My Life

Phototuts+ is running a contest this week called “The ‘Memories’ Photography Project,” and they’re giving away a Canon EOS 550D camera to the winner! You can read all of the contest details on their site but the short version is:

Upload up to three pictures that represent “memories” to you. Include 150-350 words describing each photo. Afterwards they’ll post the entries for people to vote on.

Here are my entries and the accompanying copy I wrote for each one. I don’t know how the photos will be presented so I had to write each description so that it could stand on its own. That means there is some redundant copy. Sorry about that.

Superhero Ash

This is my first and only son, Ashton, a few months after he turned two. Every photo of him represents a memory I cherish. This was the first day of summer. Not the official first day of summer, but the first day the pool was open, which everybody knows is the real first day of summer. He put his goggles on at home long before we went to the pool and refused to take them off.

This is superhero Ash.

I’m not a professional photographer. I’m not even an amateur photographer. I’m a neophyte. I don’t own a great camera. I own a cheap point-and-shoot. Having a real camera would mean a lot to me, not the least because it would help me capture more memories like this.

Note: I removed the bird poop from the submitted version.

This is my first and only son, Ashton, when he was about a year-and-a-half old. On a typical sunny afternoon at the park I was lucky enough to capture this shot of him and he was exploring a playscape. I love the inquisitive look in his eyes. That’s something he hasn’t lost with age.

Every photo of him represents a memory I cherish.

I’m not a professional photographer. I’m not even an amateur photographer. I’m a neophyte. I don’t own a great camera. I own a cheap point-and-shoot. Having a real camera would mean a lot to me, not the least because it would help me capture more memories like this.

Photographer: Ashton Clussman

Don’t dismiss this photo! Read this description first.

This is something that I think will be unique in the competition. When my wife and I bought a new point-and-shoot camera last year, we gave our old, 4MP digital camera to our son, Ashton.

He was two years old when he built and photographed this block of Legos completely on his own. He had already learned how to turn the camera on and off, zoom in and out, move close in or back away from his subject. He can switch the display on the camera to preview his pictures and he can even hook the camera up to the computer.

This picture represents a memory that he cherishes.

He has a natural talent and taking pictures is something he loves to do. I want to nurture that love. Winning this competition would mean the world to both of us.

I’ll post again when voting opens up!

I have a lot of books I want to read.

I always have a lot of books I want to read. But I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret: I tend to buy them and not read them. I want to. I just don’t. It’s for a variety of reasons: I have a toddler, I work at a startup, I have personal goals to achieve in those rare moments that I have time to myself, and the list goes on.

A side effect of this is that my summer reading list involves a lot of books that I already own, including: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler, Online Marketing Inside Out by Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley, and The Principles of Project Management by Meri Williams.

In the category of books I don’t already have languishing on a bookshelf or nightstand: Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way by Bruce Campbell (I’m a fanboy), On Writing Well, 25th Anniversary: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Knowlton, Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness by John Layman (okay, seriously, I’m a fanboy—don’t judge me), Website Owner’s Manual by Paul Boag, and Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (yes, I know, it’s embarrassing that I never read this). I’m also considering Rework by the 37signal guys.

This post is my first Weekend Assignment. If you’re really interested in writing but the blank page is staring back at you menacingly, the Weekend Assignment might be just the thing you need. Ever weekend they put out a new topic for you to write about. Working within the constraints of their assignment makes that blank page much more manageable.

This week’s assignment comes with extra credit:

Extra Credit: Okay writers, get to work! Write me the opening paragraph, just (1) paragraph of a summer read you would like write yourself. Again, any genre works fine, have fun with it!

So here goes:

When John woke up he had a splitting headache. He had been drinking again the night before. So much for AA. His sponsor wouldn’t be very happy with him. It was the third time in as many months that he had fallen off the wagon. Where was he? A seedy hotel room somewhere. A pack of cigarettes was lying on the dilapidated nightstand next to him. He reached for the cigarettes and that’s when he noticed the girl’s body lying in a pool of blood. He was going to need another drink.

