Brightwash

Boosh and Chelsea – two favorites together! I must have missed this during my relocation.

Warhound – Winston’s owner reviews Inglorious Basterds. I saw this last weekend and enjoyed it very much, it was tense and funny. Bonjourno!

Lake Disappointment – Seriously?? I want a vacation home here.

Has Drupal peaked? – I hope not, but Claudio makes some very valid points. I’m not all up in Drupal daily anymore, but I still think Drupal is a good choice if you:

• have a large site
• are in need of complex menu hierarchy
• have a consistent design
• are in need of expandability
• have many users or editors
• and many other uses I am sure!

As a designer, I find it to be overkill for a blog or a small site.

Losing my Religion – “More meta than meat.” Chris Messina writes about design issues in open source.

When it comes to open source and design, design — and human factors, more generally — cannot play second fiddle to engineering. But far too often it seems that that’s the case.

And it shouldn’t be.

More often there should be a design dictator that enters into a situation, takes stock of the set of problems that people (read: end users) are facing, and then addresses them through observation, skill, intuition, and drive. You can evaluate their output with surveys, heuristics, and user studies, but without their vision, execution, and insane devotion to see through making it happen, you’ll never see shit get done right.

Fever – An alternate google reader for nerds. Looks very smart. I hope to try this out.

LOL Grey Gardens – Courtesy of Jezebel. Pictures of the house when Little Edie sold it (bonus captions!)

Muxtape – is back! For now it is only for artists, and they’ve created this awesome 3 x endless grid of squares. Love layout limitations, people do much more interesting things when they have few options!

Susan Year Itch – Susan’s renamed movie blog. I helped make this!

Paul Gilbert – this is a guitarist Mike likes. He insisted his site was bad/crazy in a good way and it is. A tangled awesome web of pages. Real funny – see Sentences.

Last week I found this really great online portfolio publisher called Cargo Collective. They provide hosting, an admin interface and just the right amount of options.

The layout choices offered are minimal, well structured and put the focus squarely on the work and they also allow you to edit the CSS! What is great about this is it can work for a variety of people – designers, photographers, writers, fashion designers, etc. If you have a domain name you can point it to your cargo site. Cargo is currently in beta, so you have to e-mail and request an account, but I think it’s pretty open (they got back to me same day.)

Cargo evolved out of the system that runs the SpaceCollective community. We found it remarkably successful and efficient in creating visual content on the web, placing a strong emphasis on design, layout, image quality and typography. Our goal is to dramatically increase the accessibility and exposure of creative individuals on the Internet, while aspiring to build a networked context that will contribute to the culture as a whole.

Some links: Cargo Spotlight, Cookie, But it Does Float, Nate Says Hello
& MY new Cargo site.

Maggie at the Hot Lava show on Thursday

Here are some nice design/web making websites:

Well Medicated - Very pretty design resource blog. Lots of vintage art/poster/ad archives. See his post on Criterion Covers!

Nice Web Type - A combination of screenshots and article links all having to do with good web typography.

Lightbox Clones Matrix – A breakdown of all the javascript lightbox options available to you and which libraries they work with. Very helpful!

Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement

ALSO, having nothing to do with design:
I am Throwing your Life Away! - Stories of a garbage man and his finds (good and bad).

I got to spend most of last week at DrupalCon in DC (thanks Chad & 3 Waves!) I’ve come home with a seemingly endless pile of links, modules and techniques I want to try out – and a splitting headache… overload! We’ve been using Drupal at work to build content managed sites (CMS’s), and it’s been awesome as designers to have access to the wide range of things Drupal can do with not much programming knowledge required. Drupal is open source and has a huge community supporting it, very impressive to see that community in person!

My background is in print design and I have only been doing web design for a year now. I really enjoy creating for the web and I like how the web is so much more accessible than say a print piece you have to track down that then gets outdated. I’ve picked up CSS and javascript (well jQuery, heh!) the same way I did Drupal – from online resources/tutorials as problems and needs arise (I think that’s how it is for most web designers?). Figuring things out as I go…

I’m hoping to get good enough at theming and working with Drupal to contribute back and help make it beautiful out of the box and easier for other designers to work with.

DrupalCon DC 2009 Videos

Some interesting Sessions:
The State of Drupal (Keynote) - Dries Buytaert
Our Online Identity (Keynote) – Chris Messina
How Do Drupal, Joomla & WordPress Stack Up – Hagen Graf and Christine Graf
Building Advanced Social Networks at a Large U.S. University - Kyle Mathews
Mystery Showcase Site: Higher Education/Museum - Palantir
Why I hate Drupal – James Walker
Building a Frankenstein Monster and How to Maintain it - Morten

Also, I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying – and I’m glad I never liked it anyway!

I just found out we (my work) get to go to DrupalCon DC in March! Drupal is an open source content management system. I’m fairly new to all this (web design), but imagine WordPress + neverending possibilities. With Drupal you could build a regular website, a blog, an online store, a message board, a community site, a magazine, social networking, or ANYTHING really. Drupal itself is free and opensource, and extra functionality is added by modules, all created and supported by the community. We’ve already built a few sites with it, including an online grocery store – I am looking forward to learning how to do more. This sounds dry but it is fun I swear.

Learning curve: Drupal may be powerful, but it is also complex. The key is overcoming its steep initial learning curve. Most casual users are willing to sacrifice features for ease of use making Drupal less popular than more user-friendly CMSs despite its enhanced functionality.

It took me 6 months to come around and admit I like Drupal. Here are some gorgeous Drupal sites.

Bob Dylan
Human Rights Watch
Italian Space Agency (nice use of purple!)
Warner Brothers Records
Harvard Science &
DrupalCon DC Website!