More and more I think the response to boredom from many kids in school (from 8th-12th grade) is to gravitate towards computers and the self-taught realm.  I first started playing with Photoshop (at 17), not because I was introduced in a school, but because I was excited about pirating something so expensive.  How many designers started in a similar way? 

I don’t mean to discredit those with big piles of debt, I’m with you.  But I can’t help but be in awe of those who just do it and become self-taught rockstar designers without all the fat.  Thumbs up.  

More and more the internet provides all kinds of free training – for those that seek it. I compare k12 education to my experiences in learning to play the guitar (albeit a little older).  While Django and Robert Johnson are fantastic guitar players, if not the best – I want to “play The Fucking Clash,” – three power chords, I’m good.  A well-rounded education is important, but you also have to serve them up what they want.  Especially when competing with the internet, video games, and broken families.

The web gives us power – those who are willing to sweat and just do – don’t need a college education and they certainly don’t need a resume.

I can’t say I regret college – I had a great time and learned a lot of life skills, but for what I do, I probably would have been better off diving right in.  Now I am a 27-year-old designer watching the big 30 creep closer and closer – at what point am I dated?  Scary stuff!  Thank goodness for We The Media and it’s ever expanding talent pool – I will forever be connected to the talent of youth.

Yesterday was inspiring if anything – thank you to those who I met and spoke with.

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.

First off – let me say something about the idea of what I call, “power-networking.” While in the short run – power networking is great, you meet all kinds of people, their baggage, and they are as interested in leeching off of you as you are of them. Be it the 3-minute elevator speech or the small talk. I hate small talk. I’ve been to a few “power-networking” events – they left me feeling small and angry. Just like I have never been good at pursuing women at a bar, I am not good at pursuing potential clients in short 3-minute bursts. It takes time to get to know me – and I am proud of that. It’s called being genuine.

I hate small talk

Here’s what I have found – generally speaking, just about every creative I have ever met has been genuine – even to a fault. And no fault of their own – it’s the fault of those who exploit them, the many who are good at brokering the 3-minute deals. I walk in both worlds – I have a business education and I am a descent designer. Seeing creative talent being exploited pissed me off the first time I saw it – it pisses me off now.

There are those of us creatives who are lucky – we meet one or two people who see value in what we do and want to help us out. Many are not so lucky. It’s easy to be cynical and say, “well, I’m not good at networking, so I will never be free from those exploiters.” This was my own stumbling block until I was introduced to a way of networking which had never occurred to me before; connecting people.

Exploiting Creative Talent is Wrong

To re-iterate – my understanding of what networking was came from a few trips to “power-networking” groups – to which I immediately reacted a resounding, “Nope, not for me.” And then through all of my hours spent developing my creative skills, I was connected into a world which I had never seen or imagined. A world that rewarded me for doing good work creatively and also boosted my network – all without sacrificing the one thing which feels right – being myself.

Through being myself and connecting, I have gotten the majority of my client work. What is this sub-sect of networking I am calling “connecting?” It’s the idea of putting people together that you have come to know through real relationships. That’s it.

To power-networkers who do nothing but networking, this is an obvious point. Know as many people as you can so that you can connect them in ways that you see fit. But here’s the one caveat – how well does one really know another when they have only spoken in 3-minute bursts. How does one know if two people would really benefit each other? The truth is, there is no way to tell – you’re just playing a numbers game and your network, while big and strong – may be a house of cards. The real relationships come from being genuine and good to others. One must give selflessly for the relationships gained through networking.

Duh George!

Networking through connecting and being genuine has an insularly benefit as well – I know, because of the people I network with. They connect me with genuine, good people. Whereas with power-networking you get all types, the pleasant and not so pleasant. I like to think, in building my network slowly with solid genuine people, I’ve been able to shield myself from what bugs me most; bad people. Bad people make shitty clients – and if I get a vibe from a client of disrespect or an air of authority, I won’t take the work.

As a creative, one has to expect the road to be bumpy. Networking and relationship building fall a distant second to the craft you love. However, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. If your idea of networking is similar to what mine was, think about the people you know and how they may help each other. It’s a pro-active thought process – once you begin, it becomes difficult to stop. By helping people get what they need, giving selflessly, I guarantee you will be better off for it. The reward rarely comes directly, but the feeling of giving is a reward in itself.

Remember, be yourself, stay genuine, and give – the success will come.

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.

Design

I’ve detailed my process for building this latest version of eleven3, in that post I discussed mostly design. Starting your own theme should work the same way. It’s important to ask questions such as:

• What problems are you trying to solve?
• Who is your theme for?
• What is your sites most important content?

The word, “theme” is used for WordPress – but it doesn’t mean that your site needs to have a theme. However, having a “theme” may help one along their way to achieving their vision. A good place to get inspired is cssremix.com, who’ve been so kind in showcasing some of my own work. And for the quick and dirty answers: use Adobe Photoshop, use pixels for measuring (if this seems strange to you, just do it and thank me later), try to make sense of Khoi Vinh’s gridding lecture, think about what parts of your site can expand and contract nicely (if you’re a beginner, keep to expanding vertical), and for imagery check out istockphoto.com. Wow, learning web design can’t can be summed up in one sentence.

Front-End Development

I’m probably stating the obvious here, but jumping into WordPress at this point would be akin to being stinky and dumb. (-; Make your site look how it is supposed to look without any real functionality. Get it working in all browsers and upon completion – then think of WordPress.

But how?

There are a ton of “we have layouts” sites out there. And while tempting, it’s the same thing as using a WordPress theme and tweaking it. The only way to get a good understanding of code is simply just to code yourself. Start fresh. Here is a base I use for many of my sites – free to build from.

Personally my first step in coding a site is to lay the design and fresh HTML (use Dreamweaver, Coda, or any other code editor of choice) document side by side and hand code the structure. I know it would help to know where to start and I can only offer this advice – study the source code of the “famous” web designers, they’re critically acclaimed for a reason, they do everything thoughtfully and well.

Mmmmmm CSS Zen

The next step would be to start styling content using CSS – if you’re at this point and you’ve never seen CSS code then I’m not going to lie to you; your road to CSS Zen will be long and hard. If you are still not overwhelmed, create a new CSS document in Dreamweaver (or your preferred coding app). A first step I eventually figured out on my own (and then a punk 17 year old showed me the asterisk – j/k QD) that would have saved me a ton of headache is the clearing technique (which is frowned upon in some countries). It goes something like this:

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

The reason to clear the padding and margin values is to avoid all the different “inherit” values of HTML elements. To be more concrete, an <h1> tag in internet explorer may have 8px of bottom padding, whereas it may have 10px in Firefox. Why do they have any values at all? I’m not sure, it could be because HTML came along before CSS. Just ask a couple of ‘timers about spacer gifs.

Coding CSS is a mix of looking at your comp in photoshop to find pixel values (told you so) and slicing up your comp to place images in your end product. Eventually you hope to have a functioning website that looks consistent across all browsers.

WordPress Implementation

And now for the fun part implementing WordPress. It should be safe to assume at this point you have your WordPress installed on your server and you have a fully functional layout working in all the major browsers. Ready, ok go!

The conies and taters

Step One

Duplicate the default theme located in wp-content/themes/default/. Copy the default folder and rename it “your-theme-name.” Make sure your duplicate is located in the same directory “themes.”

Step Two

Start transferring your HTML, CSS, and images into the theme folder. Working within your theme folder, make the following changes (don’t worry, you can reference stuff if necessary from the original default folder):

• Delete all the files in the images folder and replace with your images
• Delete all of the functions in functions.php
• Delete all of the css (except for the commented out header) in style.css and then paste your own CSS in its place.
• Change the information at the top of style.css to reflect you and your new theme.

Step Three

Save a small screenshot of your comp/design (300pxX240px) and save it in your theme folder as screenshot.png – this will help you switch to the theme in your WordPress presentation options. Here is my theme screen shot for this site.

Step Four

Begin to think of your coded HTML as seperate components – a header, a sidebar, a footer, and then content. And if you are just a little bit quick, you may have jumped ahead and seen files in the folder called just that – header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php – but what about content? Well content is the one thing that changes from page to page, while the others are static and don’t change. So really, content is index.php, archive.php, search.php, page.php, and single.php. These files have a little bit of explanation here.

Step Five

It’s a copy and paste job. Copy your header code that should be on every page and put it underneath all the code in header.php. Look at the code in header.php and see what makes sense for you to have in your own header code. Things like the php between the <title> tag and the call for the style sheet first come to mind. Do the same thing with your footer and sidebar.

Step Six

Read this article about “The Loop” and then open up index.php. You will see the code that loops through each entry pulling the values requested – the_time being the time, the_title being the title, and so on and so forth. Copy the HTML from your main page entry and paste it bellow <?php endwhile; ?>. Then copy the different php snippets from the old HTML loop that you need and when finished delete the old entry html from just below <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> down to <?php endwhile; ?> and place your new HTML loop in there.

If there is any other structural stuff that belongs on this page that isn’t in the header, footer, or sidebar add it in the necessary places as well. Continue to flush out the other content pages using the same methods.

Step Seven

Upload your new WordPress theme folder into the wp-content/themes/ directory and login into WordPress. If you have done everything right – you should see your screenshot and name of your theme. Click it and then visit your website – you should see your theme on the site.

