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.

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!

The Web 2.0 workshop for ADAC went well, I think. At least, no one demanded their money back. Check out the projects link at the top of the page for slides and links related to the presentation. If you participated in the workshop and have further questions, please feel free to contact me.

There are a couple things coming up that I am looking forward to. On March 18th I am giving an introductory workshop on Web 2.0 and Content Management Systems for ADAC (Art Directors and Artist Club). The workshop will take place at the American River College in Sacramento at 1:30 pm on the 18th. I have been preparing my materials for a week or so, and I think it will be a quite exciting and dynamic workshop. Also, in preparation for this, I am going to be adding a new “projects” section to this web site to handle the materials of this and other projects I am involved with. So stay tuned!

The second event that I am excited about is the OSCMS Summit coming up on March 23 and 24th. If the acronym is just so much alphabet soup to you, here is the full title: Open Source Content Management System Summit. It is a mouthful no matter which way you say it. I am looking forward to hearing a lot of people smarter than me give great presentations over those two days. The summit is going to be held on the Yahoo campus and a friend from Boston is flying out to join me for the adventure.

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.