matt is known to cook a mad Beef Wellington.

Matt Harris’s personal website, http://themattharris.com/, holds archives of troubleshooting, plugin and other sorts of web tutorials. He hopes it will be, “a place that will, over time, fill up with my experiences in network administration, education and web development, oh and life in general. It is my hope that the things I share here will, in some way, be useful to you in some part of your life; or at the very least give you an interesting read.” The site’s design was done by colleague, Cindy Li. For those who don’t know Matt, you can learn a lot about him and what he does by visiting his site. Looking into Matt’s work and presentations, I noticed that he very easy to follow. The posts on his site are reader friendly and he gives a lot of information in a few words. Although I don’t understand the first thing about plugins, meta elements, or any kind of web coding, I feel like I could learn something from his experience and lessons.

One of Harris’s main topics of education and what he will be speaking about at DIY,  is WordPress (hey, guess what I’m using?) It’s a free blogging tool that has a variety of uses in the web world. It is among the most popular blogging platforms available today, but if used as a Content Management System (CMS). CMS is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text and it can support a large range of websites such as a portfolio, small business intranet and educational websites. Matt Harris will discuss CMS and also share techniques he has used when managing content using WordPress and the plugins that can help you. He’ll delve into the admin interface and the structure of themes, and even toss out a few bits of helpful code along the way.

To learn more about the DIY Summit and their other speakers, visit their site at, http://www.environmentsforhumans.com/diysummit/.

Logo Research

Hooray for logos! I looked at a variety of logos for museums primarily I looked at ones that used geometric form and ones that used more gestural forms and also some that used simply text.

I have used this inspiration in some of my ideas thus far, but so far i have not come up with a solid solution or track.

HELLO WORLD! Chatt’s Create Here hosts local artists/web enthusiasts

Perhaps “enthusiast” isn’t quite a strong enough word to describe the men and women who have visual art displayed at Create Here. The work is more than just nice to look at; the codes and programming represented in the pieces live and function in the real world everyday via the web and internet. Though coding is not something the average person sees when surfing the net, it is the backbone that makes the internet navigatable, visually appealing, and really, just makes it work.

It was incredible to see the variety of mediums these code “themed” pieces inhabited. You’d thing coding would limit you to the screen or printed paper. Not so! It was also pretty intriguing to see the work of people I know. (I’m finding that this is going to become more and more a common occurance!) Leslie’s piece was one of my favorites (and I’m not just saying that because she’s my professor). Using a visual metaphor to show the importance of intigrating the web in education. As it is becoming an ever growing profession, means of networking, and many other uses, the web and its functions and codes are just as important to learn as Descartes or the Pythagorian theorum. It is also just as temporary as the lesson written on a chalkboard. It is constantly changing and developing and evolving with our culture. The piece is also just plain beautiful! LOVE IT!

Seeing a gallery installation by a former classmate was also pretty cool. Matt Turnure was in the same Visual Literacy class with me (taught by Leslie) last fall. Having some knowledge of his work ethic and process, I know he must have labored over this piece! Also knowing that he is a very involved and brilliant programmer, I know that the piece was probably also close to heart. It was also very amusing to see the image he used of himself for one our class projects included in his work. The layering of the different transparent panes with different coding on them got the concept of coding across in a beautiful way.

The other pieces by C.E.B. Reas and Weston McWhorter, where totally mind blowing as well. All and all, viewing this exhibition made me see how beautiful web coding and technology can be. It doesn’t have to be hung up in a gallery to be appreciated. We use it pretty much everyday and with it and these fabulous people, we’d still be stuck in the Stone Age of web design.