Daily Brad, the blog

I had an “ah-ha!” moment over the past couple days. CSS is awesome!

Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve been so focused on the aesthetic design of websites for so long, and not how they’re engineered that I took CSS for granted? (I have always been able to surround myself with excellent programmers who’ve spoiled me.) So maybe the power of CSS hasn’t sunk in due to the fact that I’ve never gone in and tweaked it for myself?

But now I get it. CSS is awesome! (Did I say that?)

I’ve been blogging for a couple years now off and on, and really took what Wordpress does for granted. I enter the content, click publish and Worpress takes care of the rest. I was never concerned about the look of my blog (if that wasn’t obvious enough with my hats-off approach to the default template), nor did I think how a “blog tool” could translate into a content management system for a regular website. (Though the thought had crossed my mind) I always thought I’d get some help (the excellent programmers I mentioned before) in making any content I created in my blog work - somehow - in a future design of my portfolio site.

Now that I’ve considered how to implement and populate content into bradmccall.com in the easiest possible fashion (remember, I’m not a programmer), I now have an answer to the age-old question - what came first, the chicken or the egg? (Insert drum roll here) It’s doesn’t matter.

When I coded my first website in 1994, (did I mention I’m not a programmer?) I created every page individually by copying and pasting code on similar designs. I designed the chicken, cloned it repeatedly, and then designed each of the eggs one-by-one.

In 1999 when I designed the first (and current with the date of this post) iteration of bradmccall.com, the engineer who programmed it used CSS on each page to format the text. I got a feel for how this allowed me not have to constantly copy and paste long font attributes tags when I went in and tweaked parts (though you still may find some here or there). This simplified the production of the eggs considerably, but still left some of the chicken cloning process.

In 2003 this same engineer introduced me to PHP with a new website I created for a small side-business called SpinHouse. Now it seemed that the chicken could be randomly assembled and the mother chicken managed from one place. (Cloning on the fly?)

Now comes along Wordpress and the full realization of content management meets CSS. I can create all the eggs I like - in any fashion - and adopt them to any chicken I’d like. The content does not depend on the design, nor the opposite. It doesn’t matter.

Well, so much for writing about an ah-ha moment in the morning. I think I’ll grab some breakfast - scrambled eggs anyone?

The other day I had a co-worker looking at my LinkedIn profile, and said “Wow, you have so many Recommendations”, and after explaining how they came to be there, I thought of blogging about it.

Early last year I had a friend who had just laid off send me a request to write him a Recommendation on LinkedIn. Knowing full-well his talent and the work that he did when we worked together, I was happy to. That was when I learned about LinkedIn’s built-in ability to request Recommendations.

At first I thought it silly to ask someone to say something nice about me in writing. But as I began to request Recommendations from a few of my former colleges and contract clients, I found it was an excellent way find out from others just how good a job I do/have done as well as let potential clients or employers know what it’s like to work with me. It was testimonial, or validation of my work.

The LinkedIn feature of Recommendations - and how you used these Recommendations in gaining new business or obtaining a job - can be just as valuable an asset to your portfolio as the designs you put in there. Sure, your design work is excellent, but how is it to work with you?

Here are a couple excerpts from the recommendations others have given me:

“Having hired and managed several large, national agencies when I worked on the Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Blockbuster brands, I was surprised (and impressed) that I was getting top agency results from a team of only one person, Brad McCall…”

“…He is extremely versatile, delivering best-in-class results for every project he took up…”

“…It’s hard to believe so much talent can fit in one person…”

“…I give Brad my highest recommendation and look forward to any project that I can collaborate together with him on again.”

“…The first version [of the product user-interface] started winning awards before it was even out of beta, and the feedback on the second major version has been every bit as positive, even though the degree of complexity was much higher. Excellent to work with, good business sense, and creative work that is second to none.”

“…He is easy to work with, insightful and very good at what he does. His knowledge of color, layout, and visual impact are incredible. Though his work speaks for itself, I gladly endorse Brad as well.”

“…Brad is a valuable asset to any project he is a part of.”

“…Brad has a built-in desire to add value to every project and company he is involved in…”

“Brad is the most effective person I have worked with at communicating through design…”

“…Brad has an amazing capacity to do it all, in copious amounts with consistency, quality and with a great attitude…”

“Brad’s work was some of the best I’ve seen. It was creative, artistic, and professional.”

