• T: Need to figure out what to do with this aged portfolio site. It’s still running on K2 and WP 2.8!
• T: Need to fill/update/stop ignoring my Behance site because I…
• T: Need to connect my Behance site to my LinkedIn profile
• T: Need to start posting to my Artboredom Facebook page again
• O: I created a wickedly successful community for a retail shop on Facebook
• O: I scored another social media win by blowing up Twitter for them as well
• O: Previous job forced me to continuously improve my design speed
• O: My design speed and decision making process is faster than ever
• O: However, my CSS skills are a little crusty from hacking a retail CMS
• O: Hacking HTML email templates are to blame as well (inline styles!?)
• T: Need to dive headfirst into valid code and decrustify my CSS
• O: Discovered a love for bicycle advocacy
• T: Need to tell the world about my love for bicycle advocacy
• T: Need to figure out how to monetize Cycleboredom as well

There’s a ton more in the queue, but this is enough for a post. It’s going to be interesting figuring out the direction of this site. There’s so much work to be done, but I need to have portfolio pieces out now.

I started a new job right around the time I last posted here in September. Which was convenient considering who I was doing websites for wasn’t paying me any longer. To be fair though, the clients weren’t paying them, so it’s hard to pay me in return. Regardless, I’m now working for a small chain of bicycle retail stores here in the DC/VA/MD area called Revolution Cycles.

I worked for Revolution from 2000-2004. That’s when the design bug really infected me. Started doing signage, business cards, and even a logo. I’ve been designing ever since. Now coming back into the fold I actually have some idea of what design is. Which is good considering it’s my job! I’ve been hired officially as an Assistant Buyer & Marketing Manager. Which means I get to play with and buy cool bike stuff as well as design posters, signage, logos, maintain the retail website, design and code new sites, and manage our social media. It’s a huge freaking responsibility with a ton of work that I had to hit the ground running with.

Some of the work so far

I’m producing an intense body of work in an unbelievably short span of time. The leisurely pace of freelance is gone. At any given time I could be working on 3-4 design projects, a couple of web updates, as well as maintaining the face of our social media campaign. The one big lesson I’ve learned is, I can’t be perfect; there’s no time! Needless to say I’m loving the speed. Here are some examples of what I’ve created:

Look! I’m an über-important designer!

Look at me cranking out the serious design work. Notice how grown up I appear by using a seriffed font in my piece. Also notice how important I am by the stance that I take by calling out other designers that don’t like using seriffed fonts in their work.

Whatever. Bodoni Poster is super-retro-trendy right now so it’s no stretch to use it in work such as this. Although I recently used FritzQuadrata on a logo that a client loved. So yeah, I’m a serified baller. Oh snap - serified! Another poster!

I’m a frickin’ genius!

Anyway, if you’re interested check out some of the other typo pieces I’ve posted on Flickr.

Had a slight burst of creativity today. So I wasted it on a new Twitter background. Kindof a mishmash of crap I had in the Bridge (see what I did there?) so I cooked up something new with it. Got some trendy color circles that look like they’re floating with some of the far away. That was from some tutorial. If I find the link I’ll add it.

Then I switched up HARD and threw down with some Bodini Poster and Trade Gothic. Got my Swiss on without having to resort to the old standby. White letters left-justified on a black background makes it Swiss. I read that or saw it somewhere.

For those on displays larger than 20” who also stretch their browsers to fit that ridiculous size, I have included a special, personalized message. Enjoy.

In case you live in a dark, soulless hole and don’t know what the Tour de France is. Or you are aware of the nearly month-long slog though France but don’t give a rat’s ass since you’re only capable of enjoying American sports, otherwise known as a dark, soulless hole. Point being is I know what the Tour is, and I enjoy the **** out of it! I’ve been spending a fair bit of time over at my other blog-tastic endeavor known as Cycleboredom.

Blogger is the village bicycle of the blogging world

I’ve had a site called Cycleboredom since ‘06 in one form or another. Started out on training wheels with Blogger. After I had my eyes opened to WordPress I quickly dumped the other. But for some reason, after a while the site became unusable. Then I wasn’t able to log in. So I killed it - and no, I didn’t have a back up. I still have the MySQL DB but I really don’t feel like going through that torturous pain of extracting it.

Like Neuspeed on a VW

Alright, enough with the background crap. The new CBD or CBCM (whatever) is running on WordPress once again. I’m reworking a theme put together by Kailoon considering this is taking away from time I should be spending on projects that actually feed and clothe my family. The theme is very strong in the backend. It makes great use of WP Custom Fields for the main slider articles. I also like how the posts gradually fall down the home page. First they’ve got prime real estate on the main slider then once I’ve pimped them for all the views they can pull, I remove the ‘latest’ category and it drops down into the archive queue below. That’s pretty much what I wanted to do with the site in the first place, so why code it myself?

I have A LOT of styling to do. Ideas are swirling around my brain but I simply don’t have the time I’d like to dedicate to it. Eventually I’m going to implement switchable style sheets. But that’s as much as I’m going to release. Don’t want any of you vultures jacking ideas like I know you will!

Your KUNST is minimal.

So I like putting type on photographs. The photographs are good, but can’t they be better with type on them? Here are a few.

This work is all for fun, but a great way to stretch your creative writing/design muscles. I have a few more in my Flickr Typography set.

