A few years ago, my best friend began considering this very possibility. Keri, who I have known since the 6th grade, decided that she wanted to drop everything and change her life to pursue a design career. Keri has always been interested in design, we became good friends because we were both on the staff of our middle school yearbook and later took art classes together in High School. While other friends have come and gone, Keri and I have always shared the bond of appreciating creativity, design, making things, and art.

{Keri & I ~1994}

In college Keri fell in love with Spanish and chose a major in it, graduated and got a pretty good job in Richmond Virginia making good money. As an Int’l Customer Service Rep. for Alcoa Inc (thats Reynolds wrap, ya’ll) she managed client relations with customers all over the world exercising her proficiency in spanish. But one day it hit Keri that this is was not the career path she wanted, and began the long journey of leaving her well-paying job, adorable little house, and the awesome town of Richmond (can I get a hell yeah for the fan?) to move to DC and attend the Art Institute of Washington DC.

Something I have noticed about students who decide to go back to school for a career change is… they don’t f*ck around. They realize the importance of building a great portfolio and leverage their experience and maturity to buckle down and crank out great work. They are fast, efficient, interested, and mature designers. Marry all of that with a proficiency in Spanish and you have Keri.

Keri recently graduated from the Art Institute and I am really proud of her. The courage and tenacity it takes to go back to school and seek a new job in a new career path during these economic times is pretty amazing to me.
I encourage you all to please check out her work, reach out with any leads or feedback, connect on LinkedIn, and welcome Keri to the design community. After all this hard work she is excited to get started doing EVEN MORE work, design work. If you know of any entry level design positions in the DC area, please consider contacting her.

Check out Some of Keri’s work here

See Keri’s LinkedIn Profile Here

So, I just wanted to catch you guys up personal and fun stuff, I tend to be spending less time blogging, but not necessarily less time doing designy things… they are just all over the place. If you follow me on twitter you probably see stuff I post pretty often, but they don’t all necessarily come together right here.

I just finished up another wonderful class of excited students at CDIA Boston University. I recently have been teaching Intro to the Design Program, this is both print and web design. The best thing about teaching this class are the fresh perspectives on design and the debates that ensue. In this class I try and talk about everything from how design effected our recent election to the London Olympics logo. As a designer you sometimes take for granted the things you do on a daily basis, but in a class of intro students you are reintroduced to the smallest details of the design industry, and reminded of how very special this profession is.  One day during this particular class a student asked me “where do you get fonts?” It took me a second to catch onto this one…. at first I was like “New and exciting fonts? well.. I read blogs…” and then it hit me “Oh, you mean foundries! Well… wow, there are so many there are….” and in that moment of explanation I rediscover the magic of all those wonderful foundries I love so much. A routine part of my daily lifestyle had become magic again as I got to share all the exciting sites and boutique foundries that I love so much.

Though I haven’t been very good about updating my blog recently, I had an article come out in issue 188 of .net magazine and I currently have a makeover redesign for the current issue of .net that is out in the UK right now (go get it!), and will be out in Practical Web Design Magazine (issue 191) in the US in about a month. I recently posted an article on “CSS Tips for Designer from Designers” with a lot of help from some wonderfully talented friends for the Art Directors Club of Washingtons DC’s Full Bleed Online Magazine ( subscribe to the RSS feed).

I am not the only one who has been busy lately. Some folks I know who have been moving and shaking include my partner and crime, Jim; who started a new gig at a fantastic studio in the DC area, The Orchid; who is playing some badass tunes all up in the DC area, Elliot; who has launched a new site, and my friend Keri (you will see her stuff in an upcoming post); who recently graduated from Art Institute Washington after taking the risk to go back to school to pursue her love of design.

When I am not doing any of that I have been hanging at the beach with my friends and family because the key to creativity is being able to decompress and live a life that inspires creativity. I hope you all find some time to do the same. More posts coming soon.

