Designing your Portfolio

testing my trackbacks ;)

Designing your Portfolio

New Blog and Portfolio Site

After about 3 weeks of work, i've finished my new blog. I designed, and built the wordpress theme from scratch (which is kind of impressive for me!). its not perfect, but its done enough to show.

enjoy!

jonbroom.com

Personal vs. Professional Personas

Should our online personal and professional personas be separated?

Online Social Media and Networking isn't really all that new anymore, but it's relationship to your professional life is. If you're like me, you've got accounts on sites like myspace, facebook, flickr, delicious, twitter, brightkite, a personal blog and professional blog that are all recording and broadcasting your life to your friends, family and co-workers. I share lots of personal experiences on these sites, as do a lot of other people, that may or may not represent myself as a reliable and professional person. There wouldn't be much of a problem with this except that my professional life has taken over just as much a share in my online identity as my personal life has. The fact that I'm an interactive art director specializing in social media applications plays a big role in my professional identity growing, but i think this is a phenomenon that is spreading to other fields as well.

So, how do you manage this? I don't want my employer, future employer or client to find those drunken picts from last new years, or discovering my odd collection of "dickbirds", but i do enjoy sharing these things with my friends. On the other hand, I think its valuable to show that you have a strong online presence as well as an active and creative lifestyle. These are all important to keeping a creative mind healthy, and the fact that you have a life, online or off, is a very positive attribute. Showing that you have a sense of humor, that you're sincere about who and what you are, and not afraid to express yourself can do wonders for how you're perceived in the workplace. No one likes a fake, and its almost always obvious when you're persona totally changes at work (especially if your facebook page shows otherwise), but where and how do you draw the line?

The only answer is restraint. I know, its not fun. Its muffling the real you, its censorship, its whatever.... but face it, thats the way life is. you can't show every part of yourself to everyone in the world and not expect to be judged by it. A few years ago you could post up anything you wanted to your social applications and only expect your "friends" to see it, but now most of my online buddies are professional contacts. The good thing about my industry is that most of them are in the same boat as I am. We're all trying to figure out the balance while combining their personal and professional online presence into one. Everyone has to evaluate their own career path and their lifestyle and decide how much they can be publicly intertwine in a productive fashion.

Times are changing and i can't wait to see how this evolves social media and the workplace.

Site Launch

We've really been working hard on the development of this site over the past month. Its very complex with lots of AJAX and some tricky CSS performed by my awesome co-workers. Its still got a couple small bugs to work out, but it was a really great effort with a short dev timeline. I actually created this design at about 11 at night while i was in austin doing the Phizzpop challenge, and Ken did all of the mark-up in the middle of doing the mark-up for the red site that i mentioned in a previous post.

The client said this upon delivery yesterday:

• We just spent the morning going through the site & it looks great. In my experience, this is one of the best development efforts I’ve ever seen in translating the creative comps into reality – and you’ve done so in just one month. Thank you for going the extra mile & working extraordinarily hard at making Port 25 a great experience. I’m very much looking forward to pushing this out the door and seeing customer reaction to the upgrade. We have a vocal audience and I expect no shortage of reactions

Site Launch

A site that we did for the mothership (mic ro soft) (avoiding the search engines) launched today. it is for a charity headed up by Bono, and actually had to be personally approved by him.

We only had about a day and a half to design the site, and about a week and a half after that for approval, changes from the mic ro soft team, and from bono's team, and for mark-up and development. it was very rushed, pretty hectic and involved a lot of hours by a variety of people to get the job done. the site design that got pushed through is actually more of a collaboration between myself and my creative director, Sean. You can see one of my other comps that i was hoping would get picked here.

The final product looks pretty good, and we're proud to have been a part of it. its also kind of fun that the whole project is getting a lot of press by various sources including the new york times web site.

Two Point O'ed

I'm sure most of you reading this blog (assuming anyone is reading this blog) know what the term "Web 2.0" refers to. Basically it just refers to a breed of social networking and user driven sites, but it's also been associated with a trend of web design that we've all been submerged in for the past 2 years. I like to refer to these shiny, wet, reflective, star burst sites as being "Two Point O'ed", but we really should come up with a more deserving and appropriate name. Pictured here you can see a fine example of what i'm talking about. It's got most, if not all, of the key elements: plenty of shine, reflections, cyan, magenta, star burst emblem, networking badges, gradients, etc. Please, help me classify this trend in design so that we can engrave it into a shiny headstone and put it to rest.

Steve and I were introduced to a term while at FOWD that I love and quickly adopted: Flashterbation. It refers to the gratuitous use of flash animation that happened a few years back. It's so perfect, and fun. This shiny trend needs something just as suiting. Maybe it's already out there and I don't know about it, or maybe it just wasn't good enough for me to remember it... i dunno....

Graffiti

I've been telling a lot of people about Telligent's new product, Graffiti for a while now. Well, its finally out. A lot of people have been loading it up and seeing what its all about and i've heard a lot of good things about it. as soon as i get some free time I'll be redoing this site and building it on the Graffiti platform.

For those that don't know, Graffiti CMS is meant to be a really simple content publishing platform for individuals and small businesses. It's designed first and foremost to be simple. If you still don't know what I'm talking about, it's along the same lines as wordpress, but much more powerful.

Gotta give big props to Steve Ray for the design. I'm jealous that his first site to go live here at telligent/sound creative is so kick ass.

Phizzpop Design Challenge

Last week myself and two others from Telligent (Ken Hanson, markup master, and Kyle Beyer, backend genius and generally kick ass at attacking a challenging project with a good strategy) traveled to Austin to compete in Microsoft's Phizzpop Design Challenge.

The format of the competition makes for an interesting challenge. You get a day and a half of training on microsoft's new Expression Studio. at the end of the training on the second day (tuesday afternoon) they present the challenge that we have to design for and send you on your way for the next 2 and a half days to design and develop your solution and prepare a presentation to sell your idea to a panel of 3 judges. I think this format has potential, but there is one major flaw. The Expression Studio software is very new, and isn't even complete yet. I understand that this is a great way for microsoft to get some feedback and input on their new tools, but it makes for a very stressful, and sometimes disastrous 3 days of furiously paced work.

Microsoft had people on site to help us with the software through out the competition, but they could only help so much (big props go to Josh Holmes for his help and efforts). They were of great service to us and the other teams, but didn't seem to know much more than what we were able to figure out on our own. Adding to the software's downfalls were our own. We found out we were going to the competition about a week before hand, so we were looking at the expression studio software for the first time monday morning at the training. some of the teams obviously know quite a bit about the software already giving them a huge advantage, but obviously thats the nature of competition and its no ones fault but our own.

On the other hand, it has some really nice features as well. If Fireworks would adopt a few of the cool features and tools found in Blend i would be a happy man. They also have a very nice philosophy for work flow from designer to developer. I hope that this continues to evolve... adobe needs to take some notes.

Overall we had fun, created a really nice piece, and I got to work and get to know a couple of cool guys. We worked furiously with lots of heart and effort. Our 10am to 4am work days took a toll on us and by the time i got home on saturday i was basically sick from exhaustion. We didn't win (that honor went to thirteen23 and they deserved it), but I think we came up with a great, realistic solution. If we had been able to develop some more of our silverlight pieces and created a flashy presentation I think we would have had a real chance at winning. It was very dissapointing to not win, and i think it made it worse that they don't tell anyone what place you came in. There was no closure. No satisfaction. No tangible results to tell us how well we did.

I tried to keep a record of our design process, and you can see some of that in my flickr stream. The home page design is here and the interior pages along with some misc picts and things can be found here. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, feel free to post it up here or on my flickr account.

Oh, and did I mention that I had to present our project in front of a packed bar full of people? I haven't had to do anything like that in a loooong time. It went reasonably well though.

A Big No No

Do Not Resize My Browser Window When I Go To Your Site!

nothing pisses me off faster than my browser window suddenly jumping to full screen. not only is it rude to just go and change the way a user wants to browse your site, but its also very annoying trying to grab that little resize handle on the bottom right of the screen with the mac doc down there and all.

It might have been cool when everyone first figured out the little piece of java script to make that happen 5 or 6 years ago, but its NOT COOL ANYMORE! Knock it off!

Work Updates

We've been keeping pretty busy here at work, even though it seems i haven't had many exciting sites launch lately, but Telligent, our parent company, has had a lot of exciting things going on. We've been growing like crazy and picking up some really exciting accounts utilizing Community Server and we have some really exciting new products in the works that we're looking forward to getting our hands on.

One really big project that we landed recently was Myspace.com. Their forums are now powered by community server. The user base for the forums is over 70 million users and since they launched the new forums they've had 300,000 new posts by 20,000 unique users, and 9,000 threads have been "favorited". I think that really says something about the scalability and power that these guys have built into community server.

Another project that has recently launched is Global Grind. I did a lot of the initial user interface design, as well as the logo design for the site and the guys here did the behind the scenes wizardry to make it all possible. there is a lot of unique functionality in that site that is not apparent at first glance. Its hard to explain or imagine the amount of work that went into it.

Latest Project

One of our projects here at Sound Creative released a sneak preview of their site that i've been working on for the past month or two. We're all very excited about this one, and i'm really looking forward to seeing it go live. It's easily the best work i've ever done in my opinion, especially when you see the rest of the site. Check it out, but keep in mind that this is still just a mock up. I made up everything on that page, and the logo is still a work in progress.

the fold

I think i probably have this argument/discussion with clients on almost every project i work on: the fold, and what should be above it. For you non-designers, the "fold" is simply the point where information is no longer visible from your initial interaction with the website, newspaper or anything else that requires user action to see the rest of whats going on. Historically in web design everything was designed to cram all your information above the fold so that the user could see everything you needed them to see without scrolling down. Well, users no longer mind scrolling. They expect it and its become second nature, but clients still want you to cram everything in.

This is a great blog by Milissa Tarquini laying out and destroying the myths of the modern day fold in webdesign.

I'm Mashable

The site I've been working on for the past 10 months got a short review on Mashable today. kinda cool.

It hasn't been publicly launched yet, but they have set up a myspace page

Tellitern Rock-Off

We can't be the only office in town that has formal Guitar Hero Rock-Offs, can we?

The office is short on desks. We've hired new developers, and brought in a small army of interns (also known as telliterns) for the summer which has created a desk shortage. Basically, one of the interns is going to have to give up his proper desk for a rubbermaid fold out table. To decide who the unlucky intern was, they had to impress us with their showmanship in a Guitar Hero Rock-Off judged by our american idol impersonating panel of peers. Not a bad way to spend a friday afternoon at the office... too bad we were out of beer, and rotten fruit.

EDIT -- Ado just posted up the video on the telligent blog... Rock-Off

Oh, almost forgot, I found a fifty dollar bill in the parkinglot during! as soon as i got back to the office i heard that the Supersuckers were playing, so i decided to spend it on a concert ticket and booze. It was a great show. I was just telling someone the other day how i haven't seen a good show in a long time, so this was perfect. I've been wanting to see them for years, but always seem to miss their show (same goes for fumanchu). they didn't disappoint.

Paintball

On friday we had a team building outing at DFW Adventure Park in Roanoke. We all showed up at 10am in our various states of ready-ness for the day. some in full army fatigues, some in their hunting gear, and many others, like me, in t-shirt and jeans. The mood is mellow, and the faces look sleepy.

Now its time to get our gear together for the battles to come. you can feel the energy levels rise a little. We split up the 30-40 telligenti into 2 teams: team 0 and team 1 (dev. geeks.. haha), and head out for our first game.

Finally we are ready. Team 0 and team 1 line up on opposite ends of a 100 yard field scattered with huge wooden spools and various barricades. The refs give the signal and we're off. Suddenly these mild mannered developers are running, jumping, diving, yelling out enemy positions and plotting their demise. Paint is flying everywhere and the place literally sounds like a battle field, sans large explosions and airplanes. People are screaming in pain, others are laughing and some are just trying to catch their breath under their masks.

When our little 10 minute battle was over there was nothing but smiles and war stories. A little blood hear, some torn clothing there and even a painfull looking shot to the neck. This went on until we had exhausted ourselves at about 3pm. Dirty, sweaty and sore we packed it up and went home to heal our wounds and treat our soon to be discovered chigger bites. My count is 9 or 10 paintball bruises, and about 20-25 chigger bites. Some were much higher than that!

Today was our first day back at work since our little adventure and I haven't heard a single complaint about the day. I think it was a great success. I feel like i know my fellow telligenti better, and i hope they feel the same about me.

Big thanks to JasonA and Rob Howard for a kick ass day.

Apple.com

mmm... the new Apple site is nice. as my friend Steve put it "they just seem to do shit right"

damn straight.

HOW

The HOW Conference in Atlanta was amazing. I don't even know where to start. I met so many fun people, and learned so much in all my sessions... how do i even begin to write a blog about it without it becoming a 2000 word mess of stories and experiences?

The Conference

The speakers and conference as a whole were great. I got so many great ideas on how to keep the creativity going, tips on how to deal with clients, exercises to keep you fresh and much more. I took one session about drawing, and i decided to make it a habit to do at least one drawing a day. I might start a blog or flickr account to keep record of them (i am a nerd after all), but i haven't decided yet.

Congrats to the HOW staff for putting on a great conference. I've worked plenty of large events before, and i know what kind of work goes into a show like this.

The People

I've met so many kick ass people in the past few days. I can't think of a single person that i met that wasn't happy to stand around and shoot the shit. I think the experiences i had with the people i met were even better than the conference itself. off the top of my head i'd like to thank Sonya, John, Quyen and Trent from Southwest Airlines, Kelly from Richmond, Rebecca and Carmen from Ohio, Cassandra from Oregon, Luther and Hailey from Atlanta and the hundreds of other people that i met. I can only remember so many people from the blur of events this past week. Of course i gotta thank my co-workers Sean and Dana for making this a great trip.

Atlanta

I really wasn't expecting much from Atlanta, but it was really a cool place. It was a lot like Dallas, but seemed like it had more culture. Dallas has some culture, but its overrun with superficial crap. On tuesday we went to the Aquarium for the "Descenders Ball". it was a very nice aquarium equipped with the biggest sea life exhibit in the world. After they kicked us out of there we all took cabs over to the Star Bar in Little 5 Points for some fun. It was very interesting to see a club full of such a big mix of people. there was the bartender with tattoos and a foot long beard, there were black kids mingling and dancing, there were hipsters, rollers, movers and shakers. Dallas is much more segregated than that. everyone was very friendly, and one local girl grabbed me as i was walking by, wrapped her arms around me and started talking in my ear about how life is too short to drink cheap beer ($2 pabst baby!)... great night.

Before heading to the airport on wednesday we went to the Coca-Cola museum. we had planned to tour the CNN center, but i guess we changed our mind. It was a pretty neat place. I liked the art and architecture/design of the building more than most of the contents itself. oh! i almost forgot... the coke museum sends web pages to your phone. its kinda creepy. i was standing by the entrance of the Aquarium taking the picture you see here, and as soon as i took the pict i was sent info about the museum!

CS Theme Contest

Community Server has announced a theme design contest for the new Community Server 2007. you must design and implement your your new theme in order to enter it into the contest, and that can be done in two ways:

• 1. Best Theme Export – Use the new dynamic theming functionality in Community Server 2007 to build a new theme. Most important part of this track is that you must be able to import/export the theme using the control panel. All files, CSS, and changes much be embedded in the single xml file generated by Community Server. The second rule of this contest is the theme must be based on one of the two default site themes Community Server 2007 ships out of the box.
  
  2. Best Damn Theme You Can Create – Track 2 removes all the rules from Track 1. This theme can be based on one of the two we ship, it can be a custom theme from the ground up and anything in between. You are free to add/edit any inline code as well as include any kind of custom code you like. The only restriction is you can NOT change any of the core Community Server code. These themes must work with the out of the box Community Server 2007 download. You do NOT have to theme the control panel.

Judging will be based on creativity, originality and ease of setup. In other words, it still has to be easy to implement. i'm guessing that a bunch of hacks and trash code like mine won't impress any judges here. 1st place wins a MacBook, second scores an XBox360, and 3rd gets an amazon.com gift card.

The official contest announcement and rules can be found here. If you have any questions about it let me know.

BTW: i'm going to mess around with the new CS2007 a bit, so i might have another blog move soon. hopefully that'd be the last one for a while. i dont' have to many readers as it is, i'd hate to loose you guys just because i keep changing my URL.

telligent.com launched

We launched our new Telligent.com site last night. Telligent is the parent company of Sound Creative (which i work for), and everything else here including Six Fires, Community Server and Code Smith. The site came out really nice. I like it a lot. I didn't have any hand in its creation though.

Some of the highlights:

• A weekly (or more) blog on Telligent activities, thoughts on technology, creative, etc by the Leadership Team


• Some really great case studies (more coming soon!)


• A much more agile, and up-to-date look and feel


• A really cool image rotator on the home page to showcase some of our work

... and all built on Community Server of course!

Anchor Screen Printing

Steve and I designed and built a site for our good friends Slim and Oliver Peck at Anchor Screen Printing a year or two ago. It was a brutal amount of work getting all the images for the shirts together, but we got it done and its serving them well.

today steve pointed out that he saw it on the Daily Slurp.