Geeze... Running out of time!

Quick post. I have to get to the airport... always rushed, I, guess. Anyway. One of the hardest things to design are redesigns. It is exciting to get the chance to make something look "better," but you never really know if what you are designing is better or if it is just your taste and you don't particularly like the taste of the other designer's work. I noticed that I get really excited to design anything wether it is a full page ad, a debit card, or a redesign website for school. I just like creating and I hope that I do not lose that excitment... Max says, "HI," and that we need to get to the airport. 3 year olds are sooooo intelligent. I believe I have an awesome idea for a chior site redesign. Scared it won't go over in class as well as it is in my head.

More posts to come that hopefully will be of some interest.

*Sigh*

Great News... Kinda.

Well, I got my car back... finally. Back to shifting. Totally stoked, but I'm back to not having a radio. So, I haven't listened to NPR in a long time. This means that I don't really have anything to write about. I'm plugging away trying to look for a new job and learning how to redesign websites. It's kinda hard, but very interesting. I think, "I can totally do better than that." Then when I'm "doing better than that" I think, "Crap, this isn't so easy." The good news is that anything I do HAS to be better than theirs! :) (No offense to the people that created them.) I really enjoy looking at other people's websites and trying to do what I think they have done but in a completely different way. This way, I can design in a different style and not be copying what other's have done and I can learn from it... If that makes sense.


I am getting sick and my head is cloudy. So, this is ridiculously short. I'll turn on NPR over the break and come up with an entry that'll blow your socks off... This statement was in no way intended to be taken literally and may or may not match the opinions of my co students, parents, or affiliates.

Thank you.

Bread Crumbs, Worked for Hanzel and Gretel, but Not for the Web

As usual, there I was driving on I-25 listening to NPR... You know, National Public Radio... Moving on, they had a story about how users leave bread crumbs every time they visit sites on the web. This gets used in marketing research to see what users are looking at and what they want so ads are created for certain pages to draw these customers in. Very complicated and sneaky stuff. Well, there are lots of users that don't want to leave bread crumbs. This is an invasion of privacy to some. Ask.com has created a way to search without leaving bread crumbs. This has users ecstatic, but advertisers not so much. The bread crumbs gave advertisers a great way to do marketing research and figure out their target market's browsing habits. I, personally, don't want people to know what I'm browsing for... not that I need to hide it or anything like that... Continuing to move on... Many users don't realize they are being watched. I didn't know until I heard the report on NPR. With more and more people learning about this, issues and protests are coming out. Maybe, advertisers will figure out how to do their research without the aid of bread crumbs and users will feel better knowing they are not being watched.

Good Will and the never ending need for more...

According to NPR, Good Will, which is a company whose purpose is to create jobs, but whose name is synonymous with clothing, has realized the power of vintage clothing. They have buyers who go out to other used clothes sellers and buy vintage clothing. Then they turn around and sell it on Ebay. A 1970s suit found by Good Will was sold on Ebay for over $100, but was purchased at under $12. Let's face it, vintage sells and so does Ebay. Good Will has discovered that they can draw untapped revenue from the internet. This not only includes auctions from such popular sites as Ebay, but it includes blogs. Yes, that's right. Good Will has a fashion blog on Blogger. I do not know the URL of this particular blog, but they keep it up to date. I find it interesting that a used goods store such as Good Will who usually sells to the less fortunate and the collector has a blog about fashion. That is really cool. My goal now is to create a blog that is actually useful and means something to me other than talking about what I heard on NPR, though I now notice so much about website and blog stories on NPR that I probably wouldn't really have thought about before. So, that's cool too.

I have been looking at domain names for my portfolio. I have come up with the name and a design that I am happy with, but I have had the unfortunate experience of discovering that my name has not only been taking by someone, but that that person doesn't design well. They are totally misusing my idea! My name for myself is driven by URL possibilities and not by what I think truly speaks to me. I want my URL to match my name. That's super important. So, I'm still looking... *sigh*