Pittsford Apartment

Sat, Jan 28, 2012 – 14:26

So, as of last night I’m moved into my currently-permanent residence in Pittsford, NY. It’s a condo in a little subdivision just down the road from the Pittsford Wegmans (and soon a Trader Joe’s, plus lots of other stores) on one side and the Erie Canal on the other. The condo neighborhood is apparently mostly retirees according to my neighbors, so things are quiet and picturesque.

I hope to get more furniture in the next week or two, but the landlord couple was kind enough to leave the old mattress from their daughter and some other things, and to sell me a very nice futon so I’m set for the weekend at least. Tables would be nice though…

As you can see it’s pretty big but once I get furniture it should be cozy. It has more closet space than I know what to do with though. The bathroom is pretty cool, it has three doors, so you can close off the shower part, or the whole thing from both the bedroom and main room. There’s a private laundry room downstairs too. Apparently some condo owners have cut holes in their floors to go right down to their basement, but mine have not. Still a nice feature to have a basement though.

So those are my living conditions for the next year.

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Work from Accuraty

Sun, Jan 22, 2012 – 21:00

A couple of my projects have gone live now!

Snackstick.com, for which I set the design style, is live. Kerstin did all the implementation and a lot of the refining of the design, and we both worked on rewriting their copy text to be a little more marketing-oriented and a little less home-grown. I like the way it came out, doesn’t it start you salivating just from that palette?

GiveAKick.org is also live, which I spent vast amounts of time over the summer working and reworking as we learned that free DNN templates are probably not the way to go for a low-budget non-profit. The final design is all Kerstin, and she was very proud of it and pleased when the client finally accepted her total redesign from the template we had originally been tweaking. (by the way, type-knowlegeable people check out the 0′s in the “KICKAP00″ sign at the bottom – just like on their actual park sign :P)

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Starting at StormFrog

Thu, Jan 19, 2012 – 21:06

You may recall that right before Christmas I got a job offer to go work at StormFrog, where I did some freelance work in 2010. I promptly (if regretfully) put in my notice at Accuraty, packed my bags and got myself a plane ticket, since they needed another designer as soon as possible. StormFrog set me up with a temporary apartment while I looked for a car and started work on the 9th.

Now after two weeks of work, I have a little car and a signed lease to move in to a privately rented condo in Pittsford at the end of the month. It looks like a great deal, and the landlords are leaving me a certain amount of their daughter’s furniture that they don’t want to bother moving!

My car! A little 2008 Honda Fit with lots of room in the back.

Let me just say that I was unbelievably glad to be done with the car shopping and dealing with used car salesmen. Hoping to avoid them for a while. I do like my little car a lot though. I’m learning to commute 20-30 minutes by interstate each way and to drive in snow. Rochester has been alternately rainy and warm, and snowy and very cold, with brief periods of sunshine. Earlier this week we also had literally gale-force winds in the evening, which was a little startling.

Things have been pretty good, if busy and often stressful. At work I’ve been doing some branding materials for Olympic-style sports competitions, and a website redesign for an insurance company. When they’re farther along in the process I’ll see about sharing them here, but I will say that I’m very excited about the new logo I’ve designed for one of the sports competitions!

I took some pictures around the office. The office building is outside the village of Victor, about half an hour outside Rochester proper, which means that it’s a very pretty area, very removed from everything else. Our building doesn’t look like much on the outside but is in a nice spot nestled on the side of the hill the road runs on. I had a pretty walk to the post office at lunchtime earlier in the week and it was pleasant to walk up and down the rolling hills and past the little farm fields around the office.

The outside of our building that we share with three sister companies.

Miriam (lead project manager) in the break area.

StormFrog is on the third floor (well, and increasingly the second) up under the roof of our building, with a cozy little break area/lobby that is kept decked out with a wide variety of teas, a fancy single-cup coffee brewer, and a selection of snacks. Oh, and FROGS! ^^

Of course a place named StormFrog needs some cute little froggies.

The office has a couple of fishtanks around too (and more leafy potted plants than anybody knows what to do with), but the frog in the break area is my favorite. I like to look for him whenever I get fresh coffee. I saw him fed earlier, and he looked so happy nomming down on live fruit flies. The atmosphere the boss’s wife (and others) have created with the plants, bright paint, and lighting makes you feel almost like you’re working in the rainforest, in a good way.

Frog tank, and top of the stairwell with its big green frog climbing the wall.

StormFrog's ADDY from last year for their web work for Scion.

