I’ve been “contracted” to write 12 articles for their “Focus On” section, where each month I get a full page to write about a specific idea as it relates to website design. I’m super excited to be part of this wonderful magazine, it’s really the only one available to our industry as a specific focus. I honestly don’t know why there aren’t more but at least this one is very good.

I’ve been a subscriber for about two years now and so i’m honored to be part of the team that puts it together each month. I hope you’ll go buy one and support .Net Magazine.

(These are the awards.)

We won for the following stuff:

“UnmatchedStyle” (logo & website)
Creative Director: Jay Barry; Designer & Illustrator: Giovanni DiFeterici

“ConvergeSE Tarot Cards”
Art Director: Jay Barry; Designer” Giovanni DiFeterici

Converge SE 2011 website
Creative Director: Jay Barry; Designer: Giovanni DiFeterici

(Beautiful pictures by George Fulton Studios on behalf of the SC AIGA)

Obviously we’re totally excited to have our hard work show off a little with some design award love from AIGA SC. Giovanni and Jay truly deserve it too, these guys do some outstanding work. It’s a pleasure for me to work along side them every day.

The AWDG community is a very active and engaged group. Organized by J. Cornelius (@jc) and Farhan (@manvspan) it is quite well run and currently being held at the Portfolio Center which is a superb space for events like this. It’s wonderful to be surrounded by all the great design work and students.

The group showed up in full force and had plenty of questions for us after our talks. It was a very engaging evening where Giovanni and I had a ton of fun talking to everyone afterwords. J. Cornelius gave us all a sneak peek at some upcoming CoffeeCup Software web development software, which I can’t wait to get my hands on that Beta. Later we went with the hard corps group to Fadó Irish Pub where it seemed like we took over the top floor there.

If you are in Atlanta and haven’t been to one of these Meetups yet, you should go to the next one AWDG puts on. It is such a solid group. I can’t think of a better meetup experience I’ve had in a long while. You AWDG folks rock!

Thank you all for making us feel so welcome.

We’ve been nominated for 2011 Podcast of the Year over at the .Net Awards. We’re humbled and excited to see our name up there in this list of super awesome podcasts. We can’t thank you guys enough!

Here’s how .Net explains the Podcast nominees:
Whether video or audio, these 10 podcasts cover the subjects that web designers and developers are passionate about with energy, enthusiasm and authority. Tell us which you find the most entertaining and informative.

• big web show
• boagworld
• creative coding
• css-tricks
• nettuts
• rob conery & scott hanselman
• sitepoint
• the expressionengine podcast
• think vitamin podcast
• unmatchedstyle

Just as a resource in it’self you should go check out those other podcasts, they’re all super great!

A Grok is unlike other meetups. The intent is to spark conversation, not to acquire the best speakers so everyone can sit back and soak it in. Many presenters only soliloquized for a few minutes before the audience was encouraged to ask questions and interject comments. Most of the time was spent in pretty deep discussion about a wide and varied array of topics. Gender issues in the tech community, agile development, interactive education, start-up strategy and new-era marketing are just a few of the subjects that were covered throughout the day.

Aspects of the day have stuck in my mind for the last twenty-four hours and I find that interesting. Often, even at great events, the day seems to slip away. It can be hard to remember any details about a meetup or conference. Perhaps it’s the stream of new information or overstimulation but sometimes I remember that I enjoyed myself (or not) and nothing else. The Grok was different. I distinctly remember many of the people that I met, in part, I’m sure, because I talked with everyone there multiple times. I remember the topics more clearly because I was an active participant. I remember the venue; Charlotte was great and oddly quiet.

Here’s what I remember best: The energy. Everyone seemed intent and invested in what was going on around them. No one was clicking away on his or her laptops. People were focused and conversations built upon themselves rather than degrading into meaningless bickering. People smiled.

And they meant it.

Though round-table conversation is nothing new, the mix of speaker and participatory audience is something to behold. Like a very active classroom, more often than not, great insight can come from collaborative conversation over lecture. I honestly think more was to be had at this event than many conferences I have attended. We may not have disappeared walls or read each other’s minds but I think we flexed the brain muscles just enough to do Valentine Michael Smith proud.

Props to Bermon for putting on a great event and to Matthew Smith of crafting the Grok concept.

-Giovanni (@giodif)

It’s going to be Gene & Giovanni giving two talks, both related to UX and overall website/app design issues:

Giovanni: Symbolic Imagery in Interface Design – A discussion about the inherent symbolic nature of UI elements, how people interact with them in relation to their real world analogs and how to build a description of an element’s function into its visual presentation

Gene: Sign up form – Best practices, thoughts behind great signup UX and examples of how it’s done in the wild.

Where else can you learn about LOL Cats in popular culture and watch LockSport the competitive art of Lockpicking…?

It was held where it’s always held at in Charlotte at Area 15, which is a super cool warehouse space full of non-profits and other cool tenants, like Not Just Coffee who, holy hell, makes one of the best cups of coffee i’ve ever had.

I’m now convinced after this Barcamp that pitching your session and having the crowd vote if you get into a time slot is the way to go. I really think it’s the heart and soul of what makes a Barcamp, well, a Barcamp. Just listening to Jonathan Kay (@GrasshopperBuzz) re-pitch his talk for the afternoon session so passionately was a real learning experience.

I really can’t say more good things about these types of events, if there is a Barcamp in your area, you should really go. I can’t wait until October for the next Charlotte Barcamp!

July 24, 2011 we will celebrate 7 years of posts. That’ll be just over 3,000 websites reviewed, each with it’s own blog post. The site has come a long way since it’s launch. But this new version we’re working is a total reworking of what you currently know UMS to be. We’re using CodeIgniter for the core framework as well as some custom PHP and JavaScript that Jason has created. Among other things here’s the quick list of what we’re hard at work getting in place:

• Complete visual redesign
• Larger website previews
• Sorting by categories, tags, colors, layouts & awards
• Awards: we’ll be assigning different type awards to the websites we love
• Full size website screenshots
• Annotations: make selectable notes on your favorite parts of a website in the gallery
• Member accounts: you’ll need to sign up with the site to do stuff

That’s really not all we’re doing, we have a full year’s worth of features and ideas to complete but this quick list should get us re-launched, back to status quo with the functionality that WordPress does for us now, and enable us to have some pretty awesome new features on day one. We’re psyched for this and I hope you guys follow us as we prepare unmatchedstyle for the future.

One thing I didn’t mention is that we have Giovanni working on some fun illustrations to use on the new site. We’ve previewed a few on the reboot blog here that have been completed for our sticker packs and other giveaways but the website will be full of some really fun elements. Namely the Awards we’re planning to setup for our favorite elements on the websites we review here in the gallery.

Here’s another quick dribbble/preview at what we have going on now illustration wise:

Do you guys have any suggestions for good books to review and give away in 2011?

The panel for the evening was “Discussion Panel: How to integrate UX into the business, design & dev process” which is a seemingly complex issue to discuss in a panel setting but Bermon the night’s moderator kept it flowing nicely and kept the tone on a very accessible level. The panel was a very respectable list of top-notch professionals from around Charlotte and close by.

• Bill Baker – Director of Digital Services at Wray Ward
• Rik Catlow – VP; Senior Visual Designer at Bank of America
• Jennifer Downs – UX Designer at MailChimp
• Ron Edelen – Creative Director at MyJive
• Todd Moy – UX Designer at Viget Labs
• Patrick Quattlebaum – Chief Experience Officer at Macquarium

We recorded the evening’s panel discussion and will be releasing it as an unmatchedstyle podcast episode, probably after the first of the year.

I’m looking forward to what 2011 brings for the Charlotte UX meetup group and sincerely hope we can come back and be a part of this growing community.