Thanks for having me Justin. I do a little bit of everything - sometimes too much! I design; prefer pixels to points. I program; prefer PHP to ASP. I produce; could not part with XHTML, CSS or JavaScript. I work at Silverpoint, Inc., which is a convenient ten-minute walk from my apartment in Baltimore, MD.
Most of the inactivity was actually a result of the redesign! I realized that a number of people were finding the site through my CSS Zen Garden entries [1, 2] and were probably disappointed with what they found - si6. Since the community had been so generous with their time and open about sharing their knowledge while I was experimenting with CSS, I felt obligated to utilize what I had learned and to practice what my peers and eventually I had come to preach. I looked at the redesign as an opportunity to reduce the gap between the possibilities and reality of designing with CSS.
The web is and always will be in a constant state of flux. I think we're just noticing a number of redesigns now because we're looking for them. Standards-based design is what's hot right now so our eyes are peeled for sites making use of them.
Not especially - not to say there aren't times of frustration. I find that most often
with JavaScript, like CSS, the success of integrating multiple technologies often rests
on the validity of the XHTML. Many of the scripts I write rely heavily on
document.getElementById()- which only works if the id in question is unique. Fortunately, valid XHTML requires that the id attribute be unique so that eliminates most problems I might encounter.
As for Flash, there's that pesky validation problem which Hixie appears to have solved. (It should be noted that his sample is HTML 4.0 so some simple modification of the source is necessary for valid XHTML.) Then there's the majority of browsers' insistence on placing Flash content above everything else regardless of z-index. I personally haven't had much luck resolving this problem which affects my own site. There's also the bitmap pixel shift problem and the repeating edge-pixel problem , which are manageable but still a nuisance.
Apple's brand has had an obvious influence on my design sensibilities; from the abundant use of the color white and white space to the buttons and widgets directly derived from OS 9 interface elements.
I've noticed that what inspires me aesthetically often has little noticeable influence on my professional design, which is largely client/brand-driven. But apparent in my Designologues and personal sites is an appreciation of the early grungy work of Thomas Brohdal, (Specifically), the pixel precision of the Cuban Council (the boys behind K10k), the dehumanized chaos of early Joshua Davis.
Both Erik Spiekermann and William Kunz have had a huge impact on my typographic sensitivity and my approach to organizing sets of information.
My academic training is mostly print design. I graduated from the Graphic Design program at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2001. Most of my undergrad was focused on print with an eye towards packaging design. I had this naive idea that if my music wasn't noticeable enough on its own merit I could infiltrate the music industry designing CD packaging and elbow my way into some record exec's office.
That never really panned out but I happened across a superior delivery medium the spring quarter of my junior year. Of course, I was far too enamored with the web at the time to recognize it as such. That summer I bought every O'Reillybook on HTML, web design, and JavaScript I could find and somehow landed an internship that involved just enough daily web design/site maintenance for me to apply what I was learning the night before.
My senior year I took every fledgling web design course that SCAD's Graphic Design program offered - all two of them. Web Design (or "How to Slice Images") and Interactive Design (or "What's a timeline?") were refresher courses touching on what I had already taught myself over the summer (despite the best intentions of a dedicated, knowledgeable professor). I took an independent study that spring to delve into Flash 5 ActionScripting and PHP. As far as I'm concerned, that independent study from my final quarter at SCAD never ended. I'm still learning and still reporting my progress to the same professor, now peer at Silverpoint, Dave Bedingfield.
April 21, 1864. (The commenter below who can tell us the relevance of that date scores a $20 gift certificate from Amazon.com - I'll not be outdone by Didier and his superfluous trivia ;D) I wish I could say years ago but it wasn't much before Zeldman's Orange book was published. But once that realization came I couldn't escape it.
I believe our role as designers is to organize information into ordered, easily digestible chunks. Understanding content's semantic hierarchy helps me to determine its visual hierarchy so I'm already marking up content in my head before pixels even hit the Photoshop canvas. I'm as comfortable with CSS and XHTML as I ever was with bloated WYSIWYG applications—if not more so.
I don't know how devoted I've really been to music lately. I haven't finished a new song in at least a year. I blame that negligence on OS X.
I've been playing guitar since I was 15 - 16 and I purchased my first computer at around 20. Before OS X the computer never really got in the way of my writing because inevitably it would crash. While rebooting or running Norton's I'd pick up the guitar and work out a song. OS X never crashes - which significantly cuts down on my opportunities to compose!
I was writing lyrics before I could even play the instrument. I started out teaching myself Nirvana and Bush riffs and then moved onto Dave Matthews leads once I became more a dept. I used to play open mikes all the time while in high school and college. I won first place at the SCAD Talent Show my freshman year which landed me a spot performing for at least 10,000 people during the annual Sidewalk Arts Festival, a gathering of prospective students, their families and current students in Savannah's Forsyth Park. That's probably the largest crowd I've ever played for.
