Archives for category: Web Design
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Creative Redemption

January 6, 10 //
1

There are times when a design con­cept of mine fails to boil over in awe­some­ness and at that point I throw a sheet over it, shove it in a cor­ner next to the mutated Chihuahua-Goat™ and ask myself why I even attempted it.

It hap­pens so often, in fact, that I begin to doubt my instincts as a designer. It bog­gles the mind that a Design­ers Anony­mous group doesn’t exist for this very rea­son, but I digress.

This way of think­ing is ludi­crous because every­thing we cre­ate is vital to the design process, no mat­ter the context.

For exam­ple: That movie poster that you spent sev­eral hours on, the one that was even­tu­ally canned because the hero’s (or heroin’s) face ended up being badly con­torted at a spe­cific view­ing angle would prob­a­bly seem like a failed cre­ation. You might even be tempted to trash it from your hard drive, never to speak of it again.

But guess what? Hor­ri­bly man­gled facial crufties aside, you might end up recy­cling the type­face or that speck­led tex­ture for a future poster or project.

Make it a habit, if you haven’t already, to file away your delight­ful cre­ations for future use and avoid curs­ing your design work with voodoo.

It just never works, I mean what am I sup­posed to do with this Chihuahua-Goat™?

Just remem­ber the three R’s: Redeem, Reuse and Rejoice.

Project 52

December 29, 09 //
3

It’s been extremely quiet here, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been locked away in some room carv­ing odd sym­bols into the walls.

Actu­ally, I’ve been tool­ing away at many things, one of which involves this very site, but that I can’t speak of quite yet. I’ll just say the redesign is under­way and will mark the return of the crest. For older read­ers you know exactly what I mean, but for those who’ve only stopped by every once in a while the crest was once part of the brand of this site.

Beyond that I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in Project 52 this year. What’s that?

Project52 is a per­sonal chal­lenge geared toward get­ting fresh con­tent on your web­site. The goal is to write at least 1 new arti­cle per week for 1 year.

I’m chal­leng­ing myself to a goal: to write some­thing new once or more per week for one year start­ing Jan­u­ary 1st, 2010. It doesn’t seem like a lofty goal really, not at all actu­ally. It just means I have to com­mit to some­thing that I’ve long neglected and some­where along the line it might (I hope!) recharge the fiz­zled neon sign that is this “blog” or site, or what­ever you want to call it. Call it “Fresh Fish Mar­ket” for all I care, which inci­den­tally is the name of my wire­less network.

There you have it. At least one new post a week for just a year and if I can adhere to that rule I think the prize is an all-paid expense trip to Tahiti.

One can dream such a dream, right?

Refueling the Engine

March 10, 08 //
11

It’s been sev­eral months since I’ve writ­ten on here, since August of last year in fact, which equals to roughly 5 years in Inter­net time.

What have I been up to since I last mashed my fin­gers across the key­board and pub­lished some­thing of worth? Well, I was offered and accepted a posi­tion with AOL/Weblogs, Inc. as a designer for their net­work of sites. My first thought was; they pay peo­ple to design blogs? It’s become more than a dream job for me and I couldn’t be more thank­ful for the friend­ships I’ve formed and lessons learned.

There’s that, on the job end of things, and as a far as my per­sonal life is con­cerned we’re plug­ging along quite nicely. My daugh­ter Zoe just turned 4. For those of you who’ve fol­lowed this site for the 4+ years I’ve been main­tain­ing it this is a huge mile­stone. My son, Quinn, is now 2 and between the two they man­age to keep us busy, thanks in part to how often they annoy each other. We are expect­ing another child as well so there are more adven­tures to look for­ward to.

Speak­ing of which, this site, my favorite pet project has become more stag­nant than ever. You could search the archives… oh wait, no you can’t because that’s yet to be fixed, but hey, if you could you’d find plenty of posts describ­ing some sort of post-mortem. Mov­ing on from here I’ve finally decided to use Expres­sion Engine to use as the engine of this site. One rea­son for set­tling on EE is because I’ve used it spar­ingly in the past for projects and the road map of fea­ture addi­tions & inter­face enhance­ments (as show­cased at SXSW ’08) looks pretty fantastic.

The other rea­son is I had din­ner with Michael Boyink, recent hire of Ellis Labs (the team behind EE), and through his own artic­u­la­tion and excite­ment I myself became utterly con­vinced this was for me. He’s also the man behind Train-EE which is both an incred­i­ble and infor­ma­tive resource on all that is Expres­sion Engine, oh, and he offers train­ing course ware on it. How cool is that?

It’s been awhile and I real­ize that and it both­ers me, but, it’s clear to me that the pro­gres­sion of this site is to become some­thing more than a blog, but also it needs to be fun again for me.

 

Hostwarming

June 11, 07 //
3

Moving boxes

After much delib­er­a­tion and tem­po­rary insan­ity I’ve moved this site to its new home at Medi­aTem­ple.

The neigh­bors here are pretty great. No cook­ies yet, but lawns are mowed, my mail­box is still stand­ing and I’ve since removed the Ram­boLux secu­rity sys­tem. I kept the guard dog how­ever so intrud­ers beware!

My mail car­rier is some friendly chap named Google. He’s help­ful but the guard dog keeps a watch­ful eye in his direction.

For the time being the grid is sta­ble and all my stuff is in order, save for a bro­ken Mint. That’s okay though, I’ll just fix that later because I’ve got other fish to fry.

With that, I’m all out of clichés and my back is a bit sore.

If you have any com­ments, just slide them under the door.

P.S. — Remod­el­ing is long over­due so please excuse any future mess. 

Hacked!

June 6, 07 //
17

For those who aren’t aware Dreamhost expe­ri­enced a secu­rity breach. Accord­ing to Dreamhost, approx­i­mately 3,500 accounts were com­pro­mised, the hack­ers tak­ing note of FTP user accounts, user names and passwords.

With this data the hack­ers, using an auto­mated script of some sort, added SEO links/inframes to every instance of index.html or php.

This is the last straw. I’ve been with Dreamhost since mid-2004 and rec­om­mended them on more than one occa­sion and even went so far as defend­ing them when oth­ers com­plained about slow ser­vice or half-baked cus­tomer sup­port, the lat­ter being some­thing I never experienced.

Not any more. It’s time to look for a new home.

Over the past two hours I’ve had to comb over my files, look­ing for any­thing that could have been stolen and to my knowl­edge some files might have been removed.

Not only that, but the pass­word I used was one of the best pass­words I’ve used in a long time and now, thanks to this, I have to piece together a franken-mash of numbers.

It’s sad because while I rep­re­sent, accord­ing to DH, only .15% of the cus­tomers whose data was changed in some way, I just wish some­thing could’ve been done to pre­vent this.

Yet, who am I to say that web host­ing is safe from this kind of thing, which appar­ently it isn’t. I sup­pose I wanted to believe that they were impen­e­tra­ble, even if that was a pre­ma­ture wish.

The cul­prits added inframes and link­age point­ing to off­shore sites dis­play­ing gar­bled infor­ma­tion; SEO tac­tics indeed.

On the bright side of things, my entries are safe, every one of them accounted for since 2004. This wasn’t an issue really con­sid­er­ing I’ve kept back­ups of my DB since the begin­ning and make it habit to do it frequently.

I’m also plan­ning on mov­ing to a new CMS and will be tak­ing the entries with me to pre­serve for the future, when robots make swiss cheese sand­wiches with George For­man machines.

Does any­one out there have any sug­ges­tions for a new host? 

The Influence of Art in Design

March 2, 07 //
9

Over the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve eluded to the fact that I will be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel at this year’s SXSWi called The Influ­ence of Art in Design.

Here’s a descrip­tion of the panel (straight from the horse’s mouth):

Fine arts have long held a sub­tle, yet influ­en­tial grip on both infor­ma­tion and design. From car­toons, illus­tra­tions, dig­i­tal art, pho­tog­ra­phy and more, you’ll hear first­hand from some of the best in their fields, have a chance to explore the past, present, and future of the tech­niques that you see around the web, and how it can improve your own work and get both sides of the brain work­ing bet­ter together.

Turn­ing Thoughts into Reality

To backpedal a bit, before I made the com­mit­ment to go to last year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence — my first visit — I made a promise to myself that come the next con­fer­ence I would be on a panel. Cer­tainly it’s fun to actively par­tic­i­pate as an observer, but to present your thoughts to peo­ple, to engage them, to make them think and all said and done, if they can get some­thing out of what you’re say­ing, well, that’s say­ing something.

I kept that thought in the back of my mind, that I would some­how, using some force of nature have the oppor­tu­nity to be up there amongst a group of my peers and share some­thing, even if at the time I hadn’t any idea of what that might be.

