Sorry Portland, I’m Breaking Up with You For the Hot, Tanned, Busty Blonde that is Los Angeles, Although I Typically Go For Wavy Haired, Glasses-Wearing, Tatted Up, Scarf-Wearing, Intellectual Brunettes Like You, Portland, the Thing is It’s Been 4 Years and This Relationship isn’t Going Anywhere, Time to Move On, Smooch Smooch, Love You, Bye

Spring of 2005, I decided that I needed to leave Florida. Living there my whole life, I felt life there became rather stagnant for me. I love my Florida friends, most of whom I have remained in contact with, but I wanted to experience something completely different — something that would be impossible to do in Orlando, a cultural wasteland centered around family-friendly fun. Fresh off of dropping out from the University of Central Florida, I thought this was a good opportunity as ever to live up to my already nomadic lifestyle by leaving Florida and moving to the West Coast.

I finally set my sights on Portland. In a toss up between Portland and Seattle, I ended up choosing Portland over Seattle because The Art Institute of Portland had a Bachelor’s program for my preferred field of study versus Seattle who only offered an Associate’s program¹. I found a place on craigslist and made a verbal agreement with my future roommate via email. Once all the necessary steps were taken, I embarked on a 3-day, 2,900 mile journey from Panama City, Florida to Hillsboro, Oregon — just me, my Ford Mustang, and everything I could stuff into my small, impractical car.

In retrospect, I can’t believe I did it. It was a ballsy move on my part to move to the other side of the country without a job, verbally agree to move in with somebody I’ve never met, not to mention, I’ve never visited Portland before I moved here. I didn’t know if I was going to like Portland. None of this mattered to me, what mattered to me was Florida was behind me.

Almost 4 years later, I believe moving to Portland was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Friends will probably find that hard to believe as I’ve complained so much about Portland in the past. This place has been a roller coaster ride for me with a lot of ups and downs. But the truth is, I was using Portland as a scapegoat for my own personal demons. This place has changed my life — I did a lot of growing up here, it altered my perspective on what is important, not to mention, I’ve met a lot of awesome friends here. Friends I hope to keep the rest of my life. Portland will always have a special place in my heart.

Why am I writing this now you ask? Because I will be moving to Los Angeles next week. In a similar, but less ballsy fashion as when I moved to Portland: Just me, my Ford Mustang, and what I can fit into my small, impractical car will be making the trip while the rest of my possessions will be put into storage for the time being. I’m still unemployed, so obviously finding a job will be at the top of my priority list. Even though there are a few uncertainties, I’m excited for the future. Unlike Portland, I’ve been to Los Angeles and what I saw of it, I thought was great. I’m extremely happy to be moving back to a warm climate with a beach nearby.

I only have a few friends in Los Angeles right now, so if you are reading this and you live in the L.A. area, I’d love to meet up with you.

Portland friends: I might get to see some of you before I go. If I don’t, I’m already planning to come back in a month or two. Thanks for everything and I hope to see you all again.

1. This decision appeared to be an important at the time, but actually turned out to be the most trivial as I ended up dropping out 2 weeks into the quarter, putting school on an indefinite hiatus.

Light Theme

Some people have a hard time reading light text on a dark background, and prefer dark text on light backgrounds. Research shows that dark on light is generally more readable¹, so I decided to create a light theme that is basically the inverse of the dark (original) theme. You can easily switch between the dark & light theme by clicking the appropriate link located at the top right corner. Your choice will be retained in a cookie to save you from having to change the theme on every visit. Oh joy!

More RSS Feeds

Until a few days ago, all entries were included all in one feed. While that feed will remain intact, I’ve included two other feeds: articles only and links only. Wow, exciting!

Auto-Posting on Twitter

I’ve decided to experiment with auto-posting my entries to my twitter account. I’ve noticed that I usually post infrequently in bursts, so I can’t imagine that it would be any more annoying than tweeting links of interest. But, if it reaches a point of annoyance, please let me know on twitter or email me.

1. Roger Johansson wrote on this very subject a few years ago. While he did not provide any research, a couple commenters linked up some research on the subject that states dark on light is better for readability.

(via Signal vs Noise)

I love seeing how other designers present information and ideas in a easy to digest format.

Visual design is often subjective and can be difficult to describe or judge. Often, people lack the language or understanding of the work to accurately express their opinions. Consequently, we use simple terms of the way an object “looks” or how it “feels”.

Speaking in terms of these qualities does a disservice to the design. We cheapen the value of the work by paying attention only to the superficial aspects.

When I refer to the visual design of a website or a web application, I tend to use “aesthetics” or “style layer” but those words don’t do visual design any more justice than “look and feel”.

Also, don’t forget to read the comments.

I recently began working with a client whose staff doesn’t design together. When they walk into the office in the morning, they plug in their headphones and stare at their screens, hardly speak to each other, and forge product plans by way of short, infrequent conversations about what needs to be implemented next and when. The conference room has only a table and a projector. The front room is filled with broken-down boxes, presumably leftover from setting up shop in a new place, but the company has been in the space for months.

The people on this team are smart and engaged, but they’re nowhere near doing their best work. They’re not taking advantage of each other’s ideas and passions. They’re not having any fun.

I’ve worked in a couple of environments similar to what Robert describes here. In both environments, I did not work at an efficiency I would consider to be productive. More importantly, I did not produce what I would consider to be my best work.

What I’ve taken away from both experiences is the work environment of any job will always set a threshold on the potential enthusiasm (and fun) you will have for the duration of your time at said job. In other words, focus on evaluating the team you will be working with, not the work you will be doing. Enthusiasm and attitude is contagious.

A bit of a tangential thought from Hoekman’s point, but thought it was worth noting.

Brief Overview of the HSB color space

Before we choose the monochromatic color palette, we need to understand what HSB is. HSB is a color space that defines colors based on 3 values: Hue, Saturation, and Brightness¹. Imagine HSB as a cylinder: Hue takes a value of 0-360°, saturation and brightness each take a value of 0-100%. In my opinion, the last 2 values is what makes HSB so wonderful to work with, as I can adjust colors by changing these values without using Photoshop as a intermediary. This is why I prefer HSB to using RGB. It’s far less abstract and lends itself to how humans perceive color.

Choosing the colors

When I started choosing colors for version 4 of chrisgriffin.org, I began with a dark base color since I was going with a light on dark theme. I ended up choosing a slightly warm dark gray. In HSB, it’s value is (60,8,14) (the hex value would be #242421). The rest of the grays in my design are a variant of this base color. The way I did this is just by increasing or decreasing the brightness value in increments of 10 (and sometimes 5). For example, the background color of the main navigation here is (60,8,34), compared with my base color, there is a 20 unit brightness increase. Obviously, you can choose intervals that work best for your design. Adjusting color saturation is just as easy; let’s say I wanted a slightly less saturated color for my visited links, I would decrease the saturation value depending on how unsaturated I would like the color to be.

HSL and CSS3

The CSS3 color module includes the HSL color space which will allow for easier color adjustments without the need to fire up Photoshop. At the time of this writing, the major browsers that have HSL support are Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Opera 9.64. Since CSS support for HSB is not supported by IE (big surprise), it’s best we continue to use hex values in our CSS, which means you’ll need to use the hex value that the Photoshop color picker generated when you chose the color palette using HSB.

More Resources

• Wikipedia: HSV Color Space
• W3C: CSS3 Color Module
• Working with HSL in CSS

1. HSV, HSL, and HSI, are other color spaces that use a very similar representation, but for the sake of this tutorial we’ll stick to HSB because that’s what Photoshop uses

From the original article:

To put it into perspective, if you watch an average of 31.5 hours of TV each week (which the average person in the US does) and you value your time at minimum wage of $5.85 an hour, you are spending nearly $800 a month ($798.53) to watch TV. That comes to nearly $10,000 ($9582.30) a year. I would imagine that most people reading this value their time well above minimum wage, so the cost is likely several times that number. When you look at it from that perspective, watching TV is an extremely expensive and financial draining habit to have.

I would say I fall near the average, especially this time of year with the amount of sports I watch. Let’s say my time is valued at $100 an hour, and let’s also include the cost of cable itself ($90 for me). I waste $3240 a month in potential (and actual) income on TV.

On the other side of the coin, putting a monetary value on all facets of life may give one perspective on the priorities in one’s life, but probably isn’t the best approach in most situations.

Enter Deadbolt. I’ve owned this domain name for just over 3 years with the intentions to rebrand myself, and with my current situation, I decided it was time to do just that. Griffin Webworks is now officially retired.

And with that, I’m open for business.

Sometimes I wonder, then: given that everyone in design seems to more or less know everyone else, are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having? Are we too quick to take offense at the opinions of our peers? Or are we pulling our punches too much when discussing the merits of the work that our peers turn out? To put a finer point on it: are we being honest with one another?

When someone asks me for feedback of their work, I try to be objective and honest with them, even more so when I have a certain level of rapport with said person. But, when I have something critical to say, I watch my tone of voice, as I want them to hear the feedback without the person interpreting as a personal attack. My experience with designers (myself included) is they sometimes align critical feedback of their work with a personal attack.

