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March 29, 2005

Join the 9rules Network: Round 1

You have a blog and there are some goals you would like to accomplish:

Maybe you only want one of the items listed above or maybe you want all of them. In any case that is what the new 9rules Network is for. Here are some of the details:

Now I have already written about this over at Work Boxers to get a sample test of interest and the results have been overwhelming. To control the chaos a bit better we are going to open the window for applicants for a set amount of time. Next Wednesday (April 6, 2005) at 12:00am Eastern, we will post an application form on the 9rules site where you can submit your site(s) for review. Only a set number of sites will be allowed into the network for this first round because we want to be able to provide the best service possible to them. The form will be up for 24 hours.

So if you think you might be interested make sure that your site has been updated with quality content and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

More details later.

Posted by Scrivs at 03:00 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 28, 2005

Portfolio Design Kyle's Way

I was going to give my thoughts on Portfolio Design, but Kyle did it better than I ever could:

I think it depends majorly on how you intend to use your portfolio.

  1. Are you looking to attract clients from internet searches?
  2. Are you looking to attract clients from business card referrals / word-of-mouth?
  3. Are you looking to simply use your portfolio in face-to-face interviews, showing your work?

I'd say those are the three business-related goals for portfolios.

For option #1 - Focus on content, big headlines - short text. Make the user want to continue reading. They're just seconds from the back button... always remember that. These users are coming to your page with bad expectations. You have to actively pursue them to read the content.

For option #2 - Make it flashy, but not too flashy. Have a lot of content, headlines aren't so important - you can start making the text longer and more prominent. These people took the time to type in your address into the address bar - they're here to stay for a few minutes, and have a high likelyhood of actually reading your content. These users are coming to your page with good expectations. They have a reason for coming, and they're definately going to find out more.

For option #3 - Make it nothing but flash, pizzaz, glimmer and glamor. Content is of no relation here as no one's going to read it. They just want to see something cool looking, and examples of past sites. Thes users are coming to your site with no expectation whatsoever.They aren't even going to read any content. They're just going to give it the old once-over, initial impressions. Think book cover here.

There's 2 cents... for my portfolio (when I was still frelancing) I was going in between #1 and #2. My major purpose of my portfolio was from business card references and word of mouth, so mine's a big content heavy - but with enough flash to make people ooh when they first see it.

No comments needed here because you can just continue the discussion in the previous post.

Posted by Scrivs at 06:32 PM | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

Portfolio Design

For many designers one of the most difficult projects you can take is designing your own portfolio or company site. At Business Logs our redesign isn't going as smooth as possible mostly because we expect so much out of our own site and are working hard to get it right. I think though that at times we are trying too hard and in turn that makes things more complicated than they should be.

When doing your portfolio the content is the past work you've done. Should your design obscure the content or should it enhance it? I guess this depends on how well you value your work. I have seen many times where the portfolio site was many times better than the actual work that was done by the company. So which route do you take and which route will work best for your potential clients?

Here are two extreme examples (maybe not so extreme):

Now do you think there is a best approach to take? I love the design of both sites, but can't help and wonder if a potential client will see the twothirty site and move away from it because it doesn't offer enough flair. As designers we should all be able to see the complex beauty in that site and understand that minimalistic design doesn't mean a lack of design skills (unless you are talking about me ;-).

So I know I am asking a broad quesition here, but is there a best route to take when it comes to portfolio design? I have an answer that I will expel upon probably tomorrow in another entry, but I would love to hear what you think first.

Posted by Scrivs at 12:57 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

My Unadulterated SXSW Lowlights

Joe Clark. So this guy is an icon in the Accessibility community and seems to be well-recognized everywhere. He has a very strong personality not much unlike myself. I knew the name, but I didn't know who he was until I got to meet him at the first day of registration. May I never have to meet him again because if so bad things may occur. I am not to sure if Mike has high regards for him either.

If you were around me most of the week I am sure you heard the story. If not let me just push it in the deep recesses of my brain saved only for those parts of drunken mishappenenings. The guy is an ass. That is all.

Time Wasting Panels. Yes, yes, it has been said that the best part of SXSW isn't the panels, but the hallway discussions and parties. Fair enough. However, if I pay money to fly to Austin, receive admission to a conference, and dedicate my time to watch a discussion, I do plan on walking out of there with something learned. I didn't attend as many panels as the rest of the people, but I was only impressed with one of them (Blogging While Black, arguably the best one of the conference from what I hear). I enjoyed the Design Eye one as well for its entertainment value. The rest?

Ill-prepared. Maybe the blogging environment has caused many of us to become lazy or think that no matter what we say everyone will like it. However, I know the panelists were much smarter than they allowed themselves to be perceived. It was almost like sitting down watching a high schooler give a History presentation that he prepared during lunch time.

This did motivate me and the Business Logs team to already start preparation for our panel next year. So that was a good thing.

It's a White Man's World. No worries, this isn't one of those "where are the X?" type of entries, but it was a bit disconcerting to see what I always felt was the truth. White men dominate the industry. And I don't mean dominate as in there are a lot of them, but I mean dominate as in IE used to control over 96% of the market dominate. There were more Black people on stage for the Bloggin While Black panel than there were in the crowd!

Variety is always a good thing and I think many people would benefit from a bit more of it at the conference. However, that is not for any one person to decide. That's just the way things are for now.

Same Parties, Same Conversations. Yeah, yeah you hear about how fun the parties are right? Well, I think these tales are coming from people who don't really get to attend parties all that much. The grand finale party (which in hindsight was so overhyped it hurts) sucked. You have a couple hundred people in the same house with no music playing. Wow. Wait there is music, but its coming from a little boombox on the top floor. Lame.

What about the other parties? Same old shit. Stand around. Talk about web design (yippee) or how well work is going. Maybe everyone is afraid to really cut loose for fear of losing their professional status or that it might get blogged, but damn some of these people are just boring. Here is a classic example.

At the last party, Mike and I are walking around bored off our asses. I decide that it's time to jumpstart the party and move to the second floor in the dining room (or whatever it was). There was music playing from the small boombox, but I thought it would be more fun to have Mike beatbox while I started dancing in the middle of all these people. Mike did his crazy beatboxing thing and I did my crazy dancing thing hoping that this would light a fire under everyone's asses. What happened? People stared at us like were aliens and once we stopped went right back to their conversations and lego building activities (yeah you read that right).

Let's try this again.

Moved to the next room, told Mr. Inman I was going to perform a celebration dance in his honor. Same result.

Time to bail and go play some pool back in town.

I'm an ass. I already knew this, but there were certain times at SXSW in which I proved to myself all over again that I was one. Not my finest moments.

The Brits are just cooler. What makes them cooler? They don't give two shits what people think about them and that is how everyone should live. Too many of us are concerned about making the right appearance towards others, but fail to understand that if people don't like you for what you are then those are the people you don't want in your life.

Mike Davidson's Beard. If the only person you saw was Mike at the conference then you probably thought you were in the Klondike. That thing was hideous.

All in all though, it was more good than bad and I will be going next year to cause even more chaos.

Posted by Scrivs at 04:42 PM | Comments (44) | TrackBack

March 18, 2005

My Unadulterated SXSW Highlights

Quick story before the real content

One of the questions that I received the most at this year's SXSW was "What happened to Whitespace?" A good question and all I could provide those that ask was this simple answer:

I can't login to MT.

I had been shutout of my own installation. So therefore you get a site with no content for over a month. Well I tried everything in my power to try and get it to work, but nothing was working. So now I have downloaded all the files and done a database dump from MySQL and am starting from scratch. Old content is still there just not linked to at the moment. Hopefully order will be restored shortly.

The Highlights

Kickball. The Business Logs team showed up to the kickball game with only one intention: to beat the crap out of anybody daring to step in our direction. As fate would have it the great Anil Dash put me on a team separate from Mike and Matthew. Oh well I figured, I could dominate this game by my lonesome. I mean I was playing against other fellow web geeks so how hard could this be?

Not enough space to tell the whole story, but I can sum it up like this. I kicked the shit out of the ball twice and celebrated with the best run scoring dance of all time...only to lose the game in extra innings.

Meeting the Doctor. Who in the hell is the doctor? The doctor is D. Keith Robinson. I call him the doctor because I always thought the D meant doctor. Well I later found out it stood for Doogie so I wasn't that far off. Anyways, it was cool to finally meet him because we all know how much of a super dork he is on his site, but in real life he is one cool brother. Very easy to drink him under the table though (I can say this because he is still at SXSW and probably won't read this...)

Seeing I am not alone. Some of you are aware of the party lifestyle I live. Rundle was here last Tuesday to spend a couple days in Tampa before going to Austin so he got to witness the crazyness that is my life. To say the least I don't hangout with web people or anybody that remotely resembles someone that knows how to turn on a computer. So I fully admit to wondering if I was going to be a stranger in a strange land at SXSW.

There were a couple of people that were really great fun to hangout with. Don't get me wrong, everyone was fun to talk to, but hanging out with someone past midnight takes a certain type of fun factor. Now I can have fun just chatting with people past midnight, but there are just party types that like to keep it going for a bit longer. These are the ones that had it:

Now if you aren't on the list, it's no diss to you. These are just the group of guys that I found myself spending the most time with after midnight doing what I usually do in Tampa.

My Acceptance Speech. You see Business Logs was up for the Best Blog award at SXSW and the only competition we had was some no-name guy who goes by The Wolf. Well the no-name won and when he got up on stage he said something to the effect of:

Take that Scrivs!

Or something like that. But what I heard was:

Haha, Scrivs you punkass, how do you like dem apples?!?!

So of course I did what any other sane blogger would do and went onstage and did No-Name's acceptance speech for him. The legend of the Spotlight Stealer has now been fully established.

Liquid vs. Fixed It was Monday night/Tuesday morning and this was easily the best night I had there. This night was only for the true party types and played out like a game of Survival seeing who can stay up the latest. I lost because I crashed at 7:30 am, but what really made this night fun was Patrick Griffiths popping the most controversial question in our lil design community. Let me set the mood.

In a suite on the 17th floor of the Hilton at about 5-6am you have around 10 people in a room feeling 'nice' as I like to call it. Some of these people include Molly "Checkout my Jew fro" Holzschlag (as she kept on calling it), The Doctor, Jeremy "Which is the first name and which is the last" Keith, Garrett, and Kyle Bradshaw. There were others, but these were the ones whose lives would change forever.

Everyone is drinking, chilling, screaming, and being very professional *cough*. All of a sudden there is silence and PTG screams out:

Fixed or Liquid?!?!?!?

WTF?!?!

To say the least all hell broke loose after that and the only thing I remember is thinking I am never getting into this argument with Jeremy Keith again because he is going to write a whole damn manual on this crap within 10 minutes.

Good times.

Good Times All Over

I had a great time and will be there next year for sure. So many events that I didn't reflect upon in this entry and so many people that I need to say my thanks to for bearing with my inconsistencies. You go into these situations looking not to make a fool of yourself because understandably many of these people consider you to be a professional. I went in with the opposite approach. I was me through and through and mostly everyone seemed to enjoy that. That was a good feeling.

Monday I will talk about the lowlights that many of the people on the web refuse to discuss because I don't want to make it seem like everything was peaches and cream. There are some bastards in this industry and they proved it while I was there.

Posted by Scrivs at 02:45 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack