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!

Abbey is the kind of client I love to have. She wants to take control of her site and is willing to ask questions and try new things. WordPress is not perfect yet for the non-technical person. There are times when you have to do a little bit of light tagging, but for the most part, you can create a good looking site and maintain it without having to become a web designer. Abbey has proven that to be true.

Abbey is an Acupuncturist in Manhattan, New York, and came to me with a list of questions about how her web site should work and a lot of ideas about what she wanted from it. I designed the template for wordpress and we worked through the details to meet her requirements. What we came up with is pretty cool. Check it out!….. www.abbeyfromkin.com

The new site for Medical Traning Associates is up at USFirstAid.com and is ready for visitors. Please take a look and see what I have been up to. There are a lot of great projects coming along for the fall and I am excited that I will have a lot to show on this web site.

Another new site is done! Well, almost done. Peter is still working on content, but with his new WordPress powered website, that part is a cinch.

If you would like a web site for yourself, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Meanwhile, click on over to Peter Wallace Illustration and check out the cool design. I thought it would make sense for an illustrator to go with a sketchbook type theme. Peter has designed the image for the header and the buttons himself.

It is my pleasure to announce the unveiling of VistaClaraProductions.com, a new web site designed for Derek Velez-Partridge, Principal of the fledgling company. The site consists of a custom theme made for WordPress. Derek and I are both excited and I am sure this site will really help him spread the word for his work.

I have a number of other projects in the works, including three more web sites. So stay tuned and watch MeadDesign grow!

I went and saw this amazing exhibition yesterday with some other members of the Yolo Designers Group, and it was just amazing. If you are in the Davis, California area before the end of June, it is worth checking out. It is at the University in the Design museum in Walker Hall.

There is tons to look at and what is truly wonderful about the show, is so much of it can be touched. There are books, magazines, cd’s, posters and all kinds of other stuff. The show is intended to focus on what designers have been doing since the dotcom bust. The changes in media and methods and how we think about media that have happened in the past few years, which is a lifetime to a designer.

There is a lot of grungy, skateboard culture influenced sort of work in the show. And the work shown has a decidedly anti-establishment / anti-war / ultra left-wing sentiment attached to it, but it does speak volumes about where we have been for he past few years from a particular point of view.

Currating this show must have been maddening. Not only because of the sheer quanity of stuff, but also the variety coupled with the small space to put it all in. They did an amazing job, and the materials promoting the show, such at the poster, and postcard were striking in their design as well. You can check out the web site for the show here

Finally, I have designed some new business cards. It seems ridiculous to not have my own business cards, but when one is busy doing work for other people, this is the kind of thing that slides. Also, doing design for yourself is hard! You are your own worst customer! But seriously, the best design comes from having a conversation with the client about their needs and purpose, and it is hard to have that conversation with your self, without feeling a little nutty.

This particular image was designed to go with this site. I am hoping that this
site becomes the center piece of my professional web sites. A place to bring people to show off my work and let them get a sense of what I do and how I do it.

The other side of the card includes more information but is a modification of the style. I think the layout of the text and the type is really sharp. It will be interesting to see what sort of impact these cards make on people. For printing, I am using an online company called Overnight Prints. I have not used them before, so it will be interesting to see how they come out. If they are good, I will add the link to my links!