amazingcube.com

Posts and categories are a little scattered at the moment because I started putting posts in for filler content while I customized my theme.  I will be getting organized this week.  Promise.

All of this computer work has finally caught up to me.  I just had my first ever eye exam yesterday and apparently I would benefit from some “readers” for my “near-work.”  Translation, I need reading glasses when I am on the computer or reading, so that’s pretty much all day excpet for when I am driving to and from work.  While I could have just gotten those over-the-counter reading glasses from the pharmacy, I opted for using the vision insurance that I am already paying for and ordered some sweet frames.  So much for being proud of my perfect vision.

These guys are my favorite freelance client and not just because Andrew is the boss, but because they are an awesome company on the path to greatness and I have been infected by their fever. Andrew is probably too busy leading the efforts to shuffle celebrities around Park City for the Sundance Film Festival at the moment to notice, but there are great things in store for ESG Utah in 2007. I have been working on expanding their web presence and refining it where I can and also offering advice for their marketing efforts. Now that we are comfortable with each other I plan to unleash some serious sweetness to reign in the brand and its subsidiaries, bring their web sites up to the latest standards and polish everything off to a shine.

I have worked with material that I inherited from the designer before me and made the best of it. The esgutah.com homepage still uses tables for layout but I have cleaned up some of the code and at least gotten the ‘loose’ DTD on there. Other notables are the snow report and the greenride page that I recently did for them using the ‘transitional’ DTD and table-less layouts.

Andrew, put in a good word to Lucy Liu for me and I’ll get you those new business cards like you asked.

This is a great idea in theory.  In an attempt to become the one-stop-shop for web folks struggling with CSS issues, Adobe has launched a new website called CSS Advisor. It is a great idea but it will need to gain popularity in order to be useful. Spread the word, and if you have CSS knowledge, go to CSS Advisor and spread the wealth.

Adobe Labs web application known as Kuler is kind of like a color wheel on steroids. I first heard about Kuler from the Adobe Edge newsletter shortly after I had just finished pointing a colleague to an online color wheel as a good way to pick out colors for a color-coded table. After reading Adobe Edge I told the colleague to forget about what I had sent him earlier to go check out Kuler instead. Very awesome looking indeed and I cannot wait for my first opportunity to use it to create a new color scheme.

One thing I take issue with:

According to Mark Hilton, vice president of the Creative Solutions business unit at Adobe, “You don’t need to understand color theory to use kuler; we created the program for experienced designers as well as anyone who wants to be creative.”

So even the average joe could use kuler to do anything from, say, picking out paint for their house to choosing the interior colors for the old hot rod they are restoring. I have no problem with that part. The part that I do take issue with is the idea that a slick piece of software can take the place of the need to understand color theory. That type of thinking usually leads to sentences like “I have (insert software title here), what do I need to hire a designer for?” Just because I can download CAD does not make me an engineer. Oh well, though, I am sure that it will most likely be creative professionals rather than the hobbyist that uses Kuler.