That’s it!

Conclusion

Building a WordPress is simple if you already know how to design, code HTML and CSS, and FTP into sites. In this post I outlined my own process – not any sort of “official” WordPress process. I’m sure there are folks out there would think of my copying and pasting of the folder and subsequent files as “cheating.” Honestly though, when I am working – I am shooting for efficiency and long-term maintainability. I know in building within the structure set forth by the good folks at WordPress – I will be ok well into the future.

If you have questions about any of this – feel free to leave a comment and get a dialogue going, there is no such thing as a dumb question. This is meant to be a simple guide for those who are interested in WordPress or Web Design in general.

It was more appealing to get something generic, like a business degree, and pick up all of this web stuff on the side. I just read an article at Creating Passionate Users called, “Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?” It got me thinking a little bit about my experiences in school.

This entry is a bit off topic.

When deciding what I wanted to do, I took a few computer courses. One was in traditional C programming. I couldn’t have been more bored. What excited me about computer was the net and communication (didn’t know that at the time). At Oregon State there wasn’t much of an internet presence, probably similar to every other school in the nation at that time. What OSU did have was a bunch of older professors teaching about multimedia and hyperspace. It felt like a course straight out of Tron. There was no reality in all of it. Just a bunch of speculation.

When it got to a point where the teachers were teaching misinformation, I decided to go the logical business route. Ironically this is where I confirmed my previous suspicions and found the light through some cross-pollination with OSU’s brilliant engineering program.

If the internet exposure classes were bad, the business computer classes were worse. There is something about certain professors that makes me cringe. It’s the, “I know more about computers than you because I am a professor.” The truth is, there is a 9 year old (I used to say 12 year old) out there that knows more than all of us. He/She is brilliant and they probably laugh at our struggles. For some reason these professors had forgotten that. I was bitter after a few incidents where I offered a solution for a problem, only to get shot down immediately, ONLY to have it taught to the class as the Professor’s brainchild the next day. Ughh. That was as ugly as it got. Otherwise I learned a ton about business, not in the nickel and dime sense (for some reason I tune out when I hear the words finance or accounting, and that’s coming from two generations of accountants ahead of me), but in the strategy sense.

My biggest breakthrough occurred in a class called, “Systems Thinking.” It was one of those classes that some people hated and some people loved. Me, being the latter, ate it up and asked for more. It was taught by Jonathan King. Professor King had one of the most open-ended conversational styles of lecture I have ever seen. Although he controlled the lecture and spoke, for the most part, uninterrupted for two hours, it never felt like it. He introduced me to flow and thought diagrams, mind maps and thinking holistically. I still use the tools that were taught to me in that class. I went on to the next level of the class that pulled in the best mentors/professors OSU had and put us all in a small classroom. That is where I rubbed elbows with an engineering professor that really made an impression on me, just like King.

From the creating passionate users post, the two quotes stood out:

From Jason Fried:
“Hire curious people. Even if they don’t have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything.”

And from Jacques Hadamard:
” Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition.”

The problem with so many students is they are in college because they were told to go, or it is what everyone else did. I was one of them. They don’t ever teach you how to follow your heart or be passionate, they teach you how to follow a curriculum. OSU had a baccalaureate core for me to sample tons of different fields, and it pricked my interest a bit. However, there was a lack of focus because all you really know about a prospective course is what you imagine the people in the field doing, you don’t learn about what you like yourself. That was my hangup. Business sounded like fun because I read Wired magazine and all the business deals sounded fun. If they would have been encouraged me to follow my heart, I probably would have dropped out. Traditional education cannot keep up with our field. I know it’s blasphemy to discourage someone from going to college, but what I say is true. Until colleges get agile and adaptable to keep up with the rapid pace of the net, they will be sitting there obsolete.

I was all logic up until luck stepped in. Upon finishing school, I had a BS in Management and International Business with a Minor in Multimedia. I also had 12 years fishing experience in Alaska. I applied at all kinds of places. They all turned me down, “Sorry you don’t have experience.” Through my network I heard about a small company in Portland doing email marketing and building websites. The second I walked in, I knew it was where I wanted to work. I was placed as a Production Artist and was being paid to do my outside of school hobby every day. In other words, I was lucky enough to get placed into an industry I am passionate about, curious about, and more importantly it’s a system. All of that rubbing up with systems is more applicable now than ever. I thrive off of thinking about angles. I have helped the company in my own little way to double in size and offer full scale website solutions. We now do some really cool things.

While I tried to be logical and apply at places like enterprise rent-a-car and nike, fate stepped in, and now I have seen how things can be. I rely on my intuition.

It’s a great read over at Creating Passionate Users, check it out.