Just like most mornings, I woke up and checked my Twitter. The night before put us at the Gingerman where we drank a couple of pints of Lonestar and conversed with several geeks - doesn’t get much better. Dustin Diaz, of JavaScript and Google fame, brought his big camera, to which I proceeded to make obvious “your lense makes me feel inadequate” jokes. Yep, that’s me - taking the obvious one-liners and using them for personal gain. It may have garnered a chuckle, I’m not sure.

Jeff and I got back to our room and I use the words “passed out” here, although it was somewhere between passing out and going to bed - do you know the difference? Anyhow, the alarm came quickly and we got up, showered, and headed down to the complimentary continental breakfast. We’re staying at the Hampton - shitty wi-fi, fantastic continental, take your pick. One more good thing about the Hampton is it attracts a lot of the industry “rockstars.” Shit, Jeff and I were there, and we’re pretty important. I jest, but the highly talented Shaun Inman was there and I did get to pick up the size medium American Apparel Mint T-shirts he brought. Thank you Shaun - it was an awkward moment, but it was never dull - my name is George.

After all this we made our way to the conference, what follows are my notes from the different panels/presentations, enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 37% [?]

As a creative, I once looked wearily upon “networking.” Never because I thought the ideas generated between people or the relationships they had were inherently bad - I was skeptical of networking because it never felt natural to me. A forced relationship at most - brought about by people leveraging each other for personal gain - what good could come of that?

networking gives me tears

Moving from college where one has a pseudo-something to offer to a professional setting where one gains their real value - I have experienced some profound insight. No, nothing new or original - but my tendency to learn by doing and emulating has given me the real reward of what networking truly is - connecting others.

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Popularity: 40% [?]

When I first read about “Spaces” and saw the screenshots in OSX Leopard, I felt like it could be a huge potential productivity booster. Those from the Linux fold have been rotating cubes and “spaces” for quite some time - and of course when Leopard came out with it, they all chirped in to remind me, “that’s been on Linux for awhile.” Yea yea yea - but is it sold by an egomaniac who only wears black turtlenecks? Didn’t effin think so…

Anyhow, when I actually got Spaces - it ended up being anti-climatic. It didn’t really work how I thought it would (in my many pre-Leopard, about Leopard dreams) and it seemed like it was a bit buggy. I have seen many people turning spaces off, frustrated with it’s apparent shortcomings - but I am not one to let initial excitement die so easily - so I rolled with the punches for awhile. Fast forward three months and I am now moving from space to space like a Puppeteer on a powder day (sci-fi/drug connection makes reading all the better).

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Popularity: 45% [?]

Yep, that’s a new word, or at least I think I made it up (and if I didn’t, it’s like me to think I made up a word). The bro-conomy, to me, is the economy that exists between “bros.” Or better put, between people that you have, or would like to have, a more than a business/client relationship with - it’s something quite special. So special in fact, that in receiving a $90 dollar sweatshirt for $300+ dollars of work, you are immediately satisfied and feel that you got the good deal.

Think Bro-conomy, Think Big

So how does one crack the bro-conomy nut? When I was at an agency I noticed the guys who were making the deals getting all sorts of cool shit. Occasionally it would trickle down and I would get something like the aforementioned hoody or a circle-hoe. But for the most part it stopped right before the schwag hit the creatives. I think the most important part is exposure to clients. Before the end of this long winded, much adu about nothing post, I’ll talk about web design, a few tips to help one thrive in the bro-conomy, and a few of my own personal bro-conomy stories.

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Popularity: 61% [?]

Downloading and tweaking one of the many themes of Wordpress is all fine and good. But what happens when you want to extend your blog/site past what someone else’s theme can give you? The truth is - this is a realm where most users are terrified to go. While I understand those fears, they aren’t totally warranted. Building a Wordpress theme can be quite easy, given the right process.

I’m freaking out man!

Building a Wordpress theme can be broken down into three steps; design, front-end development, and lastly the Wordpress implementation itself. I’m not quite sure how others do it, but the following guide is a detailed look into the process I have developed for building Wordpress themes.
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Popularity: 100% [?]

It would be a marvelous world indeed, if every comp/design ever produced was received with adornment and praise. The truth is, as designers, when we submit any comp - we expect that. This type of speculation is perhaps a bit naive - but we wouldn’t put anything out we didn’t think was founded in solid design principles and decisions. Well, that’s not totally true, occasionally we do have to put out work we feel could be better, given the proper amount of time. But for the most part an ill-received comp is not unlike a cold cup of water to a sleeping face, shocking.

“We hate it”

If one could predict what projects are going to go awry and why - perhaps the “Designer’s Crisis” could be avoided. It seems there are a few situations I have found in my limited experience which have a higher risk than others. It’s tough to design for designers, work under tight deadlines, and to follow someone else’s brand guidelines while resisting the “Designer’s Touch”.

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Popularity: 53% [?]

After writing a post titled, “When Your Tools Don’t Work,” where I had outlined my annoyances with the Mighty Mouse and Firefox, I am pleased to say, I think my Mighty Mouse is good as new.

But how is this possible? Well the other day I was skimming the web and found a how to by some resourceful guy who said, “Forget the whole rubbing alcohol solution, take that bama apart.” He posted a step by step guide to fix the mighty mouse by taking it apart.

Yes, it is a bit nerve racking to pry apart any kind of Apple goodness, but I was just so fed up at the short-termed-ness of the rubbing alcohol solution. My Mighty Mouse now feels like it did in the old days when I first got it. Now if only I wouldn’t have broken the middle click in frustration.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Low and behold I figured out something I didn’t know how to do before I figured it out. ;-0

When I first started getting into Wordpress, I just jumped in. There wasn’t a lot of thought on how to go about doing everything right, it was just the emphasis of getting things to work. When this meant creating new functions, I just added those to the existing Wordpress general_template functions list. Stupid!!! This makes upgrading a risky process, as you will probably overwrite the files you create at some point in the future.

Enter functions.php. I was reading through the Wordpress site and fell on the Functions Theme Development section. You mean all I have to do is create a file and Wordpress will do the rest? Smart, simply smart. This isn’t the first time the the foresight of the Wordpress platform has surprised me. Thanks so much for doing your thang.

Just put functions.php in your theme directory, and Wordpress will load it automagically.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Traditionally, when cutting up a Photoshop layout, we all used to think of the entire thing like a jigsaw puzzle. Overlapping elements were an illusion because the element that appeared to overlap was really being cut up and then fit back together.

And then came the png. While the PNG most definitely has issues across the different browsers, there are ways to get it to play nicely with whatever site being built. Yes, it usually involves a CSS hack. No, it does not validate. However I believe it is more important to start thinking of a layout as a series of layers overlapping, versus the traditional jigsaw puzzle.
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Popularity: 19% [?]

So far Wordpress has been impressing me left and right. The plugin developers are building some amazing stuff that integrates so well that my job of building the site becomes effortless. My good friend Nicholas Galanin wanted to have his YouTube videos pull into his site. While there was definitely assumption on my behalf that there would be someone out there that had developed a plugin, there was still uncertainty.

Enter MyTube.

Some guy named VaamYob created this plugin for reasons he states on his site, “This is a plugin that I wrote because I thought videos would look cool on my site. ” While VaamYob did a great job with the plugin, the documentation across the net was sparse. I decided to give a quick rundown of how I integrated MyTube into http://www.nicholasgalanin.com.
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Popularity: 13% [?]