Lately much of my inspiration has been linked to my new toy, Apple’s iPad.

After hearing that I had purchased an iPad, a coworker mentioned that I try Flipboard, an application that turns your Facebook, twitter, and other new streams into a new, more consumable format. After downloading it, I’ve found that I can hardly view my regular twitter stream in any other format versus the more compelling view that Flipboard has created. Just this simple “redesign” of information has inspired me to think of other things in my world that can be looked at in new ways. It’s a product where the aesthetic design and enjoyable interactions have clearly improved the experience.

Links:
Flipboard for iPad: www.flipboard.com
Apple iPad: www.apple.com/ipad

I’ve got to say I learned a lot in the process about many things that apply directly to being a freelance designer. While working with contractors, sub-contractors and people who I thought were “skilled” tradesmen in their respective fields I learned valuable lessons about being on the “client” side of things. Perhaps I’ll share those in a future post. I also enjoyed being creative in a format beyond my day-to-day job of doing UI design. Picking tile, wood floors, designing window woodwork, picking carpet, tearing down walls, etc. all provided a tactile experience that the design of software lacks. From that standpoint, I’d have to say the experience was an enjoyable one.

I also wanted to mentioned that I joined Facebook recently. I had been interested in some of their use of the latest-and-greatest technologies and wanted to keep track on what changes they make overtime. (Their growth rate has been phenomenal!) I’ve already found many people I know there, and have enjoyed exchanging messages through their internal email, or their “wall” functionality.

Yahoo’s still got me on top, so I’m good there, and so does MSN.

Perhaps it’s because of my lack of frequency of added material to the Daily Brad? Or my lack of mentioning my name – Brad McCall in my posts with relevant content? I’m number 2 when searching for “Daily Bread”, just beneath a site that I think has been using that phrase a lot longer than me, so that can’t be it. I’m still highly suspicious about Google’s blogs appearing on top, and then not in any of the other search engines. Conspiracy theories aside, I think Google may have it’s hands in too many pots to be unbiased any of them.

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?