Sadness

I haven’t updated my blog in a crazy long time. Got sidetracked by the wedding, moving, trying to do work to make money to pay bills that I’m suddenly responsible for… They’re just excuses though, I haven’t updated because I haven’t had anything to say that I thought was important.

I’ve been avoiding this because I’m just one of the billion other blogs commenting on the loss of MJ, but whatever. Getting it out there before I don’t want to.

While I was never a HUGE fan of his, I still knew almost all of his songs and can recall every video without any effort. He was such a culturally relevant figure, it’s impossible to not have had him touch your life in some way. You know someone special has left us when /b/ takes the time to honor them…

mj

Looking around the internet the last few days there’s so much information that it’s impossible to decipher it all. Foul play or not, I’m very sad about his passing, but I’m vigilant in defending his memory; I will not stand by while people call him a pedo when he was acquitted from the charges after the family basically said they were just conning the poor guy. I will not stand by as people make crude remarks about his lifestyle or say that he was creepy…

I think it’s only fair to look at a person’s entire life before passing any judgment on them, and all you right-wing religious nuts need to cut out the pedo angle before I go on a rampage of proving you wrong.

In 1993, Chandler told a psychiatrist and police that he and Jackson had engaged in sexual acts that included oral sex, the boy gave detailed description of Jackson’s genitals. The case was settled out of court for a reported $22 million, but the strain led Jackson to begin taking painkillers.

http://awkwardstar.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/jordan-chandler-admits-he-lied-about-michael-jackson/

Makes you wonder how many people have been wrongly prosecuted and sentenced when they were entirely innocent. I don’t buy into the whole afterlife/heaven/hell/soul resting in piece garbage, but I do extend my thanks to him for being an amazing person that has touched my life in a positive way, and I will continue to smash the hell out of anyone around me that betrays his good name.

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June 28, 2009 by Keith in General Rambling

Lighthearted List or Foolish Facade?

I hate when people try to tell other people what they should know, because they’re the supreme consult on the subject.

Case in Point:

http://www.graphicrating.com/2009/05/03/you-are-not-a-designer-if/

You are not a Designer IF:
1. you don’t know what a PIXEL is
2. you don’t know what a mockup is
3. you don’t know what RGB or CMYK is and stands for
4. you don’t know what screen real estate is
5. you only design and never code
6. you don’t know the difference between vector and raster
7. you have only heard about Photoshop
8. you can’t name an alternative to Photoshop
9. you know some cool Photoshop filters
10. you know only a way of selection in Photoshop
11. you don’t know what DPI stands for
12. you don’t know what image formats are
13. you know only JPG and GIF
14. you know some cool effects in Front Page
15. you don’t know what a DTD is
16. you use only HTML Transitional DTD
17. you don’t know the difference between HTML and XHTML
18. you don’t know what CSS is
19. you are inclined of using inline CSS
20. you don’t know anything about typography
21. you don’t know how what a serif is
22. you’ve never heard about W3C
23. you know to code only in Dreamweaver
24. you test your web pages only in Internet Explorer
25. you don’t read web design blogs
26. you don’t use wireframes
27. you have a Mac. ( you are not necessarily a designer if you own a mac )
28. you have no knowledge of design history ( although this is something that can be learned between projects :D )

I’m sorry, I must have missed the memo where Andy Gongea became the person that defines what a ‘newbie’ or ‘mature’ web designer is. It seems pretty immature and idiotic to put together a list like this and tout your own prowess on a subject in this manner. If this was constructed to in some way show how mature of a designer he is, he’s fallen flat on his face and exposed himself to be a pompous, newbie asshole.

I mean, really, where do you see people doing shit like this? It usually falls under two categories:

  1. You’re so good you can brag about it because no one can contest your views.
  2. You’re a novice and try to mask your flaws by bragging about inconsequential crap that matters not to the crowd you’re professing your own ability.

Either way, you’re a total ass, because not any one person knows everything, and any time you start bragging about what you know and others should, you might be better off looking in the mirror to see where you can better yourself (or apply your insanely amazing talents in a more productive environment, such as educating others that don’t quite make the grade in your eyes). To be entirely fair, you can say the same thing about me. Sure, I’m spitting venom, but I’m trying to educate this douche nozzle on what he shouldn’t do, in an entertaining way. It may not be politically correct or prim and proper, since I’m just bashing this guy without knowing his full intent, but I think the conclusion of his blog clears up any ambiguity, and lets me have a clear conscience saying this stuff.

My reason for this post was to better define the thin line between a web designer wannabe (newbie) and a mature web designer. Please share your ideas, things that I forgot to put on this list.

Here’s something to add to the list: 29. I’m a douche bag and don’t really know anything about designing, or what makes a good designer.

