The catalyst a short trip to cssmania.com for some clever inspiration led me to Mr. Dan Klammer’s personal portfolio http://danklammer.com/, which is captivating in its own right. After a couple of usual poking around examinations I really started to look at his site. Read content, see social icons, etc, and discovered a little link to 8tracks.com or more specifically to a mix he had posted on 8tracks. The mix was great and his followers also had profoundly good taste in music and so I proceded to listen to their work and made an account for myself.

Someone out there is snidely thinking, “Good job grandpa, you finally made into the mixtape digital age.” Shut your food hole mouth breather.

I really truly love this site, if for no other reason that its elegantly simple and utterly usable interface allows me to take the art nerd passion of Rob Gordon and share it with friends and family. The selfless nature of making things for other people (like mixtapes) is a great exercise and it can turn you on to all sorts of great artistry that you didn’t know was there.

Thank you internet for making me believe in the mystery and magic of information, again.

Best, Z

WordPress’ Thelonoius update, is something interesting. The once playful attitude of the blog software turned semi-cms is now making a turn into a big new world. With addition of taxonomies, custom menus and now custom post types, the once blog synonymous system is looking like its fellow Opensource juggernaut Drupal.

Good things come to those who love to wait for great improvements. I hope that this upgrade doesn’t foreshadow a negative change in the WordPress community.

Z

Freelance has a lot of interesting barriers to overcome. First you have to find a client, then you must determine what the scope of work will be, then you must determine the price for your work and when all is said and done you have to COLLECT!

It seems like, even when you agree to something with your client,  you may encounter some last minute changes in schedule that weren’t apart of the original deal. Namely, they don’t want to finish paying you because they think that they don’t need to pay you for your work. They don’t remember negotiating your rate, or asking you to perform the work in an unreasonably short amount of time. I’m almost convinced that they don’t care. They used you for what they wanted to accomplish and now suddenly they want out of the deal.

No matter how fairly you have treated someone, they want to take their guarantee back.

So here is how everything happened;

1. A gentleman asked me to create a WordPress theme in one day for a client of his
2. He agrees, after many back and forth conversations, to the price for the work
3. I complete the work that I could do, and even generated artwork to complete the design
4. I am on call as a consultant modifying theme settings and php templates
5. I send the final payment for the other half of what the total job was priced
6. Customer says that he is waiting for his client to pay him
7. I politely tell him that this is not my problem
8. He doesn’t agree

From my perspective, if you have hired me to do something and you agree to pay a certain price then it doesn’t matter to me what other arrangements you have regarding the same project. I am willing to go a little bit for people, but if you have agreed to pay me for my time, you had better follow through without any condition attached.

I will keep you posted as to whether or not he actually follows through.

Thanks for letting me complain a bit,

Zach “the unpaid” Freelancer

Attention followers of our blog, we moved!

On Friday September 11th we had an opportunity to finally start transitioning away from the old single page site and allow WordPress to do all of the heavy lifting from now on. Or at least until something flashier and faster comes along to replace it.

There is sort of a strange paradigm in web development and design, you have time to work for everyone accept yourself. This issue often causes company websites to sort of languish in a mire of never progressive soup. Great examples of people who don’t upgrade and don’t really care are cameronmoll and happycog. Both represent amazing minds in the web community and neither one has really changed the theme of their websites in well over 3 years.

This constant self-deprecation can be a sweet kiss of death for many companies. I can personally attest to my constant busy-ness as being the primary cause for my lack of change to the core site. I sincerely wish that I had more time to develop the ideas that have to a slightly more inviting polish. But perhaps my recent move from spineless entrepreneur to full-time web wrangler will grant me some real time to brush my site up.

The other part of the web that is always chasing me is the feeling that my best work is done for clients and not for me. It always feels like my concepts for other people are more well rounded than what I end up assembling for myself. I know that I have a hundred good ideas a day but they are always for others. Perhaps it is my future to be a muse for others and never for myself.

Thank you all for coming by and reading my white noise from time to time.

We recently finished production on 2 new websites. They are now launched and swimming in the wild.

Joynt Search Marketing – http://joyntsearchmarketing.com

Zach Meyer, website designer and co-owner of cognizant-design.com has finished a new design for joyntsearchmarketing.com. The new website design is focused on the concept of design following functionality. The design is clean and seamless. There is plenty of room to focus on the main attraction, which is the content. Many blog designs today are overcrowded and the designers are clearly trying to incorporate too much which ends up distracting the reader from the content.

With this design, the reader is guided through the content with minimal interruption. At the bottom, they are greeted with options to contact the blog owner and read additional posts. This frees the reader from having to scroll back to the top for additional information. Beautiful font selections, and complimentary colors help make the site esthetically pleasing and warm.

10 Thousand Things – http://10kthings.com

Developed on WordPress, this design and layout was designed to include a mini form in the column as well as a home page that would serve up decent CTAs that can be managed by the client. Dave Winget is another member of the extended Cog family and has a lot to offer in the ways of full featured web marketing services. He has a great library of resources, including us , that he calls upon from project to project. He has a great blog too.

If any of you know who I am and what I usually say, I try to maintain some decent levels of class and sophistication while expressing my opinion or view about a particular subject because I know what backlash is, however, today I will allow myself to be rather unrestrained. Today I shall be attacking the loud voice of supposed web designers who are bitching about the difficulties of designing for Drupal or any other CMS that exists. This is the movement of the future

Things to know about me, I am not the God’s gift to webdesign, I am not a PHP developer by trade, I do not claim to be the last word in any of the advances to technology, but I have been using these CMS platforms for about 4 years and I think I have a reasonable idea about what is possible and how you let the medium be your guide when working in web. Plus after I am done bitching I will attach some resources for you.

I have been designing and developing in the web for quite some time now and I don’t think that there is any reason for anyone who wants to start, or has started, to ever wince at the thought of using the tools that are available to them. Having been in the middle of several debates and pushes to change the standards for various parts of Drupal, I have heard this unified cry from the “designers” that PHP is scary and that they should have to worry about it. STFUYFB! I started out with the chicken-shit designer method of copying pasting and re-wrapping existing code in divs to get it to my bidding, and it worked. My level of impact was really low at that time but then I began to copy functions and edit them to get the results that I wanted. From that moment on the dynamics of what I was doing changed. There was no longer a fear that the white screen would kill all my work.

Of course you won’t know everything to start with. But you can go about learning these things in a way that is tailored to your style. I like videos and hands on tutorial instruction. The more I physically perform an action the more I connect that action with its purpose. Some of my friends just read through the books and they totally get how to accomplish these things. Different strokes for different folks. But saying that you can’t understand or learn something means that either you are incompetent or you refuse to allow yourself to learn.

Ugly Garland is no longer an excuse, bitches! Every CMS starts with the ugliest pre-installed theme that could be possibly packaged with it for 2 reasons; 1. This is what the developers were using while developing and or 2. The developers didn’t have a designer to create a decent starter theme with. All complaints about Drupal’s boxiness to me is white noise. As designers, we (you and I) have the power to create something that can be free and airy or cramped and claustrophobic. Your art style, be it minimalist or texture crazy, can work in any arena. Our responsibility is to create something that fits the purpose and medium it will be presented in.

If you design for print, you need to know what can be accomplished and how to use the press/paper/inks/etc to accomplish it. Know your tools or start learning about them so that you can create the results that you want. Don’t blame the medium for your lack of understanding. (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP are now the foundations for open source web-design and development. If you don’t have any concept of what these things are or even a vague idea of how they work together to create a website, then you either need to find out about it or STOP DESIGNING FOR THE WEB. You arrogant lazy assholes that keep saying how much you don’t like webdesign because its too restrictive, please stop bidding against me. You are using up my creative air and its really annoying.

Sure, there are many things that can become better and in the case of the open source world, it is the designers and developers that dictate that change. Voice your opinion and help create solutions. The web is full of bitching.

As for your growth here are some basic things to consider;

Design Resources: 960grid, webdesignledger, smashingmagazine, tutsplus, drupal, wordpress, alistapart, w3schools

If you are ready to take of that summer dress and get on board with the rest of us;

Development Resources: drupal api, wordpress codex, PHP

Best of luck.

Zach “attack”

URLs are Penn & Teller’s “switch” — it’s well understood that I can switch elements just by pointing to a link, never-you-mind clicking! And with AJAX, we have a complete browser within a browser for switching out content. And the kicker? The term AJAX was coined by Jesse James (Garrett)! So, you know that deception is involved!

Please add your ideas on the correlations between in the comments!

Admittedly we come from the soup. We started out with table layouts and bad coloring and then moved our way through all of these fossil technologies into the glory of grid based, CSS design. And I give much praise to the foundations of design which are most certainly rooted in print. But many times these designers think that some how the mediums are joined at the hip. Not the case.

So, instead of going on and on about how much I dislike the efforts of print designers in the web space let me give out some advice and direction.

If you are thinking about transitioning to the web do your homework.

What do I mena by this? I am suggesting that you go to where all the hip designers are hanging out and see what they are into. By studying the style of today you will have a good barometer for whether or not you are able to design at the same level.

Also, read about the current best practices for technology. The page at a time web design is not really as effective as it once was and has been replaced by database driven websites. For good resources you should check out Smashing Magazine or Webdesign Ledger

For heavens sake, don’t use a thousand different gradients! The web needs to be lightweight as well as engaging. This can be a challenge for anyone who really likes to take advantage of the tools in Photoshop. Think about your end user. In most cases they will not care as much about the aesthetic as they will the over-all functionality of a site. This form follows function mentality will help you when determining the sizes for text, placement of navigation and ergonomics for guided calls to action.

Also. please watch your fonts. A lot of print designers are totally married to many different fancy fonts. At the moment the web cannot render most of them natively. They require special treatment. So, please save your poor development team the brain damage and use the fonts that come on every computer. A great place to do that is at TypeChart. Believe me, I love type as much as the next guy, but the web doesn’t seem to show love quite the same way back.

Use exact measurements in your layouts. Don’t leave little one or two pixel lines over hang out anywhere. This is a nightmare for anyone trying to take your design and turn it into a theme. You may not have any reason to worry about it, but the developers don’t know whether it is an accident or not. Specificity is really important. Also, using a web standard grid such as the one you will find at 960.gs will help you organize your design in a way that is easier on your development team.

Study some code. This is one of the biggest things that can help you as a designer understand what you team can and can’t do before they throw a design back at you and say “NO!” We are not looking for mastery here, but a clear understanding of reasonable functionality. If you walk up to your team and ask them about it, I am sure they will emphatically bombard you with information.

In general, if you are making the transition, please try to respect the effort and team work that designers and technologists have been fostering by making the internet a place that has both visual and vicerel interactivity.

Sincerely

Zach