Evolution

Ten years ago I was in art school at Auburn and working as a staff designer at the alumni magazine. I would have been a sophomore, taking figure drawing (I loved that class) and looking forward to drink specials on Wednesday nights. Read More  Read More

Custom Fields for Shopp Products

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. ... Read More

Creative Math

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... Read More

Review: Threadsy (Now with invites!)

Lately I’ve been getting annoyed with my email clients. For one reason or another, none seem to perfectly fit the bill. Even Gmail has it’s issues. So when I ran across Threadsy I was interested. Billed as a way to “pull yourself together,” Threadsy aggregates all of your email accounts plus Facebook and Twitter in one place. Read More  Read More

Stop Telling People What To Do

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,... Read More

How I Got Things Done in ’09

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. Read More  Read More