I’ve had this idea of ‘thinking in pencil’ for a long time. The notion that one’s thoughts, opinions and ideas can shift and grow based on the information at hand, on any given day, at any given moment. Every new experience, sight and sound informs you as a person, an artist and as a designer. That commitment to exploration and the ability to admit and even embrace being wrong is one of the aspects of my own personality that I strive to improve every day. It makes me a better designer, a better manager, a better partner to clients - and a better person.
I try to focus on things relevant to web professionals, designers and other creative thinkers. Not always a successful endeavor, but variation keeps things interesting at least.
[these are tailored to the Media Temple (dv) environment, but are pretty portable to other Linux/CentOS systems]
Basics of the issue are covered in this support article here:
http://kb.parallels.com/en/432
Basically, you need to look in the root directory for your site (where the httpdocs folder is living)
First thing is to connect via SSH and move to that root directory. Usually:
I’m happy to see that the video of my talk last summer on Web Strategy at the Design for Drupal camp. I already posted my presentation previously, but wanted to include the video here as well.
I’ve had the honor recently of being asked to moderate discussion of REWORK by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (of 37signals) on the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF Book Group. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and as with other of their writings, take much of it to heart.
Wow. It’s one year ago today that I left my job at an agency here in Providence to start working on my own again, and I woke up this morning to an email from Cat at Carsonified letting me know that my talk has been accepted for the Future of Web Design conference in NYC next month (writing up my bio and overview for the conf. site now!). That’s a hell of a way to start a Wednesday.
It’s hard to single out one high point from the myriad during the first day - but it’s worth pointing out that in a day packed with luminaries from Fast Company, Zappos, RISD and more - the standing ovations were reserved for two young women - one in high school, one in middle.
We recently had an issue where status messages would ‘pile up’ and fail to clear until you logged out and back in again. We found different possible causes listed but couldn’t work out the root of it until we saw this:
https://drupal.org/node/623028
which led to this:
Recently the topic of complicated versus complex has come up both in relation to a book group discussion I was leading on REWORK and also with an online Twitter-based chat I was moderating on innovation. It’s pretty central to everything I’ve learned, experienced and thought about with regard to design, so it seemed worth it to capture it here.
Just launched a new site for a series of Providence Drupal Meetups that I've been putting together with Chris Murray. I decided that we should use this as an opportunity to show where things are going, so I built it in Drupal 7 alpha 4.
I just spent the past 3 days in San Francisco for DrupalCon, and after such an intense immersion it does warrant some reflection. What better time than 6 hours on a plane, right? John Mayer playing on my iPhone doesn’t hurt either. There are many standout memories of the past 72 hours (almost to the minute since I landed in SFO Sunday night), but some stand taller. I’ve always been a William Gibson fan, and Tim O’Reilly quoted him well in his keynote yesterday: