For the next 5 weeks, I’ll be in Europe with Wooden Wand. If you need me, here’s where I’ll be: Continue reading
Wooden Wand European tour
Reply
The road ahead
I’m unsure of the exact date, but one of the days in September of 1999 was my first day at a little basement web shop called Infomedia. Today, nearly 14 years later, is my last.
It’s hard to conceive of that much time elapsing while sitting in one place, but I’m grateful to have seen the company that I met those years ago grow into what it is today. Continue reading
Information is Exciting
Last week, as President Obama was name-dropping “Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall” in his second inaugural address, the web development community took up arms in a new (and obviously much more trivial) revolt: a revolt against sliders. Continue reading
Remembering Art Ward
This morning over coffee, I teared up a bit reading Mike Monteiro’s most recent contribution to the Pastry Box Project, a tribute to his high school art teacher, Bernard Harmon. No doubt we all have that one teacher that altered the course of our lives. Mine was a high school art teacher as well. His name was Art Ward. Continue reading
Making Blood Oaths
Last February, I posted that we were back in the studio making another Wooden Wand record. Well, after a few delays, the record is finally out January 8th on Fire Records. It’s a record I’m extremely proud of, and definitely not the record we went into the studio expecting to make. Continue reading
12 for ‘12: a year of music to work by
The world is full of year-end lists, and at the end of every year I discover a lot of great music from them. I’m now of the age where I wouldn’t consider myself as being on the pulse of anything besides esoteric Finnish rock and modern composers whose primary instrument is distortion, so I don’t feel qualified to summarize the importance of this year’s musical output. Instead, I’d like to offer the records that have been the soundtrack to the work I’ve produced in 2012. Continue reading
On the meaning of ‘design’
To clients, one of the most confusing aspects of the job we do as web designers lies in communicating the meaning of that pesky word “design.” It’s the kind of word that you can have whole conversations about and have both parties walk away with entirely different assumptions about what was discussed. For we designers, it basically means the totality of our work–often spanning reasearch, user identification, content strategy, sitemapping, wireframing, prototyping, and yes, finally, a visual representation of it all. To most clients, it just means “art”, as in “just throw some money at it and a gorgeous finished website will pop out the other end.”
The death of desktop
I’ve been making websites for desktop computers for 13 years now. And It crossed my mind recently that, based on a little rough math, I’ve created well over 500 unique designs. In hindsight, they weren’t always pretty. But much of that was because web design was still in its infancy when I started–no web fonts, no css, and no jquery, just a bunch of awful tables and spacer gifs. Life was honestly pretty rough if you had any expectation of creating great design for the web environment. Continue reading
Instagramming with Lee
I had the fortune recently to play a few shows with Lee Ranaldo as part of the Wooden Wand band. Continue reading
Zeldman and the giant redesign
The web design community is aflame with comments and criticism over Jeffrey Zeldman’s most recent redesign–a stark, content-first (well, content-only) layout that looks undeniably odd against the norm of modern desktop web design. This single-column, text-only layout has attracted a wide assortment of vitriol, prompting a rebuttal from the man himself. You’d think the guy raped a panda. Continue reading