Ready, aim, FIRE! Consider yourself formally invited to the launch of my new website www.triggersandsparks.com!
The new year is fast approaching, and Triggers & Sparks will be meeting it fresh-faced and bright-eyed.
A complete redesign of the old website was long overdue and now it’s time to lay my beloved, but clunky, Ruby on Rails site to rest and move on to a faster, cleaner, more user friendly website. It’s been three years since I designed my old website, and I’ve learned a great deal in that time, so it’s about time I had a website to represent as much!
In keeping with the whole, “out with the old, in with the new” theme going on, and to celebrate the launch of triggersandsparks.com, I am offering 15% off any of my services purchased between today and January 1st.
The times, they are a-changin’ here at Triggers & Sparks, and some fabulous top secret projects are in the works for the coming year. Get your orders in now and have yours be one of them!
Keep up with promotions and news by signing up for the Triggers & Sparks mailing list, or following me on Twitter, or joining my Facebook fan page, or subscribing to my (new!) RSS feed.
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Thank you to everyone who responded to my hiring notice; I’ve selected a candidate and am looking forward to being able to tackle new projects in the very near future, including the much-anticipated (by myself) and much-required overhaul of my website. More details to come soon!
I received an absolutely phenomenal response, and was able to meet with a number of really fantastic people. (I wish I could have hired everyone!) That said, it was interesting being on the other side of the hiring process, and I think if I’m ever in the position of applying for a job again, I’d do things a little differently as a result.
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Tags: business, industry, jobs
Posted in diatribes, misc | No Comments »
So, having noticed it’s been nearly six months since I last updated my website, I think it’s about time I took the plunge and hired someone to help me keep this business running better. I’ve considered this a number of times in the past, but my general inability to relinquish control, of anything, to anyone, has always prevented me from going through with it. Time’s come to grow up, ditch the narcissism, and realize that I’m not the second coming, and I need some help from time to time.
That said! Here’s what I’m looking for. (continue »)
Tags: business, jobs
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About 95% of the work I do tends fall into the “logos and websites” category, but every now and again I’m given the opportunity to work on something a little different. One of my favourite “little different something” is the resume. I’ve designed a number of them, and I always enjoy them. They’re challenging from an information hierarchy point of view, and people really notice them. I’ve heard all kinds of comments, in part I think because people are so used to seeing the same boring MS Word templates. Julie Smith is a Toronto lawyer whose resume I recently designed. She sent her resume out to two different companies one day, and was given an interview on the second. Later, she passed along this comment from a headhunter:
Your resume looks fantastic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!
So, if you find yourself facing unemployment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to ruminate on the current economic climate in whatever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.
Tags: design, information, interview, logos, websites
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I seem to go through phases of rapid development, followed by periods of stasis. I just realized, after having worked 35 hours in the past 3 days, that I’m in a “rapid development” phase. Or I’m just working so much that I can’t help but pick up things faster.
Anyway, new projects!
Tags: business, design, projects
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I don’t believe in showing up early for a party (after all, it’s important to make an entrance). In a business context, this probably isn’t the best thing in the world, and in an internet context, it’s even less so. For instance, I just recently started making use of Twitter. I honestly didn’t get what the big idea was. Then I started using it.
It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the newspapers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elevator. If you complain about a product, its manufacturers will help you out. But most fascinating are the conversations: it’s like what I imagine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a comment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of conversation begin spidering off in different tangents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dominates because every response is limited to 140 characters. It’s the digital representation of the collective unconsciousness. And it’s searchable!
Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is changing our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of information that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more credible experts than I.
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Tags: business, how-to, information, resources, SEO, social media
Posted in resources | 4 Comments »
I’ve had the craziest last-little-while: personally, professionally, otherwise. I took my first vacation in years and disappeared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suitcases and backpacks and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing simultaneously, and just what I needed to return to my life & business with a clean brain & slate.
I have many stories and photographs, which are forthcoming. For now, two new projects: the holiday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rearchitecturing of Fernwood Publishing.
Tags: books, design, life, projects, websites
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The Good: Digsby is gorgeous. I love the gigantic fluorescent “download” bar that gets OS-specific after you click on it. I love their coming soon page, too, although I might have preferred to find an actual download.
The Bad: No more Digby. I’m trying hard not to think about it because it makes me sad. Why aren’t there more beautiful & clever, highly saturated things around? (I am happiest in technicolour). I don’t understand why “reality” is so interesting. There’s enough reality right outside my door; I’d rather the fantasy when I’m looking to get out of my head.
and the Ridiculous: Minggl thinks “b3k 4w5″ isn’t a valid postal code. It took me three tries to figure out they wanted me to capitalize it. Seriously? Canada Post will deliver my mail if I forget the majority of the address and scrawl it upside down with a six-inch-wide marker, but some web app that isn’t ever going to send me mail can’t validate a lowercase postal code?
Also, why are all web apps named by dyslexic five year olds now? I miss real words.
Tags: colour, life, pretty website, style, trends, websites
Posted in diatribes, misc | 1 Comment »
…but apparently I’m not. I’ve actually had “update website” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actually been upgraded to “update website PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to suspect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails powered site to a customized Wordpress site, which could easily handle everything my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that manually editing database fields isn’t easy).
I’ve been using Wordpress for everything lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really understand the point entirely) due to my general distaste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t possibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d discovered the power and flexibility of Wordpress earlier on—it’s brilliant and I’m beginning to use it for more and more of my client projects.
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Tags: business, design, logos, projects, trends, websites
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I’ve been doing some work with email newsletters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a challenge, given how email is even less reliable at properly interpreting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Seriously, one of these days, all these companies will get together and start implementing code consistently, across the board, and web designers across the world will suddenly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Companies like the fabulous BrowserCam will go out of business. Why is so much of our economy built on busy-work? Screw the unemployment rate, I want efficiency!)
Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:
- Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
- Outlook 2007 will make things look ugliest. Apparently, this is because it uses the MS Word rendering engine. Now, seriously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design anything in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, however, provide this handy little “validator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Outlook. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!
On a vaguely related, but mostly unrelated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been directly involved in doing design work for a campaign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the election than I usually am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Libertarian, if you can! Efficiency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)
Tags: business, css, design, email, politics, resources, typography, websites
Posted in design, diatribes, resources | No Comments »
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