Category: Life

…at least according to my Facebook profile. I looked through all of them the other day as I wanted to send out a message about this website. You know what? There are people in there I can’t even remember, I have no idea how I know them! And there are a lot of people who I haven’t talked to in years. We were acquaintances at best.

Social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook came about so that you could connect with people. I certainly see some amount of value in keeping up with people from far away; it’s not a bad thing. But it’s interesting to me that as we’re able to connect with people easier and easier, it gets harder to maintain all of those friendships that we now have the ability to keep up. Could I realistically keep up friendships with 284 people? Yeah right.

Sometimes I wonder (and I’m sure I’m not the first) if all of these friends, if all of this “easy contact” I have with people all over the world enabled by the Internet, email, instant messaging, and social networking sites has actually made it harder to maintain a real friendship with anyone?

Instead of telling people about an important event in our lives, we post it on Facebook. Instead of calling someone to see what they’re up to, we just Facebook them. Instead of stopping by someone’s place, it’s much easier to send out a Facebook invite.

It’s all about convenience and making communication easier. After all, how often do you have a meaningful conversation through these sites? Even our face-to-face conversations may change; we are so used to having these little snippets of friendship that we are not used to conversing about the deeper and more important things in life.

Friendship is a two-way street, giving and taking. These sites are all about the taking, we post only what we want to post, and we read only what we care to read. When all we do is take, we find that no one wants to give back. I’m not sure I believe that you can maintain a friendship through a social networking site, at least, not fully.

Why am I dissin’ these sites? I have no idea, truthfully, I have nothing against them. I’ll continue to use my accounts and talk to people through them. I guess my challenge is to continue to build real friendships with those around me and to not let the “bad habits” of online contact seep into my everyday life.

One of the things I’m proud of in this new website is the technology behind it. It represents a couple of steps into new grounds that I haven’t made before. First off, the website is based on a simple XHTML skeleton, and then is styled using CSS. This method has been around for a while now, I’ve waited for a while for technology to catch up, and then I also got lazy and just didn’t want to learn it. It was a good challenge and I certainly see the flexibility and the wisdom in separating the design and the content.

Second of all, this website is completely based on the WordPress blogging platform. Now, running a blog off of WordPress is easy, and doesn’t take much. But after trying out a billion CMS’s out there I finally settled on simply using this system. It took a bit of haxoring, and a little PHP programming on the way (scary!) but it was actually relatively simple and I’d consider recommending it for clients and friends. Each item in the Portfolio is actually a post with some custom features, this makes adding new stuff really easy. (The idea being that I update this website more often!) Plus, those designs can be sorted any number of ways, by discipline, campaign, or any other way I want.

I haven’t updated this site for awhile, so it’s about time. I’ve graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. I’ve got my double major in Graphic Design and Advertising and it only took me five years.

I’ve started in the professional world of design and advertising at Morsekode a Twin Cities advertising agency. I love the people and the atmosphere there. I hope to be able to post some of my new work from there on here soon, but it may take me awhile.

In other news, the logo that Seth Koslowski, Dave Bromeland and myself designed for the McIntyre Library back in Eau Claire has been chosen as the official logo. I’m proud of the work we did, and it was a nice culmination of my school career for design. You can see their website which makes use of the logo, although we did not design the website itself.

School at Eau Claire is over for the semester, I have some time off before I start my internship at Morsekode, a graphic design and advertising firm close by in the Twin Cities. I’m really looking forward to that, but for now I’m just realxing and trying to settle in for the summer.

I would like to get some of my design work from the semester posted in the portfolio, but unfortunately the majority of it was group projects, so I’m unsure what to post. Now that I have some time this summer I really want to update this website. It’s coming… really.

I’m back from my home-state of Minnesota from the weekend. I was at the AIGA Student Graphic Design Conference. While there I got to tour several different Graphic Studios, some of which had incredible spaces that they work in, much better than my dorm room. On Saturday I met with four different reviewers. Some of them were way too nice, and didn’t really give me anything to improve upon, but others gave me some great comments to work with.As I’m going through old work and improving it, look for some more changes in the online portfolio pretty soon as some of the work is badly outdated, and it needs better organization. Unfortunately it may have to wait until after finals. They seem to be keeping me very busy at this point.

I haven’t updated in awhile because, truthfully, I’ve been trying to get people to sign up for that Mini Mac deal… kinda sad. But I think I’ve got all 10 people signed up now, hopefully it should be shipping out soon. In the meantime, this semester has been flying by.

Graphic Design 476 has finished our Campus Directory Covers, which I hope to post soon enough. We also worked on a poster for the Student Art Show, mine was one of the final five chosen, but didn’t get voted as the best one. I’m alright with that though. We really need to start going on other projects though for the Chippewa Valley Economic Development Corporation, and the Eau Claire Regional Art Center.

The Bitsplash Website is done, have a look. I think it turned out rather well and I’m quite proud though its been changed a little since I gave them the design. Might have a few more business projects coming as well. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Its been a long three days, but I finally have a template for BitSplash Software. I’m pretty happy with it right now, a few things could use some work, but I think they’re going to be happy with it when they see it. See it for yourself right here In this design I started using a few more CSS tricks, I’ve been learning a ton lately after exploring this site, every one of those designs is accomplished through using different stylesheets with the same HTML. Simply amazing. My newest design is a mish mash of some tables, and some CSS tricks. My goal for the next site I create is to make use of CSS exclusively with no tables.

Awhile ago I switched this news portion so that the background was white, but that complicated the link colors, and everything was all messed up. So I finally got around to fixing it tonight. I’ve made some small changes around the site, probably nothing that you’d notice.

Currently I’m in the process of looking for an internship this summer. It’s been interesting so far, and I have a few good leads as well. Andy is also keeping my busy working on stuff for BitSplash including a new logo for Exact Mouse, and the new website design. That should be coming soon.

My friend Joe and I are in a class called Electronic Media where we need to develop a storefront for an online business. We’ve decided to make up a company called Mere Design Co. which will be a clothing company, probably mostly T-shirts and sweatshirts. It’s going to be sweet. We finished it for class tonight, check it out for now right here. Mere Clothing for Mere Masses.

Currently, I’m working on this exact website. I finished it up for class this afternoon and it should be ready for the teacher to grade. Be sure to check out the portfolio section, as it has all of my work, and took me forever and a day to finish.