I really wanted to launch my new design before SXSW but life, job and sleep conspired against me. Now I’m at SXSW and I can’t get VMWare to recognize my local OSX web server. So… I’m just going to put the new design up there and debug it live. How exciting! If things look fucked up. This is why. Please bear with me.

I’m redesigning my site. If you’ve been around here at all, you’re probably thinking “but Chat, you just did that in December!” Well, yes, I did. But that was more of a triage. Taking a broken website and fixing it so that it had the bare minimum usability.

One thing I’m very proud of with the triage design: total images for the entire site (not counting any images I add for specific posts, like this one) are about 3.7kb. You read that right. 3.7 kilobytes. Not 370 kilobytes. Not 37 kilobytes. 3.7.

The new design will be a bit heavier than that, but I’m going to try to stay true to the principles of lean and mean. I’ve spent months trying to come up with a design that reflects me. Months before the redesign I was trying to create a new design. One road I went down was a three dimensional wall look. Another had me trying to creative an illustrated look. That second one definitely isn’t me but I wanted to grow who I was as a designer.

I’ll keep working on the growth thing but, in the meantime, the new site I’m designing represents who I am right now. And that’s a minimalist designer with a love of iconography and type. I’m including a mockup of the new homepage here.

Mockup of new homepage

After trying to come up with something for six months, when I finally let go I designed the new homepage in two hours.

I’m getting more excited about SXSWi with each passing day. My wife pointed out to me yesterday that I’m now counting it down in days rather than weeks. We’re under two weeks now so I’m going to defend my geekness. Daily feels right. T-minus 12 days and counting…if you’re wondering.

Twitter is starting to swell towards critical SXSW mass. I’m clearly not the only geek who is having a hard time focusing on anything else. I’m also not the only geek who misses ye olden days of “south-by” when it was just us geeks. I work in a marketing department. I’ve worked in an ad agency. But I wish the marketers would have stayed away.

The hype, the spiels, the venture capitalists, the wannabe venture capitalists, the wannabe entrepreneurs (real ones are okay), the new celebrity culture… You’ll here a lot of this from folks like me over the next few weeks but the festival just isn’t what it used to be. Everybody has something to hawk now. Everyone has something to sell.

The geeks will still be there—I’ll be there—but it’ll be a little bit harder to find them in the crowds this time. Just like it was a little bit harder last time. There are a lot of great apps to help people organize though and the panels you pick offer their own kind of organization. There probably aren’t that many marketing types sitting in on JavaScript sessions. So there’s hope!

Browsing through Twitter this morning, here are few SXSWi quick hits to help with your organization:

• The SXSW Interactive Mobile Thriving Guide (iPhone)
  Want to ditch the laptop this year? The IMTG offers advice and a collection of iPhone apps to help you.

• South By Texas State
  The tagline for the site is “New Media Students Chronicle SXSWi 2010″, which looks to be a fairly accurate description of what they’re doing. So far they’ve written up various top five lists and several individual panel previews.

• SXSW 2010 Guide: Balancing Film and Interactive
  If you only have a Film badge or an Interactive badge but want to be more involved in the other part of the festival, these guys did the legwork for you and found out which events of the other track you can cross over to participate in.

As it turns out, when I actually looked at the film panels, I found a lot of stuff I’d like to see. My company pays for my interactive badge but I’m considering paying to upgrade to a gold badge. And not just so I can go to the premiere of Kick Ass. Not just for that reason. There’s also the panels.

My wife and I are both fascinated by title sequences. They can be amazing works of art in their own right. This year there are least two film panels entirely devoted to them.

I most likely won’t pony up the $200 though. We’re trying to be good and save, to the point where I’m even considering putting off purchasing an iPad for a few months. (My wife was duly shocked by this pronouncement.) Then again, it’s only $200…

I’m doing something a little different and self-serving today. I’m posting the list of SXSW Interactive panels that I’ve bookmarked for consideration. I’m kind of all over the map this year. I knew going in that I would be interested in all things iPhone and iPad this year. I have ideas for two different apps I want to build.

I surprisingly found myself bookmarking lifehacking sessions. Things like improving my memory, using social media to live cheaply, and building your dream life.

I’m also apparently still very interested in improving my design process and how I manage and work with project owners. And I apparently I want to become a professional blogger, except that I don’t, so those panels might get the axe. In theory I really like publishing content. In reality it’s damn hard work.