There are a couple of these cubicle clumps around the break room, for the Quality Assurance and Project Management teams.

My desk is around the corner in the “creative ski loft” with the other two designers and the Flash/Interactive developer. It’s a pretty cool room with wood beams, big windows and skylights, and nice people (although that goes for everybody I’ve met at SF so far).

My desk right next to the window, with a couple of plants I adopted.

The view out into nature from my window.

I like the view out the window right behind my computer. I’m hoping to spot some interesting animals out there at some point, but nothing so far, just a good view of the depressing weather when it rolls in.

Matt's desk right next to mine. (also check out that field of view on my camera!)

Niki, the ever-enthusiastic project manager and Joe Mayernik, designer, on the other side of my desk.

We figure we need skis to work in the creative loft.

Creative ski loft, with Joe Burgess, interactive developer, in the background.

I have a few little reminders on my desk already, some old and some new.

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Design Links

Tue, Jan 3, 2012 – 13:39

Between the holidays and my departure from work as of tomorrow, things have been very quiet for me at Accuraty lately. I’ve been working on a new logo for them, which is quite exciting even though I’m leaving right away. Getting art direction from Aclewe while I was working there on the TEAMGOLD logo definitely taught me so much that my design classes didn’t have time to refine on. Thinking back to that process for the Accuraty logo has been good. So to help with that I’ve spent a lot of time perusing logo and general design blogs and have found some beautiful links.

  • The Dieline - as the name indicates, this is for package design, but the designs and products they exhibit are so amazing and inspirational that I will definitely be subscribing to their RSS!
  • For Print Only - similar to The Dieline, this one focuses on stunning print work, and really makes you wish you had the budget for letterpress printing. Which brings me to Studio on Fire’s blog of their letterpress shop work. More drool-worthy stuff there. Under Consideration also runs Brand New in addition to FPO, which is a good blog of branding and logo work.
  • Logo Design Love also has a lot of nice links, and many of the articles are quite short and bite-sized.
  • Dribbble.com is the place to be currently when it comes to show-and-tell for the world’s best digital designers, and where you can be weeded out if you don’t behave. Behance.net is also good although not as picky about who joins. Between the two of them they seem to set a large fraction of current design trends.
  • Stankowski06.de – I like this guy’s work quite a bit (at least what’s listed on the site), and wish I could see an exhibit of it sometime. Apparently he made the iconic slash-in-a-square Deutsche Bank logo plus a lot of other logos, but I also like his less-directly-design, more artistic pieces.
  • Viget Font Roundup – a long list of font pairings that are useful for book design, but with the prevalence of print-style digital design as a fashion, I’ll be using this as a reference when I next have fonts to pick out. Relatedly, H&FJ’s advice on mixing fonts. I love their writing style that makes each font sound like a finely-crafted wine. In fact, I’ll just list the article where I got these links and more from: DavidAirey.com.
  • Myfonts.com – It’s nice to be able to buy a font knowing it’s better produced than the homemade ones that populate free font sites. They have pretty good prices and a mind-boggling selection that’s constantly growing. They have a really great newsletter too, which I highly recommend and which I absolutely love reading whenever it comes around. The newsletter from FontShop is also good, but since their prices are higher it doesn’t have me drooling and wishing for a bit of a font budget quite the way MyFonts does.

Also, I really want a deck of these Icelandair cards.

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Christmas Lens

Tue, Dec 27, 2011 – 17:21

It was lately Christmas, as you may have noticed. My parents are back from sabbatical in Eugene, Oregon, and we celebrated the holiday nicely together with delicious food and so on. I went to some nice parties for friends and coworkers, and we all went to the UU church’s Christmas Eve service, which was very nice as usual.

I got a new lens for my camera, the Canon 10-22mm, which is an extremely wide-angle lens for taking pictures of panoramas and architecture and things like that. I’m still working out how best to take pictures with it, since it covers about the entire view your eye can see (which makes it hard to avoid getting things like telephone poles in the picture) and tends to have a certain amount of barrel distortion (where straight lines come out curved because of the view angle). Here are some pictures from our Christmas day and subsequent walk.

And from Tuesday morning when it snowed here.

Another BIG present that came on Friday was a job offer to go be a full time Junior Art Director (clever trendy title pending) for StormFrog in Rochester, NY. I’ll have full benefits and a very good salary, but I have to get a car and move out there ASAP as I’m starting January 9th! There’s some talk of me getting to do things like brand design in addition to wireframes, which would be exciting.

