A few thoughts on art.

4/9/2011

2011-04-09T00:46:00.003-05:00

Vacation! You might know what that means - time with friends, no work deadlines, and finally a few uninterrupted hours to update my own website! Check out the print design tab for a brand new section entitled "Personal Work." New Client Work pieces are also slated to go up soon!

2/26/2011

2011-04-07T22:04:00.001-05:00

Notes from an actual potential client: "I found your resume online...do you have a portfolio online?"

*insert cricket noises*

Clearly if you found my resume, you either a) didn't open it, period or b) saw jenniferdipalma.com stamped everywhere linked to various projects, and chose not to visit it. I wasn't interested in the project - a retail website. I might talk myself into expanding my interests down the road, but for now, I quite enjoy my niche of medical, church, and artsy websites.

Today's thoughts: learn to read, America. If you can't bother to read my resume, what makes me think you're going to read anything else I write to you?

2/7/2011

2011-02-07T22:36:00.002-06:00

I'm so guilty of not updating this thing. I was really shooting for one post a month in order to post my recent art activity. But I'm at an absolute standstill with my new WordPress site. I just can't decide what texture goes best with IT jokes. I will have to brainstorm some more. I normally don't sit on a project like this, but as it's just for my own personal amusement, I'll let it ride while I spend my time web consulting with clients who have deadlines and wait till I have a more appropriate time to study texture.

Here's my tip of the day: Web 2.0 on WordPress sites...it's over! Go send your rounded corners to someone who cares. I saw one of my client's 3rd party consultant websites today while I was surfing the networking, and it's just old and boring kids. Rounded content boxes are like rolling out of bed without showering. I promise there's some fresh-scented soap behind the door if you get off your themes long enough to draw something.

12/19/2010

2010-12-19T15:35:00.003-06:00

Ah, finally! I had a few minutes to sit down this past weekend, and with the help of Chris Coyier's wonderful videos on www.css-tricks.com, I learned the ins and outs of WordPress. I'm sure there are many more topics that could be covered since the tutorials didn't even touch all of the plugins out there, but for my purposes CSS Tricks was perfect because I am mainly interested in being able to design 1) on a blog platform or 2) just to give people an option to update their own websites if they'd like.

I might experiment around just a little bit this month with a WordPress site for myself. I've been toying with the idea of having a blog-style tech support website, mainly to laugh at my job and all of the silly things we run into at work. I'm still deep in my sketchbook right now and will make another post when I solidify a few things.

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In other news, the St. John the Baptist sweatshirts came out just wonderfully. We ended up switching from a hoodie sweatshirt to a non-hoodie sweatshirt at the last minute to save money, but here is the artwork, that did not have to change from this switch:

(click for an up-close view!)

All of the graphics for the sweatshirt are made out of a font named Gastada.

12/2/2010

2010-12-02T16:10:00.003-06:00

Lookin' good, Digestive Specialists of the Southeast! I'm very happy to post these guys live today; they've been one one of my favorite clients, and probably one of my better technically-driven sites.

http://www.dothangi.com/

I probably could have simplified the background images a little more--maybe just used 1 repeater for all the horizontal lines. I may go back in during the middle of the night one day and update that just for ease of sanity, but everything's running pretty smoothly at this time.

11/20/2010

2010-11-20T15:37:00.005-06:00

5 kinds of fun is what's going on these days. I never fancied myself an archdiocesan designer, but it's just plain coincidence that 2 churches and a youth group in Alabama have all contacted me for design needs. I finally got to play around with jquery for both sites...I truly love the slideshows we can build with jquery.

Speaking of slideshows, it's pretty funny and timely that I got an irritated phone call at work the other day. Some SEO consultant was pretty peeved that her client's slideshow was built in Flash, so she couldn't tag the images. I'm sure I didn't improve the situation when I accidentally blurted out, "Well, seeing as how I used to be blind, image tagging is really only for the visually impaired anyway. Our company is otherwise not concerned with image tagging..."

Anyway, onto the fun stuff:

http://oursaviorparish.org -- Our Savior Catholic Church

I finally got to rectify a wrong here! Their website was built years ago in tables using a 100% width. These guys approached me a couple of months ago desperately needing a site with a fixed width that would fit on everyone's browser. We also redid the graphics to match the altar of their church.

http://southalabamacsa.com -- Sacred Heart of Jesus, Catholic Student Association

These are my favorite kids ever for breaking out of the box. It's kind of embarrassing that the main technology the University of South Alabama is sporting is...the frame. Seriously didn't we leave .htm pages at least 3 years ago? I know I ran as fast as I could. After some recurring difficulties with IT, we slapped on a redirect and moved the hosting to a Windows platform where I promptly indulged into the land of ASP.

We also had a really rockin paint party for the student center. It's always scary when the paint studio picks out the exact colors that I would have chosen.

[click on the image to enlarge!]

