BarCampBirmingham2 is coming up this weekend. It’s a gathering of tech-minded folk in town — from their wiki, “BarCampBirmingham is a user generated conference created around an open, participatory workshop-event, with content provided by participants. Those participating choose the session topics for the day and then present to each other. It’s free. It’s fun. It’s a great way to meet the local technology community.” — and for some reason I’ve decided to head a session on design for New Media (i.e., the Internet).
Not that I don’t know what I’m talking about - except, it’s one thing to be at the top of the game in a world filled with people that can barely check their email, and another all together to feel comfortable in a room filled with people that do this sort of thing every day, for a living (or worse, spend every waking minute thinking about information systems or programming or whatever their devouring passion is).
My biggest problem in doing web design is that — compared to everyone else in the field — I’m scattered. I’m not a techie, as much as the programmers and security guys and the engineers are, and I’m not a designer with a natural eye for graphics and layout and the like. I’m somewhere in-between, the classic ambidextrous divide, equal parts right- and left-brain. I’m trying really hard to convince myself that this is a strength — there aren’t too many people with strengths in both areas — but it keeps coming back in my mind that it’s a weakness.
I’m guessing most Jack-of-all-trades probably struggle with this.
I’ve thought about designing for the Internet a lot — touched on it once here, in fact — but I can’t manage to unscatter (I guess the actual term I’m looking for is “organize”) my thoughts. I don’t want to come screaming in with a list of problems and no solutions, but in the forefront of my brain that’s what I’ve got.
Any of you reading that do work with websites, or even read them — any thoughts or suggestions?
BarCampBirmingham2
April 12th, 9 AM to 3 PM
Innovation Depot, 1500 1st Avenue North, Birmingham, AL / Google Map
Cynthia’s a bellydancer (and infinitely better — inherently so, from what I’ve seen — than she’ll ever let on). This makes all the guys at the bar delirious with envy, of course, because everyone knows that bellydancers are incredibly hot (true, at least for my wife, one of her friends, and two ofthe women in the instructional DVDs she owns), flexible (also true), and open to trying new and crazy things (not anymore true than for any other group, sadly).
The mind positively boggles. I watch this, and I feel like either I’m living in 1993 and didn’t realize it, or that there’s a Los Angeles, Iowa (population: 11) responsible for this.
If I don’t get laid, it’s the woman’s loss, not mine. It’s all women’s loss. What the fuck else are they going to talk about during Ladies Night? Their hopes and dreams? Isn’t that the same thing?
Oh, and there are top ten lists, too:
Whether or not you believe in Jesus, there is one fact you can’t argue with: he was a man. No religion anywhere has ever put a woman in charge of shit. That’s called dogma — man-dogma — and it means men are better than women.
I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I’m laughing or taking this seriously today (here’s a hint: don’t bother reading through any of the comments; men and women take themselves waaay too seriously).
Yes, I know his name is R. Lee Ermey. And if you imply otherwise, I’ll beat you to death with nothing more than a used newspaper and your own cirrhotic liver. Removing my watch first, I assure you.
There are bookstores — I’ve been in them — that are treasure troves crossed with nightmares. You never know what you might find, but that’s primarily because you have no idea where to start looking — and gods help you if you are in search of something specific. There are boxes everywhere, on and under shelves that sag threateningly under the weight of piles of who-knows-what. Card tables are set up haphazardly, forming makeshift aisles. The walls of the maze are made up of even more books, magazines, and VHS tapes that probably have some vintage porn recorded on them.
As my work with third party web designers has expanded over the past few months (prior to now, I did the design work — along with the development — whereas now I’m primarily working to implement other people’s designs into a content management system), I’ve started seeing more and more one of the primary downfalls of the web as a medium to date. More and more, I’m coming to realize that designers (by and large) are either trained and trapped completely in a static medium (print, by and large) or — hopefully not the case — utterly incapable of thinking in dynamic terms.
A few years back, with the advent of peer-to-peer networks, it began: the paradigm shift of the entertainment business. The ability to digitize (and, with a high-speed network, share) music, movies, books, and TV shows has drastically affected (or not, depending on whose data and statistical analyses you choose to believe) the financial end of artists, management, and studios producing these forms of entertainment (and others).
