In a fit of uncharacteristic motivation, I spent Friday evening redesigning my website (see also: the aforementioned afoot changes, only 3.5 months late). I’m nowhere near done, of course, but it’s already better than what I had before.

Ah, what I had before. Ah, the old WasabiJane.

This is, I think, the fourth incarnation of WasabiJane. First there was the waste of a year of a paid domain name from a won bet, then there was blogger. The last incarnation was born in December 2007, when I was still trying to figure out how to systematically break things in WordPress and needed to create a portfolio site. In retrospect, I’m amazed I actually did as much as I did with it; admittedly, I didn’t update the portfolio at all (a function of a poor choice of a template), but up until about a year ago I actually blogged multiple times per month.

I could hazard a guess as to why I stopped. Life has shifted multiple times since I graduated in December 2008. In April, my boss at University Outreach and Engagement told me he couldn’t afford to renew my temp contract, and I’d be out of a job come October. In August, I started transitioning from there to doing contract work at MessageMakers (an awesome production company in Old Town, Lansing). September was consumed by a workation to Northern Wisconsin, a struggle to balance a workload for both MessageMakers and UOE, and a physical move from an apartment into the basement of some friends from church. (September was awful. I don’t recommend trying to balance that much at once without major league support.) For the next six months, life was in…well, I’d call it a holding pattern, but I’ve already seen some good growth as a direct result of it.

In short, the last 18 months or so have been like fertilizer: lots of crap, but necessary for growth.

So where am I now, and why am I actually writing here again? In April, I started a full-time position at Covenant Eyes (official title: Web Content Producer, and yes, I am working on redesigning the site). Of indirect benefit to the blog is the fact that I actually feel stable about life for the first time in a long time. I have a salaried position. I have awesome coworkers. As of two weeks ago, I have my own apartment again. I have negative space again.

The second thing that changed is that I’m back around bloggers. I mean, my desk is right next to the company blogger’s. I proofread at least five blog posts and edit one podcast a week (by the way, this week’s is particularly awesome). And at least a few coworkers have personal blogs. I’m too lazy to look any actual research up at the moment, but there’s sufficient evidence that you rise to (or sink to) the level of your peers. Now that I’m in a place where people blog, I’ll be more likely to think about blogging myself.

Hence the rebirth of WasabiJane. Expect more of what I’ve historically written, only posted more than once every four months. Oh, and probably containing 20% more rants about the porn industry.

design, site design, internet

Good, user-centered design is often simple and elegant.

I just wish the process of designing was as well.

Uncategorized design, life

It’s been a while since I did an image dump:

The Fill the Bus project is being run by the Center for Service Learning and Civic Engagement. We needed a very fast turnaround for this. I think it took me about 20 minutes total to create this image in Illustrator.

Interestingly enough, the font (Ravie) was a random pick. I wanted a font that would be fun and bouncy and chose it because it sounded like it might fit. Normally I’m pretty obsessive about font selection, but this time the first try actually worked well. I love it when things work out in my favor.

image dump design, drawing, fonts, photodump, work

A friend of mine from grad school works at a company that promotes magazines.  Apparently the P.R. director got approached by the editor of this magazine:

It’s called Cats in Space, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It even beats out SparkleWorld. Seriously. I hope it’s real.

Actually, one of the even better things about CiS is its parent site. This high-quality publication is hosted by the similarly high-quality awesomecats.com. Content-wise, awesomecats performs its function of being a site about, well, cats. If cats are your thing, it has a decent collection of resources–if you can get past the horrible page design, at least. And the sad thing is, people have obviously very specifically spent a fair bit of time on the design of the site. The header, for instance, is beyond my Flash capabilities. Not that I’m some flash guru by any means, but somebody had some good quality bonding moments with Flash over that header. And they obviously try to offer a reasonable range of services. Why, I could register wasabijane@awesomecats.com if I so chose, or even have an awesomecats.com website of my very own!

Actually, this is what I find the most telling. Look at their site features: 5K free web space is but one example. For you non-techy people, this randomly selected image is 4K. A single-spaced, one-page Word doc is likely to be at least 25K. This blog post is probably more than awesomecats can handle. And, even more telling, the first line of their site features reads as such: “No knowledge of web design or HTML is required to create websites.” No kidding. But then, I think the only ones who would take them up on such an offer are people like the creators of Cats in Space.

…and anyway, I was always more of a dog person.

Uncategorized cats, design, rant, rhetoric

Sally pointed out this blog, which features strange maps and their function. I must admit I find it fascinating. This map, in particular, is a startling reminder that reality differs greatly from our perceptions thereof; this map, on the other hand, fills me with empathy for the designers. I’m actually working on a similar map for a conference program at the moment, so I can honestly say, given the design problem (too much text, too little room), the designers could have done worse.

fun, rhetoric design, maps, rhetoric