A blog worth keeping an eye on is PortlandTwitterJobs. Also, read the New York Times article (Finding New Employees via Social Networks) cited in today’s lead story called “One More Reason to use Twitter for your Job Search”.
Portfolio sites
June 1, 2009Armit Vit
May 26, 2009Our favorite WebVisions speaker was the last one on Friday: Armin Vit. He’s the eloquent man behind BrandNew, Quipsologies, SpeakUp, the new FPO, UnderConsideration and DesignEncyclopedia. After we got used to his strong accent and he talked his way out of his initial nervousness, he really got on a roll.
Formerly a designer for Pentagram in NYC, he recently relocated to Austin, Texas, has a new baby girl, keeps up with five different blogs a day, and freelances with his wife, Bryony.
He broke down blogs into interesting categories:
Philosophy: Inclusive (Coudal Partners) or Exclusive (zefrank)
Page Structure: 2 or 3 column grid, sidebar and content fields
Topics: broad or specific; work (HouseIndustries) or play (Tolleson Design)
Voice: multiple contributors (DesignObserver) or single contributor (NubbyTwiglet)
Design Approach: is it consciously designed or not
To have a successful blog, he offered the following tips:
Be obsessive about your content (ilovetypography or Bibliodyssey)
Go the extra mile. Read Armin’s post from July 17, 2007 called Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies to understand what he mean by “extra mile”.
Go where no one else has gone.
Respect your audience by writing well. (Use complete sentences, no typos, etc.) He actually said “don’t treat your readers like a douchebag”.
The Quality Triangle
May 26, 2009Daniel Schutzsmith asked the WebVisions audience (70% percent of whom were local attendees) if we’d ever heard of the “Quality Triangle”. He was surprised when most of the audience raised their hand. Apparently, in New York City, where he works, it’s not a well-known term. That didn’t stop him from talking about it for the next 90 minutes. It’s a worthwhile concept for you to know about, so here goes:
Imagine a triangle, with one point being CHEAP. One point is GOOD and the final point is FAST.
Your client wants their project FAST and CHEAP? Then it can’t be GOOD.
Client wants the project CHEAP and GOOD. Then it can’t be FAST.
Client wants the project GOOD and FAST. Then it isn’t going to be CHEAP.
The moral of the story is that only two of the points of the Quality Triangle can happen with a project. If you want to read more, Google it, or read this, one of many articles on the web.
SHIZZEEPS, SHIZZOW and TWITTER
May 26, 2009David and I attended WebVisions last Thursday and Friday and were struck by how much Twitter was hyped during the conference. During the introduction of Thursday’s keynote speaker, the audience was encouraged to Twitter frequently, and follow the audience’s tweets during each session. Tagging one’s tweets with the right hashtags and keywords was the key.
The headline for this post comes directly out of the conference program guide. Shizzow, by the way, “helps you hang out with your friends in the real world.” And, in case you’re even more curious, a Shizzeep is a registered user of Shizzow. For sure. I did not make this up.
I would say, however, that Twitter is here to stay, and you really should get on board with it. You can be a lurker like myself and just observe the frenzy!
MIT’s Revolving Homepage
May 26, 2009Did you know that every day, the home page for MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) changes? Students contribute background images and CSS and they’re swopped out daily. Check it out by viewing the gallery 
of previous pages, or bookmarking the site and checking back once in a while.
From their info page: The image and background colors on the MIT home page change daily to call attention to each new spotlight. The MIT logo shown above is the graphical key to the background designs on the second-level pages. These pages use an enlarged and cropped logo as a background to bring together the categories of life at MIT.
Letterpress movie
May 23, 2009Lovely video, great music! From the folks at Northern Lights via Uppercase
Online Portfolio links
May 20, 2009Check each other out!
Barbara Miller – Krop
Tasha Houston- Krop
Sara Graebe- Coroflot
Sherri Muller- Krop
Cathleen Green- Krop
Michelle Clark- Krop
Annie Vandomelen- Krop
Chelsey Brislawn- Behance
Gaby Mejia- Krop
Ross Wineinger- Behance
Amber Metz- Behance
Diana Judge- Behance
Frankie Welk- Krop
Blake McCoy- Krop
Caitlin Yoder- Carbonmade
Tiffany Tran- Coroflot
Vadim Makoyed- Behance
Natalia Podvalnaia- Krop
Catching up
May 15, 2009This week I’ve been dipping my toes back into Twitter after more encouragement from Chris Barnett. If you’re interested as well, check out this excellent overview in the New York Times by Paul Boutin. I’m using TweetDeck from my laptop and Twitterific from my iPhone. It’s a great way to surf the web from an iPhone and keep up to speed on what interests you. Kind of like a personally tailored, mini mobile RSS feed.
I discovered two new design blogs worth subscribing to: Ace Jet 170 Found Type, Print and Stuff. Note the really tightly controlled use of a grid and photos. It’s a TypePad blog (another blog product like WordPress and Blogger). Does anyone have any experience with TypePad?
The other one is from England: CreativeReview. LOTS of great content. Well worth subscribing to this one.
Missbehave Magazine features NubbyTwiglet . Note the “awesome community college” reference in her interview 😉
And, check out the first year students’ Mt. Hood Jazz Festival logos. (still in development). Comments welcome!
Link to enlarged images
May 11, 2009
Are your pictures too small to be of much use to the reader? Then use small/medium ones in your post, and prepare full size images for readers who want to see more detail. Here’s how:
Click on Upload/Insert. Navigate to the large image. Under Link URL, choose File URL button to link to this large version. Now when the image is clicked (you’ll see a border around it) it will display a full sized version in a new browser window.
MHCC Integrated Media 