This is not strictly a MeadDesign project, but it is a web design project so I have decided to included it on MeadDesign. The Unified Wine & Grape Symposium site is one of the sites I manage for my day job at ASEV. Finally, I had the opportunity to rebuild the site from scratch. It was originally built by my predecessor in the job, but this was several years ago when it was normal to use sliced images for navigation and tables for layout.

Now the site is clean xhtml. It is not a particularly complicated site and it only took me a few days to build the whole thing from scratch, but it sure is satisfying to know how easy it will be to update now that it is coded properly.

I should note that I am not responsible for the logo or the color palette. Those were designed and chosen by someone else. I think the logo is nice, but I would have liked to have access to one more color for the site. I also used Cody Lindley’s wonderful ThickBox script on this site. Currently you see it in use on the news page, but it will be used a lot on the daily schedule page as well.

While this site has been in hibernation this spring, a lot has been going on for MeadDesign. First of all, there are a number of new web sites and design projects in the works. I have clients returning for updates and expansions, as well as a few recurring projects. In addition to this, I co-taught two courses this spring at American River College, which took an overwhelming amount of time. More on these courses in another post. So, in an effort to decompress from all this activity, I have started a new project: Office Art… Work Created Between Tasks in the Office. Find out more about it!

I just finished building a small website for Gerry Washington at Teleports International Corporation. This is the first site of static pages I have built in a long time, but I think the design is really striking and I hope that the site helps Gerry and his team reach their goals.

I noticed while building this site that Dreamweaver really has come a long way as a tool for building web sites. I generally use it as a fancy text editor most the time, but there is a lot of untapped potential (at least, untapped by me!) lurking under the hood. Building a static web site rather than just a template to be used with a content management system encouraged me to play around a bit with some of those other features. Although, I can’t imagine having to build a huge site manually, page by page. That is just crazy.

Well, I have the honor and privilege of presenting Al’s web site. Al has been absolutely wonderful to work with. He has jumped in with both feet and it has really been a very positive and productive experience for both of us, I think. After a few attempts to find someone to help him build a site he could control, he found me. My eternal gratitude to Mary Beth Barber, with whom I work at ADAC and who introduced me to Al. I could tell I would enjoy working with Al from the moment he called me on the phone. He has one of those voices that grabs your attention and draws you in. It must be part of his training. When I read the poetry on his web site, and really anything he writes, I can hear his unique voice so clearly. Thank you Al, I look forward to working with you more in the future!

I have been so busy, I have not had time to post some of my recent work. So here we go, before the holidays I did quite a bit of design work for Sabine’s production company called WinterGirl Productions. Besides the logo pictured here, I also designed a postcard, flier and the beginnings of a web site.

Sabine is a film maker and is currently working on this wonderful documentary called Breaking in Two, which has support from an organization called Women Make Movies. Sabine is great to work with. She has a great sense of vision and an amazing work ethic. I look forward to our continued efforts to build out her web site.

There is a great deal of design work underway here at MeadDesign. I will have some to share soon, but I thought it would be fun to show this logo that my son and I worked on for some mixed CD’s he is creating. It was a lot of fun to create it with him, and it will be cool to see how he uses it.

On Sunday, October 28th I held another workshop for ADAC at the American River College in the Art New Media lab. This workshop was a second part to the workshop I conducted in March. In the first workshop we explored some of the modern methods for building web sites for easier content management. In this workshop we discussed how Software as a Service (SaaS) is changing the way we work and the tools we use. We explored some of the new tools for productivity, communication and collaboration.

We looked at some of the social networking tools that are available and put many of the terms and concepts you hear out of context into context so that they make sense and participants walked out with a much clearer overall picture of the situation. You can check out the details of the workshop by clicking here, or go to the projects link at the top of the page.

There has been a bit of a hiatus regarding my posts here on MeadDesign. This is not because I have not been busy with design, on the contrary, there is a lot going on! The purchase of a new house for my family here in Davis has occupied my thoughts and time a lot this spring/summer, and now design jobs are flooding in from all sides. It looks to be an exciting fall.  I have both print and web projects coming and I look forward to posting them here. Of course if you are interested in what I am up to, feel free to contact me!

For the last several weeks, I have been working with Elizabeth King to develop materials for her Walktopia project. This is a wonderful project geared to get people of all walks of life excited about walking for fun and for health. Elizabeth is fun to work with. She is enthusiastic and full of ideas and full of energy. I look forward to seeing her efforts blossom into something beautiful for Sacramento and then spread out from there.

This is the runner up version of the logo. I like the one we chose very much. It is simple, elegant and gets the idea across, but I also like this “funner” version. Maybe we will get an opportunity to play with it some more in the future!

On March 22nd and 23rd I attended the OSCMS Summit which was held at the Yahoo Campus in Sunnyvale. A friend from Boston flew out and we drove down together. The conference, true to the open source community, was without cost. Yahoo was very generous and lunch was provided on both days, not to mention enough caffeine to keep the developers going.

I was impressed with the breadth and the depth of the topics. The people were very pleasant and supportive of each other in their endeavours and skill levels. I learned a lot and I am excited about continued participation in the community. Considering the conference itself did not cost a penny for its participants, it was quite spectacular.

I believe the next one will be in Barcelona next fall. That would be a fun trip. Who knows, maybe I will see you there! Check out the summit web site for topics covered. There were people video taping each session too, but I have not chased those down yet.