Here’s the main point of this rant; when there’s someone like this getting work, http://joshstj.undertwinskies.com/portfolio.shtml, who’s to say what he’s doing is wrong or immature? It may not strike me as something I’d like to make or slap my name on, but if he’s making a living doing it, and more importantly making people happy with his work, he is a mature designer. He’s reached the goal that many of us strive for, which may or may not be standards compliance, knowing what the hell a DTD is or not using an elite editor like Notepad to code our sites; we all want to make money and help people make a presence on the web. If all of those converge, you’ve reached maturity, it doesn’t take a list of trivial shit to proclaim you have arrived.

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May 4, 2009 by Keith in Web Desinger/Developer Related

Branding Your Own Wedding

One of the coolest things about my relationship with Dorena (my wife after the 15th of May, currently my fiancé) is that we’re both creative people. She went to school to become a graphic designer, and I am a web designer. We decided early on that we would handle most of – if not all – of the creative elements related to the wedding. I just wanted to document the process of our branding the wedding, so I have something to look back on in a few years.

Dorena and I have been together since the spring of 2000, and we’ve pretty much always known that we’d be together for the rest of our lives. I proposed to her on Christmas Eve in 2007, and we figured that we’d aim for a date as close to our dating anniversary as possible. We started dating May 18th, which is a Monday in 2009, so we opted for the Friday before, the 15th. A huge advantage of this entire process was having an entire year to plan things out. There hasn’t been anything rushed, nor have there been major complications. It was always assumed that I’d create a website for the wedding (which I did: http://keithanddorena.com), and Dorena would handle all of the print media, such as invitations and place cards, et cetera. I felt that we should treat it as any other project we’d tackle, and come up with a theme that would carry over throughout all aspects of the wedding.

I don’t normally date my sketchbooks that I use to store work notes in, but there happens to be a 7/13/08 written on the page directly before these sketches appear, so we’ll say I came up with this ‘coat of arms’ idea in mid-July 2008.

Coat-of-Arms-sketch-001

Original Sketch

Coat_of_Arms_Final

My Final Product in Photoshop

Frank in color [Converted]

bandwFrank coat of arms [Converted] 

Dorena’s Final Products from Illustrator

It’s fun seeing the progression from sketch, to inefficient Photoshop design, to polished vector illustrations all in one spot. It’s the first time I’ve seen them together, and I’m pretty happy with the results. This was the design we anchored everything around, from the invitation…

Invitation-001

To the RSVP cards…

RSVP-email

To the address labels…

address-label

To the website…

Web-Site-Sketch-001

Original Sketch

Keith and Dorena logo in place

Photoshop Mockup

Untitled-2

Final Site (Click to Visit)

A favorite little touch of mine, is the horizontal rule that I designed for the website. For those unfamiliar with HTML, a horizontal rule just creates a visual divider (a line that typically spans the width of the page) in a page of content. Again, I utilized the Coat of Arms that I came up with…

hr-bg

Us I’ve done a lot of branding over the last few years, but I’ve primarily worked with established clients, that had logos and designs in place. It was a great process crafting a brand and implementing it on my own (with some help from my extremely talented soon-to-be wife). The website was another grand achievement because it’s the first time I’ve used my developmental PHP core (along the lines of CakePHP or other PHP frameworks). It performs very well, and it’s not that difficult to use. I’m planning on wrapping up a beta release some point over the summer, and hope to have it released for other people to play around with then. It’s a little frightening thinking about PHP developers looking over and scrutinizing my code, since I’m not a developer by design (ha, get it?), but it’s also exciting to know that I can code something this in-depth.

An interesting thing that I’d like to document is the attempt at digitizing the RSVPs. We figured that a large majority of the people coming to the wedding were computer savvy, or at least had the ability to send an email, so we opted to try our hand at only giving mail back RSVPs to the old goats that didn’t even have computers.

The formula was simple, as outlined in the RSVP card above; Send an email to rsvp@KeithAndDorena.com and let us know if you’re coming or not. We sent our invitations out (albeit a little later than I anticipated) in the last week of February, and gave a deadline of April 24th. A week later we started getting mailed responses, but the emails were very few and far between. After two weeks of having invitations out, there were only seven responses out of the nearly thirty we sent out. I started thinking that the email address was screwing up at some point, either in the receiving on my server’s end, or the synchronization to Outlook, but all of my tests worked immediately. I crafted an RSVP form and slapped it on the home page of our website, and less than a day later I had seven more responses. By the end of the week, all were accounted for.

It opens an interesting discussion, is it too difficult to send an email to a new person? Do people respond better if the person they’re contacting is already in their contact list? Why would someone visit a website daily, when hardly any attention was brought to it on the RSVP card? It’s incredibly curious to me, and I’ll probably never find out why this phenomena occurred, but I figured I’d point it out to those that were thinking of doing the same thing. I wonder if there will be the same resistance with the digitizing of other traditional mail-based correspondences…

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May 1, 2009 by Keith in Web Desinger/Developer Related

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