I am proud to welcome Addie Juell to the growing family of websites designed and built by MeadDesign. Addie is a talented photographer in New York City looking for a nice simple, elegant website to display some of her commercial work. It was a perfect match for MeadDesign. Visit her site here.

The website features nice use of Lightbox 2 by Lokesh Dhakar. The coding for the website is nice clean xhtml. It was a pleasure to make and Addie is great to work with. If you need a photographer, be sure to give her a call.

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.

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!

George Mandler has been great to work with, and as I am finishing up work on his site, my next project is already under way. This is a web site for a very good friend of many years. Cora Fox is a professor at Arizona State University in the English Department. She is a Renaissance specialist and needs a web site for a variety of reasons.

This particular site has been really fun to design. Cora pointed me to several resources on the web for images related to the Renaissance era. She found this fantastic paper that makes up the edges of the pages. The paintings at the top directly relate to topics that Cora studies and teaches. I am really pleased with the look and feel of this web site, and I look forward to helping Cora put up content and get used to uploading information herself.

If you need a professional web site, please do not hesitate to contact me. Also, if you get a chance, check out Cora’s web site.

For the past few weeks I have been working with George Mandler to create a new website for his nutrition, accupuncture and oriental medicine business called Nourishing Balance. He has been a pleasure to work with. One the things I really admire about George during this project is his attention to detail. If he brings this sort of focus to his business, (and I am sure he does!) then he must be an incredible clinician.

The web site has been built with WordPress, which continues to improve with a new version out recently. I have to say, I have come to really love WordPress. It is just a fantastic tool that empowers ordinary people to take control of their own web sites. Once the site has been built, you can use WordPress to post news and information easily.

Well, it is a work in progress, but I have had a lot of fun setting up and training my friends at MSLA how to use Joomla to run their new web site. There have been some interesting challenges and I am sure we will do a lot more for the site in the future.

At the end of October 2006 the Massachusetts School Library Association unveiled their new logo. They changed their name, dropping the “M” from MSLMA (the second “M” was for Media). As the designer, I lead a process for about ten people on a committee to come up with this new logo. We never met physically - all our work was done remotely via email and the web!

I am very proud of the process we went though, and I am thrilled to have had the experience of not only leading such a process, but also doing it all electronically. At the start, I was not sure how that would work. However, we had a great group of people and the ideas really coalesced as we went along. Essentially the process consisted of three rounds of twenty or so sketches each round as we narrowed in on a final set of ideas. Then we had a fourth round where we worked out colors and other details for the design.

We are all really proud of the final design, and it made a big splash at the MSLA Annual Conference when it was unveiled. I have also been designing their annual news letter, as well as a new web site for MSLA built in Joomla. More on those later!