If you haven’t run across this link as yet, you might find it to be of assistance in the future. It’s a site that hosts nearly 5,000 corporate logos and brand marks in vector format. While I don’t know the legality of this site (thus, it could be taken down any day), it is a great resource for those who need to have a corporate logo and don’t have time to illustrate the logo or go through the corporate mombo-jombo to get one. I recently found it handy to get the “Recordable Compact Disc” logo which I had been looking for.

Check it out at http://www.logotypes.ru/

I was also referred to another site from a graphic design forum, which essentially does the same thing, but I haven’t had time to poke around there as much. The site is covered in ads, so it seems a little more difficult to navigate. Look near the bottom for the “search” and the “A-B-C” directory. The one search I did for “Harley” came up with many more versions of the Harley Davidson logo than the previous logo directory. (I needed this logo to do a mock-up for a local Harley Davidson shop that’s opening up.)

Check it out at http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/

It’s true, I’ve got a foot in the Apple world and the PC world. Because I’ve worked as an in-house graphic designer for tech companies over the past 6+ years, I’ve spent most of time using a PC to do graphic design work. I’ve found that companies who have a small design staff require their designers to adapt to PC’s so they can interface with the rest of the organization (Microsoft Outlook for meetings is a big one), and so the network guys don’t have to go out of their way to give anyone special treatment.

But now that I’m working from home I have a PC running a AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+ 2.4Ghz, 2GB of RAM and Microsoft Windows XP Professional version 2002, and a Apple G4 Dual 1 GHz PowerPC with 1.5 GB RAM running Mac OS 10.4.7. And you know what? I think I prefer the PC. (Big gasp here)

Perhaps it’s my history with Apple which all started with the upgrade I made to my G3 (the pretty blue one). I needed all sorts of attachments to hook my former printers and scanners because their abandonment of Apple Talk. Then when I upgraded to my current G4, Apple switched rebuilt their system completely and I had to replace all my software with OSX compliant software to avoid that nasty “Classic” loader thing that took forever. And now, I’m ready to upgrade design software again, and found the whole “Intel Processor” issue with my Adobe Suite. While I appreciate Apple trying to stay ahead of the game, it seems that it might be worth my money to switch to PC.

Or perhaps it’s just a feeling… the way the clicks work, the keyboard, the mouse… the interface… perhaps it’s only a matter of personal preference? Now Apple allows you to run Windows, which is old news, but it even confuses the issue further in the ongoing MAC vs. PC debate.

So what I’m curious about, is how many graphic designers chose PC as their computer by choice? I know there is this passionate debate about MAC vs. PC, but when you put all the feelings aside, is one better than the other for specific tasks? And what about graphic design tasks, which computer to you prefer? In my opinion, it seems that the PC has caught up in the graphic design world, and now it’s a matter of preference. What are your thoughts?

It’s funny, I remember that Janet Meiners (the blogger who got me started doing this blog) said that one of the reasons she started blogging, is that she didn’t have that great of a memory. She said that she blogs to remember ideas she’s come across or had herself to save for reference later.

So I thought I’d blog about a recent discovery that prompted a few ideas in my brain that I thought I might forget. (That’s the funny part… at least to me anyhow.)

While poking around the web to find cool things, I ran across an offering called MOO. Moo? Yup, MOO. Even though the story behind their name is a well-guarded secret, the grand statement on their website states why they exist and what they do:

The web. You can’t touch it, write on it or put it on the mantle. You can’t hang it on the wall or pass it to the cutie on the bus and you certainly can’t give it to your mum for her birthday. MOO want to change all this. We dream up new products, personalised by your stuff on the web, that let you take that virtual life offline. We hope you like them.

So what does that all mean? Well, for starters at least, NO MORE BORING BUSINESS CARDS.

MOO allows you to make small business-like cards called MiniCards (28mm x 70mm). You create unique designs for the back of the card, and share your Skype name, Flickr pics, email, blog, and vital statistics with friends and attractive strangers, in the real world on the front of the card. There are some examples on how people are using their cards on the MOO Flickr Pool. There even seems to be a movement to collect and share these cards.

But my thought - what a FANTASTIC tool for a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, etc to show off his work. Since each card in the pack of 100 can have a different back-side… the possibilities are endless!