Wine in the Woods

I just recently completed a couple of sites with Wine in the Woods (above) being one of them. WIW is a wine festival in Columbia, Maryland running on its 17th year. I produced the site for/through the BMCGroup. BMC, which also located closed to Columbia is having their business portfolio site redesigned by me as well. I’m working on that project right now. Lots of great opportunities!

There are a few things that I would’ve like to have had for the launch, but time was of the essence. All the information that the festival coordinators were feeding me was more important, so some of the “cool stuff” had to be kicked to the digital curb.

Monalco Marketing

This is another site I produced for BMC. I was working this and Wine in the Woods simultaneously. First time to really push myself to keep everything straight as an independent freelancer with multiple projects. There were many “learning experiences” but that’s what’s needed to get better.

Thematic Framework

Part of my learning experiences was taking on a new WordPress framework. I’ve been using either the Default theme, or K2 and breaking it down how I wanted. These sites were built on the Thematic framework. I should clarify and say they were sort-of built on Thematic. I was in such a rush at the beginning that I completely ignored the process of building the sites using child themes. Bad choice, really bad choice. Thematic makes heavy use of PHP hooks to call the elements of the framework and make the site. I’ve never used a theme that relied so heavily on that method. So I struggled. Then I looked for help on their forums and received what I thought of as sub-standard information and help. Turns out, if you actuallly build the site using a child theme, then the advice makes complete freaking sense.

Long story short, the new BMCGroup site is being constructed using the latest Thematic build and I’m doing it right; and things are MUCH smoother! Once I’ve completed the site, I’ll give a little overview of my experience.

I was an early adopter, late power user. I’ve always used it as a micro-blog addition to this site, but it wasn’t until I started following people that I truly understood its power. So follow me if you’re interested, and I’ll follow you if you’re Tweeting some nice content. But please show some life from time to time; URL’s are nice but after awhile it tastes like spam.

Why Am I Using Safari Again?

Another subject that could use some extra digging, but it really boils down to one thing: bookmarks. Why does the browser created by the company that invented(?) Smart Folders not utilize them? Nor does it use tags or keywords. WTF do we need CoverFlow for? Let me search my bookmarks by tags please. Firefox is looking better all the time. Again.

You Ever Use Yep!?

I’m officially loving this app. Yep! pulls together all your PDF’s no matter where they are on your drive. Sounds nice? But wait there’s more! With a simple Cmd-Enter-1 Yep! will automatically create a PDF of a web page you want to save. It doesn’t have to be active either. So sweet. I do this for almost all pages that have code in them I want to save. This is also good for tutorials and resource lists. Websites disappear but the PDF’s stay on your drive.

Loving TextExpander

I can’t get enough of TE. I use Coda to do my hard coding which utilizes snippets that you can save, but TE works everywhere. My favorite right now is for anchors. A quick “aahref” gets me everything I need for a hyperlink in a comment or anywhere I need it. I also have one for Lorem too. Anything you type repeatedly, put in Text Expander.

What jQuery Scripts is Artboredom using?

This site is the dictionary definition of the word “sandbox”. I’m deploying all different types of scripts many times regardless of their UI effectiveness. I want to see what they’re capable of before going live on a client’s site and livelihood. In addition, I want to see where they work and where they don’t. For this post I’m just going to run down the list of what’s active and what I’ve tried here on Artboredom.

jQuery Main Content Gallery Slider/Glider

From a website called LavaBlast. They use it on their home page and were cool enough to put together a tutorial on how to build it. Don’t let all the ASP.NET talk freak you out. Take a look at their simple demo sans content and that’s all you need!

prettyPhoto jQuery Lightbox Clone

Just like the way this one feels. There are a ton of these out there that all have great features and benefits, this one simply stuck with me. Take a look at prettyPhoto.

jQuery Slide Panel

I tried so many versions of these that I can’t remember what I ended up deploying in my portfolio page. I recently tried to add some dynamic elements to my menu area but it conflicted too much with the glider (z-index battle and bugs). So I went through my bookmarks and pulled out one that I remember liking for its simplicity. You can find this at Web Designer Wall which is a fantastic website which you should bookmark if you already haven’t.

Coda-like jQuery Tooltip

Another area inundated with examples. For some of my client sites I’ve used MooTools for my tooltips. For the longest time there weren’t any elegant jQuery tips (or at least I couldn’t find them). And by elegant, I mean good! The basic MooTools version had a nice fade-in and fade-out effect that most of the jQuery versions did not.

I’ve been intrigued by what Panic used on the Coda website though. It’s not as dynamic as a pointer-following tooltip, but sometimes a little understatement is nice. Especially when you have other dynamic elements moving on the same page. Unfortunately many that have been created are dependent on being contained in unordered lists. Most things I want a tooltip on aren’t lists! That’s where this little guy comes in from Digital Vision’s website. I haven’t tried it just yet, but the deployment looks absolutely simple. Here’s the demo.

What I’m Trying Next

In the coming days (!?) I’m honestly going to try and post some more links that I’ve found incredibly helpful in my progression. I’ll also post some of my favorite Tweeple from Twitter who are constantly throwing out great content for web design in general.

Thanks for stopping by and forgive me if you arrive and divs are flying everywhere and dynamic content isn’t so dynamic. Hopefully I’m getting something out of that FAIL you’ve witnessed!