Both are creative outlets although the music is more of an escape. I can find guilt-free pleasure in covering someone else's music. Imagine if I could say that about design!
During the summer after I graduated, I found myself in a new city. I had moved from Savannah to Baltimore. I'm originally from the Boston area, so I only knew a few people in Baltimore. Around that same time, Coudal's Photoshop Tennis was nearing the pinnacle of its popularity. Designologue grew out of a desire to keep in touch with old friends and to continue to develop the training I had started in school. Given our common background, some sort of collaborative design project was a natural choice.
It seemed everyone was doing something similar: Coudal, Australian InFront, Surfstation, but their projects were all invite-only. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but "battle threads" were popping up all over the public design forums like Were-Here and YayHooray. Designologue addressed both the A-list elitism and the disorder of the ad hoc melees by being open to the public and providing a structure to present and archive the visual exchanges. While most other visual dialogue projects seemed to be largely ego-driven, Designologue introduced the idea of a theme to give the designs something more substantial than the designers' own egos to build upon.
So in the unemployed fall hours of 2001 I began dissecting open source PHP forum applications and pieced together the first public version of Designologue. Since then, Designologue has always been about having an outlet for experimentation and growth - whether it was developing the public CMS or designing individual images while participating in designologues.
Sometimes too much, lately though it seems I'm not devoting enough time to Designologue. As for hours, it really depends on the type of work we're talking about. When developing last year's redesign I spent as much as 30-35 hours a week on design and coding-in addition to working full time. When producing an image for a designologue I usually spend about an hour digging up source images and developing ideas. Then anywhere from 1-3 hours putting it all together - depending on the complexity of the final product.
Constant dissatisfaction with previous projects is my primary motivator. No project is ever perfect. There are always colors that could have been tweaked, code that could have been more semantic or a script made more efficient. Not that every subsequent project attempts to make up for the shortcomings of the previous but I'm definitely more mindful of previously unresolved issues when developing new solutions.
Designologue. Definitely Designologue. Not only as a participant, which has given me an opportunity to develop mature aesthetic sensibilities but as the client, project manager, creative director, designer, server-side and client-side developer, producer, and site admin. I've had many tastes of many hats while working on Designologue.
I never had huge aspirations for Designologue and I'm always amazed when it breaks another 100 registered members - we're up to 790 as of this writing. Despite these numbers I think it still exists in relative infamy but I couldn't be happier with the small cluster of dedicated regulars whose activity on the site keeps things going while I'm busy being negligent.
Growing up, I always hated reading my musical idols' answers to this question. Inevitably the bands cited were unknown to me, their peers and overlooked contemporaries - and if I had heard of them, I had never really taken the time to appreciate their music.
Silly meta-reflections aside, my biggest influences are those virtual unknowns, immensely important in my own life and to the others whose lives they intersect: The girl, also a designer, has always honestly critiqued my work and pushed me towards better solutions and client relationships than I'd ever be able to achieve on my own. Bernard Canniffe taught me that content is king, process is queen and a successful designer is a jack of more than his own trade. Dave Bedingfield rose above the role of professor and friend to help inform many a design and life direction decision.
And then there's the usual suspects: Joshua Davis, Aaron Boodman, the boys over at Cuban Council, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea, and countless others who have generously shared their knowledge.
There aren't enough hours in the day! Joshua Davis, the boys at Cuban Council, Todd Dominey, Jon Hicks, Coudal, Dave Shea (JavaScript Bonsai - what do you say, Dave?), Jason Santa Maria (something just might be brewing here), Kevin Cornell, Doug Bowman, Mike Creighton, those Naked and Angry Jakes over at Threadless(again), and all my neglected Designologue conspirators.
Right now I have a full time position with Silverpoint designing websites for national boarding and day schools. A project manager usually just sits down with me and says, "Here's your next project." Recently however, freelance opportunities have been trickling down from design peers or former professors who simply have too much on their plate. Sometimes they need my particular skill set but other times they just need a warm body to do some design.
Hehe, you asked for it.
Dr. Pepper. I'm not really a cola guy so I don't drink all that much of it. Least favorite would have to be Moxie. Have you ever had a Moxie? I haven't had one recently but if memory serves it's a bitter carbonated cross between a Fig Newton and unflavored cough syrup. Nast.
All of my spare time is spent paying bills, eating, sleeping or cleaning up the mess that comes from being so productive - and I'm only half joking! I enjoy what I do and I like to keep busy but Leslie and I enjoy trying new foods so we make time for the eclectic mix available in and around Baltimore: Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Afghani, Persian, Egyptian, Vietnamese, Korean - the list goes on. I am a huge Simpsons fan so I try to make time for an episode every once in a while too.
I say a little prayer for Netscape 4.x. We weren't very close but I'm glad its suffering is over.