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Grandparent Trip

Sun, Dec 11, 2011 – 20:34

I went up to New Hampshire over the weekend to visit my grandparents with my dad. We had a good time with them. My grandfather did some wandering though the forest with us, and we kept my grandmother company in her nice chair by the fireplace. It was quite a nice visit.

The whale rock outside their house.

I love New Hampshire forests and granite.

They have a very cozy cottage in a retirement village in the middle of the New Hampshire forests and mountains. It seems like the perfect place to retire for people like them. Until a few years ago, my grandfather would teach ski lessons at a local slope, and both of them liked wandering in the forest and taking care of the garden. The community takes care of all their needs, from cleaning the cottage to providing food and medical care.

They have a little greenhouse porch in the back, and I had fun taking pictures of the plants in the bright morning sun. I’m pleased because these are the only pictures I took on the porch, and I think they all came out quite well, considering that there aren’t any extra photos that failed.

So we had several nice walks around the community’s woods, and the one Saturday morning had enough good sunlight to take a bunch of pictures. Here are some:

My dad took a couple of nice pictures of me too, while we were all wandering around in the woods.

This is my favorite :P

The rest of the day was mostly spent sitting around and talking, but we got my grandmother out for a bit of a walk around the river dam before the sun went down.

After a nice day and a half with them, my friend Piyush came and picked me up and we hung out in Lowell, MA for another day before I went home.

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Catching up…

Fri, Dec 9, 2011 – 20:49

With the holiday season, I haven’t gotten around to writing about my activities in a timely manner. I had Thanksgiving with my best friend’s family and friends, which was a really fun time. We played some games, watched some football, and of course ate lots of delicious food.

Thanksgiving with the Joneses

Accuraty also had a holiday LAN party, which was actually a lot more socializing and sitting around than most LANs. We played DDR and a racing game, and some old-school games on an emulator, and Smash Brothers, and ate a lot of snacks. Here are a bunch of pictures from the evening:

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IGBA website

Mon, Dec 5, 2011 – 20:56

We got an assignment at work in October to make a new website for the Illinois Green Business Association, which went live just last week. I was excited to be assigned to this since I’m interested in working with more humanitarian projects through work, and since they’re young energetic professionals who were willing to listen to our advice, they’ve been a great client. They also share the floor in our office building with us, so it was nice to see them all the time in the break room. Unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot of the original site to show you at the moment.

In the meeting with them, they described themselves as fresh, professional, and of course green, overflowing with initiatives and social media participation, and by the time we left the meeting, I had a pretty clear idea of what would be appropriate. Over the next few days I laid out a black and white wireframe…

And then laid a stylized color version over the interface I’d built. I’m really proud of the glass effect around some of the boxes! :) Having the boxes for the wireframe all laid out and pinned down in advance really helped put the stylized version on top. It’s called skinning for a good reason – like laying the muscle and skin down over a skeleton.

After that I turned it over to Kerstin for the markup and development. She’s a lot better and faster at that, and working with a non-profit, we needed to keep the hours spent on the project lower. We did some small updates to the design that are reflected in the live site and then it was filling in their content. I had a lot of fun coming up with the headlines and their attitude once the implementation was done.

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Dwarf Fortress

Mon, Nov 21, 2011 – 20:03

For about a month now I’ve been playing this ASCII game called Dwarf Fortress. I realize that I’m late to the game, and most people have already tired of playing it.

The game takes me back to the days of playing Oregon Trail on the public library computers in the 90s. Except with a worse interface. Or playing the Sims and carefully caring for my stupid little minions and toying with their lives. If only I could name them things like Über Von1337worth…

Dwarf Fortress screenshot

A screenshot of the first level underground of my fortress.

The idea behind the game is relatively simple – manly Sims with dwarves, as far as I can tell. You lead an expedition of dwarves to settle a new fortress, and can choose where on the map you want to settle. Once there you set up everything the fortress needs – in my screenshot you can see a variety of stockpiles, my fields, the underground parts of the lakes and rivers, and if the image were better quality, you could see my dwarves wandering around. There is no mouse interface – the entire thing is based on keyboard shortcuts. For example, to build a jeweler’s workshop, you press ‘b’ and then ‘w’ and then ‘j’ for Build, Workshop, Jeweler’s Workshop. And that’s one of the easier options to figure out. You can build staircases down (I have a workshop floor and a sleeping floor below this, and then an area for my magma-powered workshops since I’m in a volcano) and reach deeper levels of the mountain.

You also mine through the mountain looking for metals you can smelt and gems you can cut. A whole industry can be built from the silver and gold you find, selling the items to the Elves and Humans who arrive in caravans every so often. You can even brew wine, make cheese, and keep bees. Once you breach the underground caverns you can harvest the webs of giant cave spiders to make silk clothing – but be careful that none of the monsters wander up from the deep! To prevent that, and to keep the goblin thieves from doing too much damage, you have to set up squads of dwarves to train and to attack any creatures that show up.

The game is extremely micromanagerial – to the point that you make left and right gloves individually; you have to flood the fields and wait for the water to evaporate before you can plant them; and you have to dispose promptly of the offal in your butcher’s workshop when it becomes rotten. As far as I can tell it must be near-impossible to get started successfully on your own, but once you do there’s a very informative wiki that will answer your most questions (for example, what is produced when you smelt tetrahedrite? how do you make cave-ins to keep your population under control?) But in return for the mystic obscurity that shrouds the game, it rewards you with entertaining things like descriptions of scenes engraved in your cave walls that depict your Engraver engraving a picture of himself on a wall. Or descriptions of what’s on your dwarves’ relatively simple minds and their relationships. For example, my dwarf Monom Olonlerom likes rock salt, crowns, chickens for their clucking and giant toads for their strength, but absolutely detests purring maggots. Whatever those are.

It’s kind of like a digital ant farm with an economy.

Your dwarves will get married and have baby dwarves until you’re swamped with more dwarves than you know what to do with. Migrants arrive just when you were getting used to the number of minions you had. They will be adopted by so many cats that your only choice is to butcher the kittens and make leather gloves out of their remains. It’s quite distressing if you manage to kill someone’s beloved pet and send them into a fit of miserable depression though, so be careful!

Your dwarves gain skills and can become great masters of their trades – sometimes even being catapulted to fame by coming up with plans for a legendary artifact. I had a legendary cook who made “plump helmet roasts” worth more than a thousand dwarfbucks each. I think it’s fascinating to see what they all make, and what the trading caravans are willing to pay a lot of money for.

I’m not sure what the point of the game is, but losing is reported to be one of the main entertainments. Accidentally drowning your entire fortress, or getting all your dwarves to be eaten by a Forgotten Beast – or losing all the survivors to depression when a couple of squads of fighters get eaten. You certainly have to start over a lot. Personally I really enjoy how it forces you to see with your mind’s eye what is going on down there, since the interface is no help with that at all.

Apparently the next thing I’m supposed to do (after I get beekeeping worked out) is play the game in Adventurer mood.

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Die Zauberflöte

Sat, Nov 12, 2011 – 20:06

Last night I went to see the opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart at Krannert. It was by the U of I school of opera (most of the performers seemed to be masters’ students), with a pit of what I assume were also U of I music students. I thought they all did an excellent job – just like one would expect from our world-class performing arts theater.

The setting was interesting, sort of a modern dress-rehersal style complete with director(?) running around with a clipboard, stopwatch, tape, and headset; a props woman wheeling a clothes rack around; and most of the cast in street clothes at the beginning. It worked surprisingly well, since it made the little mistakes of the cast as they got the show rolling fit into the setting. One of the performers had a little trouble with his music when he first came on stage and was clearly nervous, but it worked out excellently with the rough draft feeling of the stage.

I was pleased at how much of the German I understood despite the operatic style, though of course the subtitles were a big help, and also the fact that they often repeat a line two or three times. It was really interesting to hear the different singers’ German pronunciations since each seemed to have a slightly different set of strengths and weaknesses. I also thought it was fascinating that they managed to completely dodge the fact that Monostatos is a very racistly-presented moor simply by having him played by a white man and translating a very few lines of his songs differently in the subtitles, which probably wouldn’t be so easily dodged in something like Othello. I thought it was a good choice, since really it’s only important that his character is a lecherous underling, and perpetuating the stereotype of hypersexual Africans can only be offensive. The sexist stuff on the other hand was left in, as it’s kind of the core of the whole opera, the conflict between male and female, logic and illogic, but it’s not that bad compared to some things.

I really like the bird-catcher Papageno’s songs the best, I think – “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja,“ ”Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen“ and “Pa–, pa–, pa–” are all three awesome in my book. Since he’s the main comic, it’s no surprise that his songs are very accessible in music and humor level. It’s hard not to laugh when he says ”A net for girls is what I would like, / I’d catch them by the dozen for me!” Sarastro and the Night Queen also did a great job I thought. I enjoyed Sarastro’s bass voice and the Night Queen’s aria, which really shows off the typical opera singing that you think of.

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