opinios

And I'm (Finally) Done!

Just handed up my folio for school, and what a relief it is to be finished for the year study-wise! There were a number of briefs that had to be completed, and I am pretty happy with my solutions to each of them. But it wasn't all smooth sailing. At various stages last night (and into the early hours of this morning)

1. the hard drive on the iMac carked it (not really too surprising as it is over 10 years old and cost me $200)
2. the backup I had was (ahem) somewhat out of date
3. For a brief moment I saw my entire year's efforts flash before me, and I began to panic
4. the iMac came good again, I did not hesitate to retrieve everything from it that I could
5. the iMac carked it again. It is now sitting in the corner of the room in shame.
6. the CD-burning software on my PC (it should be called F%$#@!*g Difficult Media Creator, rather than Easy Media Creator) got its knickers in a knot, refused to uninstall, refused to allow itself to be reinstalled, but chose to launch the (broken) installation program every time I so much as copied a file in Windows Explorer. Aaargh!

So yes, it was a very late night stuffing around with the technology and trawling the discussion forums for other people that have had this problem (luckily there were plenty). And of course when you print something out there is always one little annoying thing that you miss when viewing the file on the screen that you need to go back and fix (which is why it pays to print in black and white first - cheaper!)

Here's one of those submissions, the one for our final brief for the year which was entitled "Type In Society". It involved photographing the letters of the alphabet (from signage on the street) and arranging them into a theme of my choosing. Radiohead fans out there will immediately recognize the source of inspiration. The white weathered look around the edges is actually a custom Photoshop brush based on the hull of a rusty ship!

Tomorrow is my first day at SitePoint, which I am excited about. After last night's efforts I'll need an early night to catch up on sleep before my first day!

How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

It's not that the wife and I are competitive or anything. Honestly, there's no sour grapes here about the fact that her site is so god damned popular and my lil ol' site still struggles to get double figures in the page view department. Really.

But who makes these silly automated tools anyway? I mean, there's obviously something very wrong here...

Onward, Ever Onward...

Next Wednesday is my last day at IBM - I have accepted a position as a technical editor with SitePoint, who are a young publishing (web and print) company based in Collingwood.

It's not a consulting role, although there may be some opportunities to get involved in SitePoint's web design division. It will definitely be quite different from what I have been doing at IBM, but I'm very excited about the role and about working with a young team who are doing some exciting things and dabbling in the latest web technologies.

I am also excited about working in the publishing industry. In many ways this role is a natural progression for me, originally kick-started in the early days when I first started this web site. opinios was borne out of a desire to satisfy the editor within - I would convince my creative friends and family to send in their photographs, poetry, short stories, artwork and and used to love putting it all together and publishing it as a collection of creativity. That was before web publishing got even easier and any old Joe could publish on the web themselves, so eventually the site evolved into the blog you are reading now.

Anyway, the opportunity to experiment with and write about technologies that I am passionate about was too enticing to pass up.

IBM is a very difficult company to walk away from. There are so many great people with whom I have worked over the past 15 months (and 3 years prior to my stint in Japan), and there were some interesting projects during that time that I was involved with. And they do reward their employees well.

However the time is right to move on and I am very much looking forward to joining the SitePoint team. Plus the timing is perfect as I have a few days off before I start the new job to print out my folio for my design course and hand it in.

Exciting times!

Two Down, One To Go!

Well, my first two exams have been OK so far. I actually got my results back for the written test already: 97% ! Woo hoo!!! I certainly didn't get any marks that high in those ball-breaking engineering exams in my uni days.

My final exam is a design brief for creating a logo in Illustrator, then applying that logo to stationery, business cards etc, all within the 3 hours. It's the kind of stuff I really enjoy, however the one area that could possibly be my downfall is that I am a perfectionist. During the year it took me forever and dozens of thumbnail sketches to finally decide upon a logo for the exercise we were set. Anyway, I won't have time to mull over a dozen thumbnails this time round, it will have to be a quick decision that I run with.

