Fresh

I am so in love with this project from Bill Zeman: Tiny Art Director. It’s a blog that documents the paintings and drawings he does that are directed and critiqued by his daughter. It started when his daughter was two years old. She is four now, and a very opinionated art director!

Tomato Monster by Bill Zeman

There are a lot of dinosaurs. Be sure to check out “poo poo airplane” for a good laugh. It is also hilarious to see how many pieces he lists as “rejected.” Love, love, love it!

Via Owltastic

Now here’s an initiative that lends some heart and soul to the (oftentimes) silly seriousness of branding. Enter Save Your Logo. The basic gist is that the initiative “creates an opportunity for companies represented by a plant or animal in their logo to contribute to the conservation of that species.”

Wow – what a great idea that we can all get behind. As a matter of fact, Lacoste has already committed to conservation efforts related to crocodiles.

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I love books. I love design. I love me a good book cover!

“But I’m a web designer! What do I care?” you say. Well, so am I my friend!  Looking at media outside of the web is so crucial for inspiration for me, though. It gets me thinking outside the confines of my screen. For some reason, getting away from the media that you typically work with can really generate inspiration.

Book covers are also somewhat similar to the home page of a website. They have to communicate the essence of a story. They have to be captivating enough to grab someone’s attention enough so that they will read the whole story (or browse the entire site, if you will.) Sometimes there is a lot of information to convey, sometimes a little. You have to think about hierarchy. What is most important to communicate? Least?

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Often here on Fresh we bring you what we’re digging and what inspires us. We give ways to make what you create easier, ways to solve development issues creatively, and generally anything that we think you’d value. Sometimes we find problems that need to be solved that are staring us right in the face and we don’t even realize they exist.

After visiting An Event Apart this past month, I came face-to-face with one such situation. Have you ever wondered why sometimes when you create a website for a client, launch, then hand over the keys - things go haywire? All of a sudden the format is broken and the copy no longer makes sense, and all you’re left to do is shake your head and pray you took a screenshot before they took the reigns. Before you know it, the client is back at the drawing board wondering if they should’ve just changed that background color or moved things around on their home page a bit. Should we simply resign ourselves to blaming the client and moving on to the next project? I think not.

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WEB Visions, a conference in Portland about everything web starts tomorrow. As part of the conference are the 2nd annual  Webvisionary awards and celebrates fantastic work from categories from motion graphics to blogs. This year two projects from the eROI team have been nominated and have made it to the finals. Our team of web ninjas will be in attendance with cameras in hand hoping for yet another reason to continue drinking.

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Let me start off by saying that I had an AWESOME time while attending An Event Apart. From my first ever train ride to all of the food consumed to all of the conference sessions, it was an event worth attending. So many experts in the field presenting AND presenting in a manner that actually had entertaining moments (read: not boring). An Event Apart is a conference I will be happy to attend in the future.

That being said, my blog post about coding techniques learned at AEA will probably be the driest post to date. Here we go…

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Have you seen Brent Barson’s short film “F is for Fail: An Alphabetical Odyssey Through The Creative Process”? It’s featured over at Veer in the Ideas section. It has some lovely typography (Proxima Nova and Arno Pro), movement and color. It definitely features some words we can all relate to :)

Check out the film here.

via Design Crush

We’ve been hard at work lately (as demonstrated here by our lack of posting), so its good to know sometimes that all that hard work gets recognized out there in the wide world of webs. Now, this is not the place we would normally indulge in shameless self promotion, but we thought you all might see this worthy.

Just yesterday a link came through to the group here that eROI has a few nods in the category of email newsletters over on the site BEN (Beautiful Email Newsletters). The content here is user-generated, so its rad to see our stuff show up multiple times. There’s really some great work here to get the ideas a flowin’. Check it out!

There’s a lot of information out there on the interweb - information about you, your business, your competitors, your favorite products, your friends, your cat, your cat’s friends, etc. etc. RSS feeds allow us to subscribe to streams of information from certain sources or on certain topics, but oftentimes our feed readers fill up with irrelevant information that we have to parse through to get to the good stuff.

Using Yahoo Pipes you can get practically any kind of information on the web, strip out the stuff you don’t want, reformat it in a way that’s easier for you to digest, and spit it out in a shiny new RSS feed suitable for your reader or maybe even your info aggregation website!  Sounds super awesome and easy right?

AHH! What the hell is all THAT?  Save me! Take me back to my regular feeds and never show me that mess of blue boxes and squiggly lines again!

OK, yea, I know it looks intimidating and confusing, but really, it’s not that bad.  If you start fresh and take things one step at a time you’ll be Piping up a storm in no time.

Meet Dawn Foster (fastwonderblog.com, Twitter: @geekygirldawn), RSS wrangler extraordinaire (among other things).  She has a full library of example Pipes and tutorial videos to get you started.  And if that’s not enough, she has just announced her first Introduction to Yahoo Pipes training course.  Here’s all the info you need:

What: Introduction to Yahoo Pipes

When: Thursday, May 7th, 3PM - 5PM

Where: Webtrends Classroom (851 SW 6th Ave, Suite 1600 | Portland, OR 97204)

How Much: Students/Freelancers/Unemployed: $100.  Early bird (before April 23): $150.  Late registration (after April 23): $250.

Prerequisites: You just need to set up your Yahoo Pipes account prior to the class (don’t worry, it’s free!).  If you have a Yahoo account already (and you do if you use Flickr), just go to pipes.yahoo.com and log in using your Yahoo credentials.  If you don’t already have a Yahoo account, go ahead and get one here.

Even if you already know a bit of Pipes, I have a feeling this would be a great class to get to know some of the more advanced features.  I know that I could personally use some tips and tricks from a power user.

One of the reasons I love web design is because there is so much opportunity to pull knowledge and inspiration from other disciplines. The SXSW panel “Playing on! Interface Lessons from Games” let me do that, and it dealt with video games, which are just fun. The general idea of the panel was:

“We know we will have succeeded when non-game interactions provide the same level of emotion, feedback, progress indication, innovative controls and social involvement that games supply.”

The points that really resonated with me the most were their discussion of “progress indication” and “social involvement” and how those apply to the work we do in web design.

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