The secret: Twitter can’t resize .gif images. So make a big .gif of your profile picture, you can even animate it.

The catch: Twitter also doesn’t like uploading .gifs. So the first 10 times you try, you’ll probably get the fail whale. Keep clicking the “Save” button over and over before the whale has a chance to hit you; for me it was about twice a second or so. Stop after a little bit, and back up.

Do you see your new picture? If not, rinse and repeat.

And do it quickly, because once enough people figure this out they’re sure to fix it.

Say hello to me on Twitter @jruckman.

At RTP Startup Weekend this month, myself along with about 10 other dudes put together a new site we call Bars For Us.

The idea is simple: index the attributes of a city’s bars and present them as a list of tags. Click on tags like “outdoor seating” and “wine”, and your options narrow down.

Check out our company’s website, or our first live city: Raleigh, NC. Lots more tags, cities, and features to come. This is a lot of fun to build.

These are my most recent business cards. Guy Kawasaki recently asked me to make some for him as well, and I gladly obliged. Clearly he has impeccable taste.

The font is Clearview Hwy, a font collaboratively developed by independent researchers, the Texas Transportation Institute, the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, and the Federal Highway Administration to be as legible as possible in the worst of visibility conditions.

Does your card’s design get in the way of the information it exists to communicate?

photo credit: Elizabeth Compton

Bout time I make one of these for myself. I’m Justin Ruckman, currently a student and freelance designer/consultant/whatever living in Charlotte, North Carolina.

As I work and play, I’ll post artifacts here. Eventually this will function as my portfolio (of sorts), after I move my work which is currently on the main page, jruckman.com, over here.

I post miscellaneous badassery over at my other blog, Centripetal Notion, photos to Flickr, messages to Twitter, videos to Vimeo, links to del.icio.us, found images to FFFFOUND! and track my music at Last.fm.

I’m also co-founder and media director for Metrolina Biofuels, and in a couple weeks will be launching a local blog with some good friends: CLT Blog.

Grab this site’s feed, I won’t be updating too often but when I do I’ll try to make it worth your time.

Thanks to Derek Punsalan and his kickass WordPress theme “The Unstandard“, which I’ve made even more (or less) so after some light tweaking. The design here will be improving over time, but I think this is a good place to start.

See you around.