In the mean time, here is a sneak preview of the calendar that I am putting together to include in my end of year folio.

Exams? Exams!!

I have exams for my graphic design course this week. First one was last night, the written test. Questions included being asked to illustrate various design principles and examples of type empathy, identifying different examples of type and classifying their family and explaining details about the lithography printing process and other print terminology.

I'm reasonably confident that I did well. There was one typography question that I know I got wrong, but the rest of it was pretty straight forward and I actually enjoyed it (this is the point at which my cousin rolls his eyes and exclaims "that nerdy studious cousin of mine!") I had plenty of time to complete it and so, in my own perfectionist manner, put a bit more effort into some of the illustrations of type and design principles than was probably necessary. I even threw in a bit of cartoon humour instead of simply illustrating a square or circle which would have been enough.

Tonight I have my second exam which is a brief using Adobe InDesign. Although I find it frustrating that some of the user interface aspects of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are not consistent across the Adobe suite, I think I have my head around how to do most things in each of them and am fairly confident about this one.

Then next week is my final exam, a brief using Adobe Illustrator. Once that is over I have about a week to finish off my portfolio for final submission, then I am done for the year! I am happy with how some of those pieces are coming along; I'll post them to the site when I get a chance, I promise!

Goat Square Cottages

I designed goatsquarecottages.com.au for a small bed and breakfast in the Barossa Valley wine district ages ago, but haven't invested much effort into driving traffic to it. Tourism is a difficult industry to achieve good search engine rankings in, as it is very competitive and everyone books accommodation for their holidays online these days.

I enjoyed creating the logo in the site's header, using two fonts which very obviously portray the design principle of contrast. The colour scheme was decided upon by choosing colours from the photo at the top. And all coded using web standards of course. I think it works!

The site is also implemented using a CMS which means that the owners can easily update text content on the site without having to call me!

It was a fun little project, especially because the images were provided by my Dad who is a photographer. If you are ever visiting the Barossa Valley and looking for a place to stay, check out this place as the rooms look amazing and the cottages have a lot of character.

What's In A (Domain) Name?

I've always lamented the choice of domain name for this site.

In hindsight, something that is as difficult to pronounce or remember as "opinios" (in case you've always wondered, it's pronounced oh-pin-ee-os) is not the smartest choice for a domain name. If it comes up in conversation, people ask me to repeat it. And they often type "opinions" or "epinions" when typing my email address for the first time, which then bounces. It's a disaster.

I registered this domain back in the days of when I new nothing about usability or web marketing, and I substituted for this lack of knowledge with an attempt to be cool. Of course, I didn't know how to do that either, so I substituted for that by trying to be abstract-with-some-vague-Latin-reference, and hoping that people would think that that was cool. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

And maybe it was, for a short while. I had my time when photography submissions to opinios were too many to sort through, the site traffic was high and the comments were coming in thick and fast. But I couldn't sustain any consistency to the theme or the quality of the content. So now we're back to plain old random opinios. Occasional update. Infrequent techy web commentary. Less frequent political musings. Large gaps between each.

And that's fine. I'm over it. I probably wouldn't change the domain now anyway, as I have been writing to this site for 4 years or so. I may launch something new (there's a hint, stay tuned!)

However I take consolation in knowing that a couple of sites that I follow regularly have adopted a similarly difficult-to-pronounce-or-remember, abstract-with-some-vague-Latin-reference approach, and their sites are quite popular.

I am talking, of course, of the extremely useful DOM Scripting reference sites, Adactio and Incutio.

So there is hope for me. Now I just have to work on that content.

(For those of you thinking of registering a domain name, here are some tips on what to think about when registering a domain name)

World Usability Day

Tomorrow, November 3, is World Usability Day. World Usability Day was created to raise awareness of the ways to help create a better user experience of our world (not just the web).

Check the events map for events near you!

Tags: World Usability Day