Also I thought I would share with you some of my more recent favorite tweets:

From Zeldman

From Elliot Muñoz

From Graham

From Val

From Geoff Barnes

Last month Viget’s Design Director, Tom gave a fantastic presentation to our design team on various applications for collecting inspiration (he wrote a marvelous post). This presentation finally kicked my ass into gear on creating a collection of my own. While Evernote was a tempting possibility I joined Elliot Jay Stocks and Patrick Haney who have been using LittleSnapper to keep a visual record of  design that inspire them. With some tips from Tom (@TheTroz) and a fellow Viget designer, Talbs (@talbs) I was quickly on my way to a solid little collection.
There are two factors that make LittleSnapper the solution for me:

It seamlessly integrates into my work flow.

I have the icon in my dock, when I see something I snap it. It provides fields for all the information that makes that “snap” useful to me. There is a field for the web address, description, and descriptive tags. I hardly have to go out of my way to document a really cool piece of design. My only suggestion for improvement here would be a tag suggestion feature… its hard to remember if I am using the tag “Packaging” vs “Package Design” when I am in a hurry.

It has an online gallery component that creates an RSS feed.

While I could set little snapper up to integrate with my Flickr account, personally I want to keep my Flickr for photos and personal design pieces, and have a separate area just for inspirational work of other designers. Having it online is essential for me because I may want to pull it up in a pinch to show clients or students and I would also like to share it with you guys. The fact that an RSS feed is generated adds a whole other component to it that I would like to play with further. Eventually  I would like to pull the RSS feed to my blog to display selected pieces of inspiration.

Two Things I have learned from Creating a Quick Snapper Gallery

Holy Crap, I have a very defined “taste” in design! Yeah, you guys probably know that all ready, but its interesting to see it for myself.

Most of what inspires my online design comes from offline inspiration. Package and poster design is incredibly beautiful.

Check out LittleSnapper and subscribe to my new “Design Inspiration” feed. Or…if you would rather… just mosey on over to my QuickSnapper page.

Think more, design less.

Many desperate acts of design (including gradients, drop shadows, and the gratuitous use of transparency) are perpetrated in the absence of a strong concept. A good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work.

-Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type

Black White Bliss
I recently stumbled upon this feed by accident, and while it does not update too often it has a lot of really interesting design-y things all sharing a similar color scheme. I really love black and white.. websites, clothing, photos… and here are tons of things that will all match. »RSS feed

Design Snips
In have an entire tab of my netvibes dedicated to web galleries and over a period of time I have really found designsnips to contain some of the most unique content. Rather than showcasing full web designs, DesignSnips hones in on the details.
»RSS Feed

Aisle One
This feed has provided me with quality content over the las few years. With a focus on clean design not only does it feature great inspiration but fantastic tips and insighttoo. I love the design of the site.
»RSS Feed

Very Small Array
This feed is a recent discovery brought to my attention via my colleague Doug Avery. The author of this blog, who also draws an online comic makes these intriguing graphs and charts. I love graphs and charts… and maps and information design. Call me a freak, I don’t care, that shit’s cool.
»RSS Feed

Dezeen
Clean architecture and industrial design can be a really great place for web design inspiration.  I have subscribed to this feed for a long time, and while I don’t check it that often, it is a delightful respite from the ins and outs of web design.
»RSS Feed

Because he is such a cool guy, he took some time out of his busy schedule to give me the answers to 8 Random Questions. Enjoy!

Q: You get the opportunity to work with lots of well-known musicians, what one musician or band would you love to work with but have not had the chance to?

I’d love to work with Randy Newman, Joe Jackson, and Ben Folds. Daft Punk, too, or Underworld, but they don’t need me. And hell… Prince, of course, but his batting average on design is pretty shaky. (With the notable exception of LoveSexy). You know who I bet would be interesting to meet? And I know this is going to mark me as a total nerd. Weird Al is crazy-smart. I’d love to do something for him. Also Pete Townshend. Iggy Pop. And Liz Phair. And… ahem… Hall & Oates. God, I’m so completely uncool. I listen to new music, too, I swear! Company of Thieves, I like. Lilly Allen did an acoustic version of “Womanizer” recently. I’d design that single in a heartbeat. I wish I could’ve done the soundtrack design for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” And for a hundred others. But these are the people I’d start with.

Q: In your ADCMW talk you mentioned that tough economic times like these provide a great opportunity to grow as a designer, can you expand upon the types of things Designers can do to take advantage of the situation?

When things get as lean as they are now it’s a great time for the little guy. If you’re running a small studio or working on your own you can be much more flexible than the big boys. More importantly, heavyweight clients might actually give you a closer look than they would when they can just write a check to one of the bigger firms.

By the same token, your existing clients might be up for some more extravagant ideas if they make a big impression on a budget.

On a personal level, I think that the current economic situation erases any lingering illusion of job security. It used to be irresponsible to do what you want to do if it meant risking your job or a big client. But now… hell, you’re already at risk anyway. Might as well sink or swim with something you’re crazy about.

Q: Many of your monsters wear very stylish shoes, do you have a pair of your own that are your particular favorite?

I do, though at 6′4″ I’m pretty much restricted to flats. I have a great pair of boots from Silverfeet, which is the store brand at Fred Segal. I love these boots. They have buckles on the side that are hidden 99% of the time and just flash occasionally. They’re comfy and stylish, and they make me feel a foot taller. I wear them when I’m on stage. I love my boots. You can see them in Robynne Raye’s new book.

Q: I’m a big fan of your “Greed Control” graph, what steps have you personally taken to decrease greed and increase your quality of work?

It’s simple: I live within my means, and I pay off my credit card every month. Other people take lavish vacations, or buy themselves a fancy car. I drive a small car and travel small. I just don’t spend more than I make. In exchange, I get to say No to work I don’t like, or walk away from clients that don’t treat me right. Being debt free has made me so much calmer and happier, and that shows in all areas of my life. I got some really lucky breaks that made it possible for me to be debt free now, but I also worked towards that goal for the past 12 years. Along with my U.S. citizenship, it’s my proudest achievement.

Q:You recently came out with a series of really cool skateboard decks, do you ride? If not, what gave you the idea?

I don’t ride, sadly. But only because I’m afraid of falling off the board. And onto concrete. But I love the aesthetics of skateboarding — both the boards and the actual activity. I think it’s beautiful and sleek and elegant. If done by people other than me. I’d look like a drunken crane landing on a sea of ball bearings.

Q: Both in your presentation and on your website you are refreshingly candid about being “shockingly” expensive. You charge “per project” rather than an hourly rate (a feat that is admired by many designers) how do you justify this to your clients? How do recommend other designers pull this off?

The only way to pull it off is to do it. And I’m not doing it to prove anything. I ask for the amount of money that will keep my head clear for the time I think the project needs to be great. It’s hard to get into the necessary Zen state when you have to worry about timesheets or hustling for more work. This, again, goes back to Greed Control®. The less money you need each month, the easier you breathe during negotiations. It’s all about freeing up as much bandwidth as possible for the actual work of making art.

Q:You sneak the number 344 ( the name of your design company) into a lot of your work, what is the significance of that number?

Originally, the number came about because my studio is at the intersection of the 134 and 210 freeways. Later I discovered that the 344th day of the year is the day I moved to California from Germany — my U.S. birthday.

Q: In the Q& A portion of your presentation, I asked you about your decision to take your Monsters online, how do you see the web affecting design for all designers in the future?

Oh my! I have absolutely no idea! But I bet it’ll be cool, and I hope I’ll be in on it!

Many organizations (AIGA, Refresh, ADC…) are comprised of volunteers. This means the people working hard to make things happen are doing this as on their time… they are not being paid. They are doing the best they can in the amount of time they can spare. While some organizations do have paid employees, I can say for certain they are not making the wages equal to the amount of effort they put into it. AIGA and ADCMW are non-profits, and as many people know that the non-profits that flourish are the ones that have people involved who put in 110%. If there is something that you see happening in your local community that is just bobo as hell, I recommend you look into helping to fix it before you go all publicly bitching about it. If you have time complain, you have time to volunteer.

Organizations that request payment of dues:

It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that if you don’t pay membership dues you can still go to events and pay the non-members price and make out OK. Thats fine, and I don’t fault you for doing this… that is because I don’t really think we should call them Dues at all. Consider it a “donation”, because that is really what it is. I constantly hear people saying “what do I get for my membership dues?”. My answer to this is that you are supporting your community. You may not physically get anything (though you actually do, you just have to take advantage of it..) but in general your money is often going towards maintaining a full-fledge working organization. In the case of ADCMW, I know that you are helping to support a wide range of educational events and programs that you may not see first hand, but those embarking in the early stages of the creative profession are taking full advantage of. If it wasn’t for ADCMW’s educational involvement during my college years I may not fully understand the importance of community to my profession now.

On the subject of paying for events:

Some communities manage to maintain a model where you do not have to pay for events. That is awesome, and a great model for some communities, but not every organization can maintain that. The money you pay at an event pays for a number behind the scenes things that need to happen in order to make the event possible, and often the entire organization putting on the event. Realistically… not that many people pay dues.. so the money running the organization has to come from somewhere. And here again, I will make this very clear, if you don’t like that an organization makes you pay for an event… volunteer to help bring the cost of the event down, or to be involved in the decision making behind the costs of events.

Some say “well, this organization really isn’t for me” :

The landscape of the creative industry is changing. Creative organizations are no longer exclusively “print” organizations and web organizations are not just for “techies”. There are enormous overlaps and eventually… there won’t be a line drawn between print designers and web designers at all. If you feel like a specific organization is not catering to your specialty (maybe your an IA and want to see more IA related events, maybe you are print designer but you want to learn more about web) then get up and volunteer to make it happen. Every year at SXSW I hear “there weren’t really enough panels on the topic of X”. No? Well then organize one for next year. Organizations aren’t trying to alienate anyone, they just need people to do the things that are actually being suggested… they need the man power.

With that I encourage you to really think hard about what you want to see from your organization of choice and stepping up to help make it happen. The organization I am most closely vested in is ADCMW, and we are currently looking for people to volunteer on the board for next year. We are especially seeking folks who are web savvy, who can make their way around HTML to assist in our web efforts. Even if thats not you we are just looking for people who are enthusiastic, motivated, positive, selfless and love their profession. People who are looking to contribute, have fun, dig in, and get dirty. Those who show up, do what they say they will do, and smile… a lot. All organizations and events need people who do things, not just talk about doing them. If you don’t think you have the time to commit on a monthly basis, there are tons of volunteer and sponsorship opportunities available that require shorter and less invasive time commitments. We need your help to make things happen the way you want to see them happen.. if you are interested in getting involved, hit up my contact form or find an organization that needs your help.

(If you are a member of another industry organization that needs volunteers not mentioned here, please feel free to leave the name & contact info in the comments)

The web is about relationships, not just people

Those in the web industry tend to be super motivated work-aholics, and sometimes its easy to feel really alone. I mean not everyone gets what it means to “tweet” or dreams in HTML (its not just me Matthew does too). We each face unique challenges and often turn to each other for comfort over the internet, but getting together face to face over some miso soup at SXSW and sharing our stories can be more revitalizing than anything that can ever happen over twitter.

While I really think that these personal connections made a huge impact on me personally, I also think that this year’s night entertainment circuit really helped for meeting new people. While bars and parties are fine, its nice to see the conference get creative…. two of my favorite events were “Pasties and Pastries” a cupcake contest & burlesque show (get your mind out of the gutter, it was totally PG-13) and OK Happy Cog’eoke. What made these parties a notch above others was that they had a theme that gave you something to talk about with the other attendees, making it easy to find common ground with the crowd and connect with folks you may not have run into during the day session.