Months later dur­ing a late night IM con­ver­sa­tion with Anton Peck he men­tioned the con­cept of the panel to me and it didn’t take much con­vinc­ing on his part, I was hooked..

The Dream Team

Next week I will be shar­ing meat­space with the fol­low­ing creative-minded people:

Come join us on Sat­ur­day, March 10th (11:30–12:30pm) and be sure to mark it on your SXSW cal­en­dar.

It’s a win-win; you’ll have a blast, learn a thing or two and I can gen­uinely promise your cre­ativ­ity will kick into overdrive. 

The Legacy of Matthew Carter

December 12, 06 //
1

Matthew Carter [profile]Matthew Carter, born British but now resid­ing in the Boston area, is the cre­ative force behind many widely used fonts today includ­ing Ver­dana, Tahoma, Geor­gia, New Cen­tury School­book and Hel­vetica, to name a few.

Carter began his career as a tra­di­tional type­face designer, study­ing under Jan Van Krimpen’s assis­tant P. H. Raedisch, where he learned the dis­tinc­tive craft of punch cut­ting and even­tu­ally tran­si­tioned into using dig­i­tal meth­ods to cre­ate his fonts, a more expe­dited method than tra­di­tional processes.

In a pre­sen­ta­tion given to mem­bers of the AIGA (New York Chap­ter), Carter reflected on his many expe­ri­ences with devel­op­ing the fonts he’s so famously known for and revealed that many, if not all of his cre­ations, were inspired by actual type­faces from his­tor­i­cal architecture.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Matthew Carter “co-founded the Bit­stream type foundry in 1981, which he left in 1991 to form the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone.”

Bit­stream, Inc. was a first of its kind, a com­pany formed solely for the pur­pose of the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of dig­i­tal fonts and their respec­tive licenses. Unlike tra­di­tional type foundries, where the typog­ra­phers would sell wood and metal type­faces, Bit­stream dealed exclu­sively with dig­i­tal fonts.

If not for the hard work and impres­sive efforts of Matthew Carter, design­ers would be lim­ited as far as font selec­tion for print and web.

Whether he knows it or not, Matthew Carter has left behind a legacy that will con­tinue to thrive in future gen­er­a­tions, all because of his desires to pre­serve his­tor­i­cal typefaces.

 

Taking a break

July 14, 06 //
3

If you couldn’t tell by the lack of writ­ing, I’m once again (maybe twice now) con­sumed by life’s respon­si­bil­i­ties that I haven’t had much time to com­mit to this “blog” as I’ve had in the past.

The lack of TLC is attrib­uted to sev­eral things, many of which are related to work­ing a 40-hour work week as well as tak­ing courses in the evening. Mix that in with every­thing else and you can begin to see why there hasn’t been much activ­ity here in over a month.

Instead of allow­ing this site to tran­si­tion from a state of limbo to com­plete neglect, I’ve decided to take a break from blog­ging for the time being. I can’t say exactly how long this will last, but rest assured it’ll only be a short break to effec­tively reboot myself.

When I do even­tu­ally return, I’ll also reboot this site as well, giv­ing it a com­plete makeover but with­out Ty Pen­ning­ton of course.

Thanks for read­ing. Have a great summer.

I’ll be see­ing you again soon.

 

Acquisitions and Movies

April 15, 06 //
18

Update #3: (drum­roll) Arno is/was Andy “Malarkey” Clarke. What a crazy — but funny — bloke!

Update #2: Jeremy Keith responds to Arno after receiv­ing a sim­il­iar email, but for perfume.

Update: Arno responds to this post. (read below first if you haven’t already for the full scoop)

You know, I’ve sifted through a truck­load of emails in the past few years about instant credit reports, money-making oppor­tu­ni­ties and not to men­tion sales­peo­ple inter­ested in sell­ing me every­thing from pet rocks to laser-guided golf ball retreivers.

In all this time I’ve never once received a domain acqui­si­tion email, until today of course.

Not more than 8 hours ago, I received an email from an Arno Zim­mer­man in regards to pur­chas­ing, or actu­ally acquir­ing this domain for a “well-known Hol­ly­wood stu­dio”. The email was a bit hazy, but to keep this on record for future con­ver­sa­tions I’m pre­sent­ing it here in it’s entirety.

Read on as I really can’t make this kind of stuff up:

Dear Mr Sagen,

My sin­cere apolo­gies for writ­ing to you unan­nounced. My name is Arno Zim­mer­man and I am CEO of an Inter­net domain name acqui­si­tions agency based here in Los Ange­les, California.

My agency is cur­rently engaged by a well-known Hol­ly­wood stu­dio. The stu­dio is pro­duc­ing a new action movie called The Kar­tooner. The movie has an all star cast, includ­ing Bruce Willis in the title role, and will be released in the fall. My client is there­fore very keen to pur­chase the rights to the domain name kartooner.com from you.

I am sure that you will under­stand that I can­not pro­vide you with much in the way of infor­ma­tion about our client at this time. How­ever I can assure you that they are sin­cere in their offer, and that they are keen to con­clude this pur­chase quickly.

I would be inter­ested to learn how much you would require for this trans­fer of ownership.

Many kind regards,

Arno Zim­mer­man

Okay, admit­tedly, you caught me off guard Mr. Zim­mer­man. If some­one were to tell me — like you just did — that Bruce Willis would be star­ring in an action movie called The Kar­tooner, I’d be hes­is­tant to believe such a thing.

How­ever, if you want to talk about the green­back, I might be will­ing to budge for about $66,000 dol­lars, give or take.

Let me know, alright? In the mean­time, I’m going to try and fig­ure out what I’d pur­chase with that kind of money.

Arno Responds

Dear Mr. Sagen,

My client’s legal team have informed me of your arti­cle regard­ing our offer to pur­chase your domain name. While I was a lit­tle sur­prised, as I have not yet had a reply from you directly, I do not think that this will cause us a prob­lem as The Kar­tooner is now in full pro­duc­tion, cur­rently shoot­ing live action in Manhattan.

As I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous email, The Kar­tooner will star Bruce Willis in the title role. Bruce plays an impov­er­ished artist in New York who pays his bills by draw­ing car­toons for the New York Times. Through a series of unfor­tu­nate acci­dents, Bruce’s char­ac­ter mis­tak­enly becomes the tar­get of a Mafia hit squad and must use all his wits (as well as his artis­tic skills) to stay alive. Need­less to say I can­not divulge any fur­ther plot details.

You men­tioned in your arti­cle today that you would be pre­pared to accept a sum of $66,000. Unfor­tu­nately this is over the bud­get that my agency has been autho­rized to pay for the aqui­si­tion of your domain name. How­ever I won­der whether you would accept a smaller sum, in addi­tion to a small walk on part in the movie?

Would you please be so kind as to let us know your deci­sion as my clients are keen to con­clude this pur­chase quickly

Many kind regards,

Arno Zim­mer­man
CEO and Inter­net domain name acquisitions

 

The Redesign

April 13, 06 //
10

For the past few days I’ve been work­ing dili­gently on a brand spank­ing new design for this site, as the cur­rent design has always been meant as a tem­po­rary place­holder. When I say brand spank­ing, I mean it, as it will include pre­vi­ous ele­ments I’ve used in other site incar­na­tions (mainly heaps of beige) and for the first time in this site’s his­tory there will be an “art­work” sec­tion. (Oooh.)

One of the main rea­sons for this realign­ment “re-envisioning” is that I’d like to tie the blog together with my other domain, eriksagen.com which includes a work­ing port­fo­lio and a resume for the time being. Even­tu­ally there will be a slick com­pany site in place of what’s there now, but that’s far off a bit.

Brand­ing is cru­cial to me at this point and has worked well for other peo­ple, like Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Dan Ceder­holm (and Mike David­son) to name a few. There’s an instant famil­iar­ity and con­nec­tion when you visit these sites and that’s inten­tional, so bring­ing every­thing under one roof (albeit a some­times leaky one) is impor­tant to me.

Back to my men­tion­ing an art­work sec­tion, I’ve decided to beef up my port­fo­lio. Over the years it’s become, well, a bit stag­nant due to other pri­or­i­ties and dis­trac­tions tak­ing focus. How­ever, shov­ing all that aside briefly, I’ll be putting up art­work from the past, present and future, which will be the present by the time I hang them up in a dig­i­tal gallery.

Many thanks to the hand­ful of sup­port­ers over the past few months (even you, Anton) for encour­ag­ing me to do this, espe­cially since I adver­tise that I’m an illus­tra­tor and yet have very lit­tle to show for it. Who would’ve thunk?

In a nut­shell, things will be chang­ing for the bet­ter around these parts.

That’s all folks! 

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