Personally, I like to think I take criticism well from designers who I respect. The trouble I have is a tendency to dismiss feedback from designers who I don’t respect, along with non-designers, non-designers commonly being developers. Their reputation (or lack thereof) precedes their feedback and holds less weight with me, even if they have valid concerns. When I step back, I see that I should handle these situations more objectively by being more inclusive and receptive, while remaining assertive, standing behind my design decisions. Clear communication and approach is key here, as we all have our egos to worry about.

There just wasn’t enough work to warrant keeping me on the roster and they decided to lay me off. Planet Argon did what was necessary to cut costs in order to survive in this bad economy, and I don’t blame them for that. Saying that, we parted on good terms and I’ll still see most of them regularly outside the office. We may no longer be colleagues, but we are still friends.

What does this mean for me? It means that I have some extra time on my hands. I was somewhat prepared (admittedly, not completely prepared) for this to happen, and have been working on contingency plan in the background over the last few months to not leave myself in such a bad position in the case that I would end up jobless. The redesign of this blog and my business card site, chrisgriffin.me, were among the things on my list, although my work isn’t done.

I also had plans to get back into freelance work that I abandoned a couple years ago. While it isn’t as graceful as I planned it to be, my current situation brings these plans to the forefront. Now that I have all this time on my hands, I can take on freelance or contract work. Please feel free to check out my résumé and/or contact me, if you would like to talk more about your project.

I am nervous and happy about what the future will bring. I haven’t been unemployed since I started making a respectable income as a web professional, and once one starts making a respectable amount of money, they carry on new responsibilities financially, all of which carry a certain burden. In addition to these burdens, the crumbling economy just makes it that much harder to find work. Despite of all this, I am optimistic that I will come out of this just fine. I will keep you all posted on the outcome of this scenario.

Why the new domain?

Honestly, I never liked having my middle initial in my domain name, but being that Chris Griffin is a somewhat common and famous name, I had to settle for Chris Z. Griffin when I initially bought the domain in 2005. Sounds picky, I know, but I always thought it sounded out of place with my nickname, Chris, as middle initials are usually reserved for more formal purposes. So, you could imagine how giddy I was when I stumbled upon chrisgriffin.org while purchasing chrisgriffin.me last July, only 16 days in the wild after it’s previous owner abandoned it. When I moved to a new host I decided to go ahead and switch domains.

Boxcar

Beginning of this year, when I decided I wanted to move from the shared hosting environment I had over at Media Temple to a VPS, I decided to go with Boxcar. Beyond the fact that as an employee of Planet Argon, I get a free Boxcar, not to mention that if at any time I’m having any problems with my hosting I could literally throw my shoe at Alex’s head. But seriously, I hear nothing but good things about it from Boxcar clients and our managed hosting clients. And yes, I’m a little bias.

Wordpress

if that wasn’t enough, I decided that it was time to abandon the abondonware blogging application Simplelog. In my last post, I stated that I wanted a blogging application that ran on ruby on rails so I could get my hands dirty in ruby. That still stands true, but I came to the realization later that I just wanted a place, first and foremost, where I can just write. Writing and refactoring code should come secondary to that.

Enter Wordpress. I know it’s PHP, it’s bloated, and a bit ugly, but it has a decent UI, almost everything I needed in functionality, and what it lacked in functionality, there was bound to be a plugin to fill in the gaps. I won’t go into any more details about Wordpress, as it’s ubiquitous on the web and the upsides and downsides are well documented.

New Design

And lastly, the redesign. This redesign was a bit spontaneous, as my original plan was to migrate the old design to Wordpress and revisit the design later. Just as soon as the old design was completely migrated, the redesign bug hit, and I decided to go ahead with it. Migrating the old design first actually worked out for the better, as that was my first experience working with Wordpress and it’s template system. The second time around, I had more of a grasp as to what I was doing.

With version 4, I decided to do something I’ve never done: light on dark. I’ve tried it a couple times in the past, but I ended usually trashing it, as the dark design never felt right. This time around, I went with it and never looked back. I got through the design phase in about a week and a half of my spare time, which was pretty quick considering there were times I’ve spent month(s) on a design.

For the grid CSS framework, I rolled my own. It’s based off of 960 Grid System but I wanted to create something from scratch, as there were things I didn’t need in 960 GS. What I came out with was something similar to the 960, but with two major differences:

• No IE6 support: I like writing as efficient CSS as possible (as most developers do), and since I am not supporting IE6 in any way, this opens the door to a plethora of options for selectors and properties that most of us designers and front-end developers dream of using, but tend to avoid because it’s not supported by IE6, such as :first-child and :last-child and the selectors that include class subsets (e.g. .main.link).

• Less bloat: When CSS frameworks provide options to accommodate different grid systems, or better yet, all in one solutions such as typography styles, icons, etc, such as Blueprint provides, it also comes with extra baggage. This isn’t a knock against 960, Blueprint or any other CSS framework, as these are built for a lower common denominator than what I needed, and for different uses such as prototyping.

Handy Wordpress Plugins

In addition to blog entries, I wanted to have a place where I can also post interesting links with commentary. Wordpress, plus the very simple wordpress linked list plugin allowed for me to go with a different format for this version of my blog. You will see blog entries and links in similar fashion, and both will appear together in the RSS feed. I have plans to also include blog entries only and links only RSS feed, but for now this should work just fine.

The archives page is probably the page I’m most proud of. I didn’t want a typical archive that lists out years, months, or categories in a typical, not very useful format. I went digging around for a wordpress plugin that allowed me to display months by year. I found one that allowed me to do just that called Smart Archives Reloaded. I had to completely rewrite the HTML output, but the final result is exactly what I wanted. As for the category list by alphabetical order, I had to use Multi Column Category List. Again, this plugin required me to change almost all of the HTML output.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I think, for once, I’m completely satisfied with the my blog setup and design, and who knows, I may write a blog post or two. Feel free to leave feedback via comments or the contact form.

(via Jason Kottke)

Also read Website Optimization’s for implementation methods.

At Planet Argon, we’ve been using 960 Grid System in most of our projects for the last few months. Some of our internal projects, we’ve been using a heavily-modded version of 960 (more on that later).

(via Jeff Croft)

It’s been happening throughout history, of course. Beautiful accidents. Unintentional intentions. We can’t plan these mistakes, but wish we could. What seems like disaster, turns into the spark that ignites what we perceive later as “rightly so”.

And it happens all the time when I’m designing. Oops, I dumped a white paint can where color used to be. Wait. That’s nice. It’s become a part of my process. A part I can’t anticipate, or account for, but a part nonetheless.

The serendipitous nature of design is part of what makes it so rewarding—those eureka moments.

So I’ve redesigned, finally. I promised myself I wouldn’t tell a long story of the trials and tribulations of how I came to this design. Just know that I actually started doing some IA work on it about a year ago and then it dropped off the radar for about a year, and picked it back up in February of this year.

The goal here was to keep it fairly simple. I wanted the content to stand out and come first. Frankly, I’ve never been a fan of the heavily styled blogs. While they are “pretty”, there is a threshold where a blog loses its utility and becomes more of a piece of art. For some, I guess that is the point, but to each his own.

Right now, it’s a bit rough around the edges. I have a long list of known issues that I put off because I felt were not show stoppers like:

• It doesn’t look great in IE6. I’m debating whether I’ll even attempt to dumb down my markup and CSS for the inferior browser.
• HTML may not validate, if you care about such trivial things.
• Search doesn’t work. I have a whopping 13 posts, so I think you’ll live. If that’s not good enough, here’s Google.
• Tidying and refactoring of some of the code.

Why Simplelog?

I wanted to stick with a blog application that ran on ruby on rails. My reason is twofold: As a rails noob, I wanted something I could hack on and get my hands dirty, and even though Simplelog development has stagnated as of late, I still felt the UI is simpler and has less cruft than Mephisto, which seems to be the ruby on rails blog application front-runner.

Thanks

Thanks to Robby Russell for the help on all the random development and deployment issues I was having, and to Andy Delcambre for helping me getting this beast up and running.

I decided I really needed to make more of an effort here on my personal blog, as it reflects poorly on me from the lack of writing to the default template that has been up for a year, a. year. That’s sad, even sadder that I call myself a designer. Saying that, I’m going to start making big changes around here.

Change #1: Say Bye Bye to the Default Template

In the very near future (by very near future, I means an ambiguous day in the realm of the very near future that isn’t specific enough to be held accountable for if I do not meet the goal.) this blog will feature an awesome new design by yours truly. Right now, I’m working on beating Simplelog into submission (a few nit-picky things), which is tall order of rails development for a designer. There also needs to be a few more lines of HTML/CSS to be written here and there. So, get your validators ready.

Change #2: More Linkage

My first and second attempt at blogging were more about coming up with original content. If you can do this on a regular basis, hats off to you. I, on the other hand, have trouble doing this—especially since this blog is not my full-time job. To keep things moving, I’m going to start posting links with commentary inline with the posts. This is an experiment to keep this blog interesting between blog posts. I will start doing this after getting the new design up, as this may require some development work.

Here’s to hoping that I won’t fail my blog a third time around.