As usual some timeslots have half-a-dozen panels I’m interested in while others have none or maybe one.

Are you going to SXSWi? What panels are you going to?

Friday, March 12th

TBA

• How We Built the SXSW Mobile App
• iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators

2:00 PM

• Beauty in Web Design
• Social Media Marketing for Your Business
• The Broke Diaries: Using Blogs And Twitter To Live Cheaply

3:30 PM

• Battledecks 2010
• Jacks of All Trades or Masters of One?
• Making Genuine Connections: Putting Passion Over Process
• Memory Matters! How Do Elephants Do It?

5:00 PM

• Networking at a Multi-Day Conference
• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• Simple Steps to Great Web Design

Saturday, March 13th

9:30 AM

• Add Some XBOX to Your UX
• Pain Free Design Signoff
• Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

11:00 AM

• Building A Bulletproof Personal-Finance System
• CMS Admin. UX Gateway to Heaven or Hell
• Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom

11:40 AM

• Web Evolution: The Rise of Mobile, APIs and Runtimes

12:30 PM

• Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas
• Designing the First Fifteen Minutes
• Shameless Self Promotion Without Looking Like an @#$%^&!
• The Right Way to Wireframe, Part 2

12:50 PM

• iPhone Application Development: Myths and Facts

02:00 PM

• CSS Framework Shootout

3:30 PM

• BBC Digital Planet Live at SXSW
• CSS3 Design with HTML5
• From Blogger to Social Media Guru to Professional Speaker
• Is WordPress Killing Web Design
• That Game Feels Nice: Tomorrow’s Touch Interfaces
• Ze Frank Conversation: The Creative Lifestyle

5:00 PM

• CSS and Fonts: Fluid Web Typography
• Keeping Sane While Working From Home
• The Ten Commandments of User Experience

Sunday, March 14th

11:00 AM

• Accessible JavaScript Techniques
• Extending Your Brand? There’s an App for That
• Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play
• Why You Aren’t Done Yet

12:30 PM

• Anything But Typical: Learning to Love JavaScript Prototypes
• Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps
• Cross Device Accessibility: Is This For Real?
• Ditch the Old to Build Your Dream Life

2:00 PM

• HTML5 Accessibility
• Your Design Process is Killing You

3:30 PM

• HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches
• Turn Your Idea Into a Business Leveraging Interactive

5:00 PM

• Wow, That’s Cool… Fun With HTML5 Video

Monday, March 15th

9:30 AM

• ANYONE Can Create a Video Game!
• The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions

11:00 AM

• R.I.P. Content Management System
• Scoring a Tech Book Deal
• What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work

12:30 PM

• ExpressionEngine 2.0: Total Domination!
• Make Me A Damn Good Manager!
• Slow Twitter: Users Who Take Their Time Tweeting

2:00 PM

• Evan Williams Keynote Interview
• Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Interfaces for Delight and Usability

3:30 PM

• Beyond the Desktop
• Choosing Offline Activities in a Time-Deprived Lifestyle
• Forging Your Ideal Career
• Mobile Development with the Flash Platform: iPhone and More
• Visual Note-Taking 101

5:00 PM

• Hold the Cocoa: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Visual Problem Solving: 5 Diagrams in 15 Minutes

Tuesday, March 16th

9:30 AM

• Design for the Dark Side
• Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe

11:00 AM

• Effective Dashboard Design: Why Your Baby Is Ugly

12:30 PM

• Balance is Bullshit
• Getting Better: The Designer’s Path From Good To Great
• Love AND Money: Can Fansites Pay the Bills?

3:30 PM

• Can Web 2.0 Kill the Real Estate Industry?
• Interactive Infographics
• Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design

5:00 PM

• Brilliant Second Acts You Must Steal Tricks From
• Bruce Sterling Presentation

If you’re going to SXSW Interactive and you have an iPhone, you should grab download this years apps. There are two of them: my.SXSW for browsing the conference schedule and building a schedule and SXSW Play for discovering music and film media.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I haven’t blogged more in the past and what I should be blogging about now that I’ve made a commitment to do so.