I'll have another post as soon as St. John the Baptist gets its sweatshirts printed. I always geek out when I figure out how to build an image entirely out of typography for a project. Sometimes there's nothing better than letters jumbled together. :)

10/16/2010

2010-10-16T21:02:00.003-05:00

So, did the new Gap logo inspire anyone else to buy some real estate, or maybe open up a 401k? I personally thought it looked like an advertisement for a financial institute! Its implementation and subsequent retraction spelled out 5 kinds of hasty. I spent days complaining about the sloppiness of swapping out 1 logo on the website while completely ignoring the fine details of things like the favicon, existing .jpgs on the site that used the old logo, and so and and so forth.

But you know what?

I visited the Gap website at least 5 times that fateful week.

I've never been to the Gap website, let alone taken the time to browse their clothing section. Ultimately I'm not a shopaholic, and therefore have no need for their trendy sweaters, but what a way to generate some talk and maybe even some sales.

I doubt I condone it if that was the sole purpose. "Hey, let's upload something ugly just so we'll get a few more hits." As an SEO advisor, I constantly hammer home a message at work that bears repeating "usability and honesty." Generate content specifically for your users and not specifically for the web hits. But for this average Jane, a crappy logo got me to their website and shopping. Take of that what you will, and keep on keepin' on.

9/17/2010

2010-08-15T02:05:00.005-05:00

I'm browsing around online for development jobs just for kicks, and I might just fall asleep because UI is cropping up in 50% of the conversations.

What, is this something new? Have we not been paying attention to user interaction for the entire length of the web industry? Have we not been giving a crap about how our clients access information and interact with it? Do I not listen to my feedback group anytime someone says something like, "You know what? I really don't like using that menu on top because..." or assess psychologically how they're thinking about using whatever it is that I built? Do I not regularly consider what type of client I'm talking to, and how they're most likely going to want to use their web tools?

My mother is pretty much my litmus test for anything on the web. If I don't think she'll find it easy to use, I probably won't build it, unless I have a good reason. She's my average Joe every day user on the web. She has a few routine tasks that she does every day online, and she wants to be able to do them with ease, and without a lot of flashy hassle (pop-up windows, Flash intros, and too many links on the home page, I'm looking at you.)

It honestly sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me sometimes because when I see UI tossed around, half the time no one's using it in conjunction with anything tactile--like an iPod interface, a menu for an extensive web blog, a Java application at work.

I monster.com'ed some UI jobs just to laugh at them, and half of them sound like this:

"Design, develop, and maintain dynamic user interface templates for multiple applications"

Ok, I could be building a freaking car for all I know. My only clue that I'm not is that you prefer I have some good JS roots in my programming vocabulary. I don't know a lot about cars, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to write a function to run the engine.

I guess all I'm saying is that I'd like a little more tactility associated with UI, and I'd also like us not to forget that we've always paid attention to our client experiences with our applications. It may be that we're studying their reaction experiences a little more in-depth to design a better experience for them. I hope if schools are focusing on this that they're running a lot of focus groups to see how people interact with things and how we can better apply our knowledge for specific tools. But in some sense, I can't believe this is a resume requirement for most web jobs. UI should be something we're all ingrained with from day 1 of designing anything functional. If we're not paying attention to form follows function, we're really wasting our time and not listening to our predecessors. I'd hate to piss off the ghost of Louis Sullivan.

7/23/2009

2009-07-23T22:46:00.000-05:00

I realized it's been a while since I updated, to say the least. I'm really enjoying my new job at TeleVox Software in Alabama. I'm working with the webmaster team; we perform numerous updates and problem-solving techniques to a variety of sites that use ASP, DNN, JS, and Flash, to name a few of our coding styles. Every website is a new learning experience because every one is built a little bit differently. Like most, I have my reservations about the ever popular sIFR; fun fonts weren't really meant to be used on the web. But I'm learning to adapt. :)

5/29/2009

2009-05-29T22:30:00.000-05:00

Be sure to check out the latest addition to the website gallery; IBSjennifer is live! This is a very unique medical website for determining a patient's risk factors for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a disease affecting approximately 1 in 10 individuals worldwide, according to the World Gastroenterology Organisation. Our timing is impeccable as this website was released on World Digestive Health Day, marking 2009 the year of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Built in PHP and CSS, IBSjennifer calculates one's risk score and determines one's ROME criteria and Manning criteria based on how pre-determined questions are scored. This seems to be the first of its kind; no one else we know of so far has built a self-calculating IBS quiz. Prior to this, all of the number-crunching has been left up to the patient in question, and it was impossible to schedule a doctor's appointment with any working idea of the various criterias ahead of time.

I designed and built this system from scratch working with the medical knowledge of several gastrointenstinal doctors, and we're very excited that the World Gastroenterology Organisation wants to link us to their site! Congratulations to all who participated in this project.

3/21/2009

2009-03-21T22:00:00.001-05:00

Welcome to my new site! I redesigned from scratch to make it as easy as posslbe to navigate. I also cut down significantly on the HTML; Javascript was much more fluent to display information in the galleries.