This is just another one of those in a long-line of new personalization products that are out there that I just love. I’m excited to give these a try myself and see how it goes. I also like their web-page design - very fresh.

100% Cotton

Originally uploaded by chezrump.

Did you ever play with Adobe Photoshop to create a third eye in the middle of someone’s head? Yup, that clone tool can be a lot of fun to the first-time user.

But it’s amazing to see the handiwork of someone who has really harnessed the photo-editing power of Photoshop like this image entitled “100% Cotton”. Check out some more of Paul Hollingworth’s photos on flickr and see other samples of his amazing work.

Kind of surreal, don’t you think?

So I did a couple searches yesterday looking for the technique for putting Google Analytics on my blog. Since I’ve already put their code on the main pages of my portfolio site, I wanted to add it to the blog as well.

I found a quick little bullet-point that revealed how it’s done on Matt Cutt’s Blog (he was one of the first search results I found when searching). He says:

If you’re using WordPress with a theme like almost-spring, you would edit your header.php file, e.g. wp-content/themes/almost-spring/header.php and put the JS just above the tag. That’s it. Do a view-source on this page and search for “urchin” to see where to drop the code.

I tried this, and it’s already sending through hits. Wow, cool. Thanks Matt. I’ll have to monitor this over time, as it looks like it’s not sending as specific information through as I’d like. I’ve heard of other blog tracking tools, but this should be sufficient for now.

So guess what? I now know you’ve visited. Yeah! Upward and onward.

So I’ve been watching my traffic the past couple weeks through my newly installed Google Analytics. I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a lot of referrals from the Design Directory at Dexigner.com, so I thought I’d check out the site.

Their listings have a small picture of your webpage - here’s mine, and contains all the pertinent details of my web page:

Description: Portfolio of Utah-based freelance designer. Includes logo identity, corporate packaging, web site design, corporate branding through all print and electronic materials.
URL: www.bradmccall.com
Category: Graphic Design Portfolios
Page Size: 115 bytes
Visitors: 337
Date Added: 01 May 2004 16:48
Last Crawl: 23 Oct 2006 10:10
Status: Active (200)
Supporter: No
Submitted by: Design Directory

The parent site of this directory also has a design database, design forums, design agenda, newsletter and more.

Dexigner Design Portal
Dexigner Design Portal delivers latest design news, events, exhibitions, conferences, and design competitions.
http://www.dexigner.com/

Design Directory
The Design Directory is a web directory of design resources.
Designers, design companies, design studios, portfolios, consultancies and many more.
http://www.dexigner.com/directory/
http://www.designdirectory.net/

Design Database
A comprehensive database of designs, designers and design companies.
Listings include photos, material, field, location and contact information.
http://www.dexigner.com/database/
http://www.designdatabase.com/

Design Agenda
Dexigner Design Agenda keeps you up-to-date on current design competitions,
exhibitions, conferences and upcoming events.
http://www.dexigner.com/agenda/
http://www.designagenda.net/

Dexigner Newsletter
Monthly roundup of design news and competitions from the #1 portal for design related information.
Already more than 26.000 subscribers.
http://www.dexigner.com/newsletter/

If you haven’t visited here already, or list your site (as a freelancer), I’d do it. It seems like a very popular site (800,000 unique visitors a month according to their about us page). I just signed up for their newsletter, so we’ll see how that goes.

Are you being paid what you’re worth? This designer salaries link, sponsored by AIGA (the organization for designers I recently became a part of) and Aquent (a marketing and creative services group) has a link to give you an idea of what your worth.

Check it out –>AIGA/AQUENT Survey of Design Salaries 2006

Have you ever heard of Flont? If you’ve bought type from Veer you have. Most of the font companies these days have a nifty tool that allows you to see the type you want in the font they’re selling, but Flont from Veer takes it one step further.

In order to use the tool, you’ve got to have an account with them. (It’s free to sign up) Then visit their font section and type in the text you’d like to see, and select the font family and they’ll show you all of them in that type. For the example below, I used my brand name (Brad McCall, designer) and tried a few script fonts.

This is an exercise I always use to do with all my own fonts when choosing a font for a corporate ID. To see the letterforms and combine them with the actual font, helps me to determine if the font matches the personality of the company. Now I can do it with fonts before I own them and make presentations to the client to get their buy-off. Veer also gives you access to many of the large type libraries such as Adobe using this tool as well. Give it a try!