It wasn’t for a lack of things to say and I can’t even blame it entirely on a lack of time. The biggest reason why I didn’t blog because I didn’t know what my niche was. There are better visual designers than me. There are certainly better programmers than me. There are better copywriters, marketers, search engine optimizers, and small business owners.

But there are very few people who have some degree of competency in all of those areas. And that’s my niche. A shallow depth across a wider sea of topics. In some areas the sea may be deeper than in others. We’ll set sail and see where the waters take us. (See what I did there? That’s a lot of metaphor for a little paragraph.)

I think there are a lot of small business owners that try to go it alone and build their own website the same way they do pretty much everything else. The niche websites that delve deep into topics can be overwhelming and scary. There are also a lot of web designers who would like to dip their toes into other areas but, like me, just don’t have a whole lot of spare time. With luck I can find the time to write the odd tip or two that might be of benefit to them.

Writing up a goal plan, (re)creating a WordPress site, and writing down some content ideas sure is easy when you have two weeks off during the holidays. Not so much when real life comes crashing back down on you.

I had a lot of late nights at the office this week. We hired a new web designer to help out, which effectively doubles my previous staff of, well, me. Expectations easily tripled. From providing more comps on everything to doubling the number of projects and shortening deadlines, things didn’t get any easier. That’s a start-up for you. The pay is good and I believe in the product so there are definitely worse things in life, but I’m committed to my personal goals for the year too.

I just need to find a way to carve time out for them.

Here are my resolutions for the new year. All of them are related to my profession and working towards the life I want to live. I don’t have a five year plan, but consider this a down payment on one.

1. Blog at least once a week.

I’ve publicly committed to this goal on the Project 52 website because, really, without the threat of public humiliation this goal stands no chance of success.

2. Clean up this damned site.

I’m a professional web designer for crying out loud and I’d really prefer it if my blog reflected that fact. This will have to be an ongoing project though because, between the day job, wife, son, commuting, chores, dogs, and regular day-to-day stuff, I’ll only have a few hours a week to devote to all the various things on this list.

3. Try to make those blog posts useful.

Hey look! I updated widget x in the sidebar! Yeah, crap posts like that have to go. Or, at the very least, they need to be relegated to a few lines each and not counted towards my project 52 goal.

4. Sell stock images and website themes.

At the tender age of 36 I’m thoroughly tired of the rate race. I wants me a lifestyle business. Seriously. The plan is to sell stock images through iStockPhoto and stock themes through ThemeForest. I’m not going to be quitting my day job anytime soon but I’ve set some modest goals.

5. Become better at project management.

This is kind of a big deal. I suck at project management and there is no way I’ll keep my resolutions if I don’t get better at it. I need to manage projects better at Spiceworks so I can carve out the personal time for my projects and I need to manage my projects better in order to complete them with how little time I’ll have. Plus, I’d like to occasionally see my family.

6. Manage my personal projects like my job projects.

This goes hand-in-hand with the above goal. While I’m on the subject, I’ve been using Things to manage projects at work but now that I’m going to be managing another web designer and working as part of a team on many other projects, I need something a bit more robust. Any suggestions?

7. Start writing short stories or even a novel.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s the one thing I’ve been too afraid to even attempt. In no small part because of my complete lack of knowledge regarding things like grammar and sentence structure.

This goal is very personal. So personal in fact that I don’t care if anybody else ever sees it. I just need to write it, whatever it is.

So that’s it. Seven goals for 2010 and all of them about moving my life forward. Frankly it’s felt pretty stagnant for a few years now. How about you? What are your goals for 2010?

On the weekend I take one morning, usually Saturday, to go and work on my personal stuff at my second office (Barnes & Noble). This morning Ashton grabbed my arm and started crying ‘No daddy. Don’t go. Stay.’

He wouldn’t let go of my arm and he seemed to be in a near panic that I would leave him. It was heartbreaking.

Then Karina sat an egg sandwich in front of him and suddenly I didn’t even exist. I sat there for a minute waiting for him to set down his sandwich and latch on to me again but I got nothing. I tentatively said goodbye to him and, without looking up from his sandwich, got a dismissive wave in return.