Web Typography is a robust topic that needs to be discussed more

It is really hard for me to give an accurate explanation of how our web typography panel went down, because for me… it lasted far longer than the 40-60 minutes that the audience saw during the conference. The group had many conversations over the phone in the months before SXSW and while we were unable to all get on the phone at any one time, we all met up the day before our scheduled talk and had animated type conversation that I will cherish forever. The best advice I can give anyone who is passionately obsessed with a specific topic is to organize a conference panel around it, because talking type with these kick-ass web-type guys was just heaven for me. I learned more from our conversations than I ever could have picked up from a book or class… and made friends.

Overall one hour is NOT enough time to fully address this topic. There is so much that didn’t make it into the panel that we debated offline.. there could be a conference just on web typography. On Speakerrate.com one commenter suggested that we should have had a representative from the font manufacturers and the W3C, but that in itself could be its own panel. Our goal was to motivate web designers to dig in and get more creative with their typography online and to push boundaries. Whether those boundaries be personal creative boundaries, technical boundaries, or the boundaries of what is acceptable within the current state of the industry… that was left up to the audience to decide for themselves.

I want to thank Elliot, Ian, Jon, and Richard, who all traveled to Austin (most from as far away as England!) to participate and make this panel absolutely fantastic. I have now included a link to our slides via the website (which honest to goodness was a race to the minute before the panel to put up) , and as soon as SXSW puts our podcast up ( which I hope they will) I will add it to the bottom of this post & the panel site. I want to also point out the wonderful handwritten notes from the event taken by Mike Rohde , you should check out all of his sets… of mostly design related panels, a creative way to catch up on what you may have missed.

We all have a responsibility to be web educators

I was really excited to get to attend the Web Educators Brunch and then head over for the Future of Web Education Panel. The conversations, while a little hectic, was oozing with positive energy as they unveiled the new Web Standards Project Interact curriculum. The site provides a clear clean explanation of why web standards should matter to everyone especially those educating the web designers of tomorrow. There is a lot of fantastic creativity behind this push to help advance our educational system to teach the web in a manor that is current and appropriate… and I look forward to keeping you updated on what the project brings, and digging into the curriculum myself. A big shout out to all the fantastic educators I met at the conference as well.

Feel free to check out my Flickr set from the week here.

Overall this year’s SXSW left me more inspired than ever, but also a little misty-eyed. Its one thing to stay connected online, but its another to actually get to hang out with the folks in person that really dig on the same things you do. Now… to make everyday Rawk as much as SXSW, I am up for the challenge!

I had built my site using semantic code, meaning that content is structured into different levels … and the structure of the document has meaning…

All of this is good because it allows the website to be indexed more easily by search engines. It also means that people with web accessibility issues will be able to read the page content more easily…

And it also means that the type can be a bit ugly.”

Ugly, O rly?

The statement that a semantic website = ugly type just did not sit so well with me. I mean there are TONS of beautiful sites out there that have semantic markup, some relying solely on “web-friendly” fonts. I believe strongly that its not the typeface you use, but how you use it that makes someone a really strong typographer. I made sure to point a few nice examples out in the comments, but the article got me thinking about the current state of digital type and where it should be heading.

So when SXSW panel proposals rolled around I thought to myself “What if I get a bunch of these folks together who really do pull off successful web typography, have them talk about how they do it” and remarkably … they were in.

• Elliot Stocks  elliotjaystocks.com
• Ian Coyle  iancoyle.com
• Jon Tan jontangerine.com
• Richard Rutter Clagnut.com

One of the major challenges about purposing a SXSW panel is that it happens about 6 months in advance of the conference, so plenty of interesting stuff can happen regarding a topic in the meantime, and this year… typography has been a pretty hot topic. If web typography had ears, they would be burning, because everyone has been talking about it…here is a little taste of the W3 minutes from their October meeting

With so much to cover we hope that we can inspire designers to leverage their options for creating better web typography now, but also debate where web typography needs to head in the future.  There is a lot of really cool stuff happening at SXSW this year, and just as last year, I will try to update my flickr feed real time with cool iphone shots of what is going on. Not familiar with SXSW? Check out my slew of previous posts…  If you will be attending, I hope to see you there!