John Keese

Wow, Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill took an abandoned cement factory and turned it into an amazing residence. I would love to undertake projects like this. Pictures you’ve got to see to believe… Loft Tour: The Cement Factory

A quick note that makes a lot of sense, I never really noticed it though. Brought to my attention on 37signals.com

Want something to blow up? Tell the world about it on a Tuesday morning. Avoids the Monday avalanche people face and gives you the rest of the week to get play.

Want something to fade away? Tell the world about it on a Friday afternoon. It’ll fade into the weekend.

This is the sleeping bag that I’m going to purchase next, De Selk’bag.

A punch in the face!

Just because I don’t have Zapf Chancery doesn’t mean you have to smack me with Comic Sans. Was Papyrus already taken?

Seth Godin has a neat, yet threatening, post entitled Everyone gets paid on commission. It’s not that he’s threatening me or anyone else, instead it really gets to the meat of why I’m paid for what I do.

Basically, when all (or most) of my work is in digital form, it’s success rate can be measured — all the time! How scary is that.

I guess I now feel a little bit like my wife who is a teacher. She is constantly evaluated by her students’ grades. Shouldn’t I, as a designer, be evaluated by how many click-thrus my emails generate?

In fact, in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.

Makes me wonder if I do great work… and if my employer is a “rational organization.” (p.s. Yes, I think I do good work, and yes, I think my employer is rational)

Over at WebDesignerWall.com, a post declares serifs may just be coming back in for web design.

In the past, we’ve been told not to use serif fonts due to its readability on low resolution monitors and poor rendering in WindowsXP. Now, with display technology advancing and IE7+ supporting ClearType by default, I think it is about time to change that rule.

I do agree the readability issue may be disappearing with the proliferation of high-resolutions monitors. However, it seems to me the design aesthetic of most things “digital” is a sans-serif font. With the design-restrictions changing, will the aesthetic follow? I don’t believe the change will be as quick as some might think (want) it to be.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I love serifs. I think they are perfect for large headlines. Your thoughts?

“If you don’t have a creative on your leadership team you’re planning with half your brain.”
via holycowcreative.org

Michael Buckingham wrote a pretty poignant post over at Church Marketing Sucks, An Open Letter to Rick Warren about Spec Work. Here’s the short of it: Rick Warren is hosting a design contest to design the cover of his upcoming book.

For those unfamiliar with spec work (speculative), this kind of contest is all over the place and is largely seen as damaging to the design community. More info on spec work at No!Spec.

Here’s some of the highlights:

The quality of work you get is going to be sub-par (take a look—yep, that’s some mediocre work). One of the reason it’s sub-par is because the designers didn’t have the benefit of a working relationship with you the client where they could be privy to all the ideas, expectations, insights and everything else that goes into making a creative project work. In a nutshell: You’re not getting the best work because you’re not valuing the worker.

The best creative work happens in partnership. Not in disconnected competition.

Another reason it’s not so good for you is that you just used your position to take advantage of hundreds of designers who were hungry for the exposure.

I’ve been a bit successful with student spec work, so my experiences haven’t been all negative. However, I think the bigger question is the Church’s view of designers. I know design is undervalued in the Church. How else can you explain the amazing catastrophes that show up in bulletins and Church graphics?

We’re created by the original Designer — God.

What’s your opinion?

Oh snap. InfoWorld reports that more pc users are now using Firefox than people who are not. Great! I’m all for open-source software that is superior.

I’ve used Firefox as my only browser for at least 6 years now, probably more, but I don’t feel like adding it all up. I regularly use IE and Safari, but primarily as testing beds when doing web design or development.

Important to note, however, that this statistic is not covering people who only use Firefox. Apparently, many people use both IE and Firefox – 34%.

In other news, Chrome is doing better than I thought it was and Skype dominates MSN Messenger.

mimalistic house

yeah so gmail is down… apparently world wide. a simple “gmail down” search led me to a quick article about the outage. it’s amazing to watch the comments come rolling in on this page. check it out. it’s at least entertaining till gmail comes back up.

as i get further into designing for video, i find that i need more exposure to design principles for this medium. i’ve watched tv my whole life, as has any other american, but it’s crazy how i draw a blank when it comes to designing a “name holder” for an “interview template.”

i’ve stumbled upon timo arnall and his list of broadcast design books. i’m going to check out many of those, but does anyone else have any suggestions, book or online?

well, i’m trying to convince the upper echelons here at my full-time gig that we need to dive into facebook. we’ve already taken the plunge in twitter, so to me the case is simple to get into facebook also. here’s my argument that i am sending…

• Facebook is now the largest photo storage site on the WWW (even bigger than flickr) – via Techcrunch
• The fastest growing demographic [on Facebook] is those 35 years old and older – via Facebook
• Facebook is the largest social network, dominates Twitter – via Compete
  • As of Feb. 2009, Facebook had ~1.2 billion monthly visits, Twitter had ~54 million. We’ve already committed to Twitter, why not commit to Facebook which has 22 times the visits each month?

anyone else out there encountering this as well? i’ll let you know how it all wraps up…

as stated earlier, our graphic designer here at dallas market center is moving on to another job. this leaves a vacancy which i hope will be filled asap.

so if you know of a dallas-based graphic designer looking for work, let me know.