I’ve been using the Shopp plugin for WordPress on a site I’m developing. There are a lot of great things about Shopp; I’m planning a post in the coming weeks comparing Shopp and WP-ecommerce.

The latest problem I’ve been working out is how to add custom form fields for each product. Rickrackbaby.com offers custom monogramming, so I need a place for visitors to type in their custom text. To make it trickier, I actually need two custom fields for each product.

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Last week I had the chance to speak to 6-8th graders at Prince of Peace in Hoover about how I use math in my job. One of my great friends is the math teacher, and has had several speakers over the course of the semester. She was particularly interested in showing the kids that even creative careers involve math on a daily basis.

So, inspired by Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation I put together this little group of slides. If you haven’t seen the video of that presentation it is very much worth a watch. At any rate, the final product has little in common with Mr. Hardt’s presentation, but it was fun to throw together at midnight the night before and the kids got a kick out of it.

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Jared Spool over at Johnny Holland Magazine has an article out this week about why making design recommendations is a bad thing. It’s true that critiquing a client’s existing materials, be it print or web, is a touchy situation. I for one am slow to judge another designer’s work. For all I know, he could be dealing with an owner telling him he MUST use purple if he wants to keep his job. Sometimes you do what you gotta do.

But when someone asks your expert opinion, you gotta say something, right?

Jared suggests a different approach.

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Is it too late for ’09 lists? Yes? Well, tough noogies.

Here are some resources that became indispensable to me over the last year. Not necessarily all design related, and not necessarily new in the grand scheme. But things I have come to depend on in my quest to create badassedry.

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