Conscious Design

Crowdsourcing

Just read an interesting article on crowdsourcing. Surely, crowdsourcing is bad for design, but is it bad for the economy? I think that depends on who we are talking about…

Botoxed

I hope you enjoy the new design of this site. It features  phatfusion image navigation — powered by javascript and flash. Open Source!

Jodie Friend Fine Arts

Jodie’s new site is up and running. Check out her amazing art. Contact her or visit the Brown County Art Gallery to visit some of her recent work in person.

Revampage

Design tweakages are wandering about this site. I recently returned from An Event Apart in Chicago. It was an amazing conference, which exceeded my high expectations. Thus, in my highly inspired state, I am doing my best to expunge the design cobwebs on this site.

A New Yahoo!

This is, at the very least, a good PR move for Yahoo!. They have decided to rebuild their network from the inside out and rip down the walls between their services. With earnings slacking a bit and the constant pressure from Microsoft, they’ve done well in recent weeks — scrambling to keep their identity.

The Little Things

I’ve been through a lot of Wordpress upgrades to 2.5. Each time I notice something different. There are many promising little features.

Here are a few:

• a separate panel for managing tags and categories
• fancy media uploader
• auto plugin upgrades (my personal favorite)
• improved wp-config security
• a back button after editing a post
• drastic improvements in overall admin css by Happy Cog

Yahoo and Google Search

I love moves that are “designed to frustrate Microsoft.” This is terrific — even if it doesn’t amount to anything in the grand scheme of things.

Busy Times

We’ve been busy upgrading Wordpress versions. 2.5 has some terrific features and merges the style of Happy Cog with the meat and php of Wordpress.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of checking out Pictura Gallery and creating some slideshows for them. I’ll make sure to link to their site once it’s up and running.

2.5 RC1

2.5 is finally here. Well…almost. Wordpress has unveiled Release Candidate 1 for the 2.5 series. I am testing it on KOOP and WORDCHASM. The dashboard is a little bit slower, but the new features make up for that.

The only problem I’ve noticed thus far is a lack of cross-compatibility when it comes to browsers. I’m having more luck in Safari than with Firefox on the Mac. That is a rarity. The image uploader and html writer does quirky things in Firefox thus far…

Goodbye Netscape

You once were a proud browser — boasting some solid features. But, you weren’t well-maintained and you gave us all massive cyber-migraines. On March 1st we’ll say goodbye to a piece of the mid-nineties.