All of me hurts. I am not built for extended road-tripping (at least not any more.) Also, how is it that the whole of northern Louisiana has a strange, slightly unpleasant odor?
I’m in Minden, LA in a Holiday Inn. I drove about 9 hours today, saw a town called Chunky, crossed the motherhuge Mississippi River by car for the first time, listened to a lot of jazz, spent much time on the phone, and I’m getting about 7.2 miles per gallon. 4 fill-ups and counting. Ouch.
Tommorrow, I mess with Texas.
(I hope that The Final Countdown is stuck in your head right now and remains lodged in your frontal lobe for the majority of Sunday.)
The contents of 320 High St. Apt 24 are currently occupying a U-Haul on 4th St. attached to my Jeep. In less than 12 hours it, and yours truly, will be rocketing (albeit slowly) towards Texas.
I am happy.
P.S. Living in a three-story walk-up kind of sucks when one has to move. My thighs burn w/ the intensity of 1,000 suns.
I have approximately 800 miles to drive on Sunday and Monday. What suggestions do you have to help me pass the time during this epic U-Haul pulling trek to the grand state of Texas?
As the workforce becomes more mobile, the office will be the main tool companies use to build a shared culture…If you want to keep people, you have to have a business love affair with them. That requires seduction, dating, paying attention ot the relationship. Office space is part of that…and if you’re not engaging employees, they’re at risk. (emphasis mine)
Gervais Tompkin, Regional Design Director San Francisco, Gensler
The Sartorialist is full of candid photos of New York City street fashion. Just normal folks doing their thing. I am completely addicted.
I’m doing a little redesigning here today… finally getting around to transferring the blog to the new 2-column and 3-column layouts I’ve been implementing on the subpages. Pardon my mess.
I’m having a blast seeing what kind of web layouts I can pull off using text, CSS, and PHP with no images. It’s quite the challenge to make it all work visually and still be aesthetically pleasing. A constant work in progress.
P.S. I ditched the javascript show and hide navigation at the tops of the pages. I Just didn’t like the way it behaved when new pages loaded in. Everything that was in the header is now in the footer, so just click “Site Navigation” to jump to it and find your way around.
P.P.S. If you don’t have the typeface Myriad, you’re really missing out because it makes all the typography on here look a billion times better. I hate typography on the web… so few options.
10 habits of highly effective pro-bloggers. Also known as “common sense.”
The Star Trek Cribs clip is still one of my favorite things ever on the internet. Artwork… dope. (Poolside, Coffeehouse, and Karaoke aren’t bad… but pale in comparison to Cribs.)
Iconfactory is redesigning and while their doors are closed, they’ve treated us to some hysterical pixel animations.
Go waste a few hours on bestthing.info comparing apples to oranges and oranges to racecars. The goal is to try to determine the best thing ever through majority vote mediated by decent algorithms. Awesome community project. (via Cameron Daigle)
20/20′s John Stossel reports on graphic design. (Tongue-in-cheek, of course, and as an AIGA conference special.)
nooga.net is for sale. Imagine the possibilities! Buy buy, buy!
Wheeeeeee! Ok, here goes:
After approximately 10 months in the aptly named “Scenic City” of Chattanooga, Tn, I’m packing my bags, uprooting myself, and heading 800 miles in the general direction of Dallas, Tx this weekend. Today is my last official day in the office at Tubatomic Studio and it’s been a wonderful few months working alongside the talented folks here.
When I was brought on, I immediately (read: before I even got to town, actually) plunged into the deep-end of creating the visual world of the cre824 Webdesign International Festival. Under The Tub’s art direction I got the pleasure of putting together a complete identity package for the festival including print materials, banners, attendee name badges, t-shirts, posters, promo fliers, and lots of other things I’m probably forgetting. And then I got to photograph the entire event. I loved seeing it all come together and visually telling the story that web design doesn’t have to be so stale and technical – it can be fluid, organic, engaging, and – dare I say it – beautiful.
In the time since cre824, I’ve been able to work on all sorts of projects (web-based and offline) for clients and peers (massive fun working with the amazing team at Armchair Media on a few gigs.) In short, this has been exactly the kind of studio learning experience that I began looking for about a year ago.
The pull to Dallas is completely personal (not professional), but leaving regularly scheduled gainful employment places me squarely in the path of so much potential to try new things, learn even more, and further dive into collaborating with likeminded people on projects and big ideas. I’ll be launching a new portfolio soon (thanks to M.A. Turner), and putting myself out there in Dallas (and elsewhere) to see where I might fit in the best. If you have any Dallas leads or contacts, or just interesting people you think I need to meet, please don’t hesitate to send me an email. I make a good lunch date.
Thanks for coming along on the next little step of the journey. I’m excited.
Update: I got a few emails asking, so, yes, I will still be doing work for The cre824 Group in a freelance capacity as we prepare for cre824 2007. Exciting stuff is on the way. Go be our friend on MySpace to keep up with the juicy details.
Blogsitting. The act of allowing someone else to post on your blog while you are otherwise occupied by traveling, planned vacation, unexpected incarceration, etc. I was on that trend YEARS ago (shout out, Casey!) but I never thought to capitalize on it. But someone did. Literally. blogsitter.net is a blogsitter finder service.
With a little work, you can make a snazzy ring from a quarter nickel COIN. Amazing.
As if I didn’t love Aesthetic Apparatus and their wonderful screenprinted posters enough already, this video How We Do has absolutely made my day. I’m still laughing 10 minutes after I watched it.
I believe that optimism is an essential quality for doing anything hard – entrepreneurial endeavors or anything else. That doesn’t mean that you’re blind or unrealistic, it means that you keep focused on eliminating your risks, modifying your strategy, until it is a strategy about which you can be genuinely optimistic.
amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
excerpt from America’s 25 Most Fascinating Entrepeneurs at Inc.com
The programming and design portfolio of Steve Mason, who works for one of my favorite firms Odopod, is full of great work. I still want to see that Flash-based content management system in action.
Harper’s Magazine article on the great Ukrainian bride hunt. Pretty fascinating point of view(s) on the whole mail order bride process.
About The Author
I'm a graphic designer and sometimes writer living in Anderson, South Carolina. I serve as the Design Director for NewSpring Church. I love Jesus, my wife, Levi's Jeans, good Tex-Mex, and 8oz glass bottle Coca-Cola Classic. On good days I love them roughly in that order. Email me.