Please Stand By

As you can probably tell, Intellectual Poison is undergoing some changes presently. Things will probably look a little wacky for most of today until I can complete the upgrade to the new design. The nice thing is that, moving forward, site redesigns will be all easy-peasy!

But its this first move into the new Blogger in Draft custom template system that will require lots of micro-fixes and cutting and pasting.

I should bullet out a list of changes still pending but I've got so much work to get down right now (real work that someone else pays me to do so it moves ahead of blog redesign fun).

In the meantime, you are invited to peruse my photos from yesterday's Stage 3 of the Amgen Tour of California as it wound up down along West Cliff in Santa Cruz. We were able to get into town, get parked and find a great spot to enjoy the really impressive spectacle of a top road race featuring some of the world's best cyclists in one of the world's most beautiful settings. Sometimes I feel truly blessed to reside in an area as stunningly awesome as Santa Cruz. And it makes me want to relocate back into town much sooner rather than much later.

Why is Optimization So Hard?

I'm in the process of building a new website and am always in process on making this one better. Most recently I started trying to figure out how to best optimize Intellectual Poison for viewing on a mobile device.

And the information varies widely on the best way to do this. So I'll try one way, copy & paste in some code, republish the blog and see how it works. If it doesn't work, then I remove the code and start on another one. It is very time consuming and feels like a waste of time.

But I also feel like it won't be a waste of time once its done and once I've learned how to replicate the process on the new site under construction.

Anyone have a simple way to set up a website for tiny screens? Let me know about it in the comments.

What I've Learned by Looking at 80 Designer/Artist Sites

I've been doing some research in hiring an artist/graphic designer to create an image for me. I have the concept done and really just need someone with skills to take my idea and make it a reality. So I posted a short note on Craigslist in the Gigs section. Over the course of the rest of the day, I got more than 80 responses with the vast majority of them including links to online portfolios. Some included attached resumes and portfolios and some (the easiest to cull from the herd) asked for more information.

I wish it were feasible to respond to each of them but there really just isn't enough time in the day to do so. And I am slowly working through the thick stack of sites, deleting emails and proposals where I can, starring others to come back to when I like them.

Much like when I was part of the vetting process for the market research company, these emails are, effectively, job applications. And as such, first impressions count for everything. Given the volume of responses I got, any reason to remove one becomes a valid reason. Here’s the (growing) list of reasons I deleted three quarters of the responses.

Culling criteria:
• Requests for more info
• Misspelled link (page doesn’t load)
• Browser resize
• Autoplay music
• Overly obtuse navigation including window/tab spawning
• Artsy to the point of being annoying (light print on a lighter background is annoying)
• Animated and frenetic images (I don’t need a seizure, thxvm)
• Anything to do with MySpace
• Anything to do with FaceBook (I’m not signing up just to look at your work)
• Google Ads or other revenue ads
• Link to a large agency with large retainers
• More than four clicks to see your art
• Attached resumes without examples of art or clear link to art

What I’ve been left with is a solid group of high quality sites. Now my plan is to email them all with more particulars about the project and see what comes back from that.

In the meantime, we’re finalizing a domain for the new site that will be included in the design. I’m looking forward to this whole re-launch and, hopefully, converting it from a fun pastime into something of a moneymaker. Stay tuned.

Steve Jobs Hates Hoochie Nails

Women with long nails speak out against iPhone design because their chosen form of personal expression makes it hard for them to fully utilize the phone. Word on whether women with long nails have spoken out about other aspects of daily life that are made harder for them because they choose to keep long fingernails was not available.

One woman actually went so far as to call Apple misogynistic because they didn't design their phones to be usable by women with long nails. Which is, of course, totally insane.

If You Want To Believe...

Look through the photos and read the short blubs along with them at the International Herald Tribune's Socially Responsible Design. Just when I think that maybe humanity really has nothing but darkness and depravity in store for the future, something like this comes along and recharges my Faith-in-Humanity batteries at double speed as well as reminding just how ingenius we really are.

Particular favorites are #3, #4, #5, #7,#8 and #9. Did I mention that I really liked this?
via.