The Girl™ taught me how to sew. I’ve wanted to learn for years. My mother tried teaching me when I asked as a very young child but was far to complex for my 11 year old mind at the time. I’d watch her make a variety of things over the years — anything really. As the years have gone on, it’s one of the skills I’ve always wanted to add to the toolkit. From my own selfish reasons¹ to other exploratory ones².

With much joy, I learned how to thread the machine, insert the bobbin, and go to town. We’ll see what comes about.

¹ I’ve hemmed a lot of my t-shirts — I wear smalls in shirts but am not as tall as your average American male and so I find most stock t-shirts too long for my liking and torso. ↩

² Making bags, wallets, containers, things that I’m curious about.  ↩

While this is from Stephen King’s On Writing, I think it applies to the digital realm equally as well, especially given that the computer itself provides a variety of distractions in the same place.

If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall. For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it’s best to try and take care of them before you write. I work to loud music — hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses, and Metallica have always been particular favorites — but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door. It surrounds me, keeps the mundane world out. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

I spent a decade skating regularly with a good five years skating day in and day out. From the ages of 10-20, I devoted a lot of time to it, competing here and there and being part of a subculture that didn’t know the X-Games yet and before skateboarders like Tony Hawk became skateboarding’s Jordan.

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Thursday Night Track Racing at Ed Rudolph Velodrome, Northbrook, IL. June 5th 2008.

Occasionally, things come full circle and I merge two interests or two people or more than two items, matters, things or persons into one small world somehow. This surprisingly happens to me more often than not¹.

Work has these circles too — I managed to combine my love of cycling into various design work for cycling related endeavours and the same might be said for music.

Today however, something really old came full circle for me as I worked on a site that involves skateboarding. My first real “sport” or active interest going back to ’89. More down the line but I found it to be a nice change.

¹ Perhaps as surprising as the number of times I get stopped on the street, greeted and addressed by a strange name only to not be the person the addressor intended it for.  ↩

The 7:30AM doors open and subsequent 8AM start made me wonder how many people would actually show up for such an early event, let alone, one by me regarding Creative Content for the Web. To my surprise, I was proven quite wrong. People were willing to come out, indeed.

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The weather’s in flux lately — ups and downs, downs and ups. We had a brief reminder of winter this past weekend as a few snow showers passed over the city, their thickness a surreal unpleasant memory. It’s officially Spring™ no?

We found ourselves trapped at home all day Saturday. A mix of extra work, overcast and cold skies and a general lethargy providing a game plan for staying in.

Sunday was a different day — cabin fever galore and the sun was out. It was still very brisk out but as I showered in the morning, that usual nostalgia for times past (moments I call London Moments, to be explained at a future date) crept up on me and I got the idea to venture out to a coffee shop. The Girl™ was amenable to this and so I looked up free wifi close by and found a coffee shop I’d never heard of before but looked like just the place I’d like. Dollop. How could you not get on board with a coffee shop that uses Tumblr for their site?

It’s located in Buena Park, Uptown. Not too far away from here, perhaps a little over a mile and a half. The space is eclectic and a mixed bag in the way I like coffee shops — a mish-mash of furniture and pieces from mid-century modern and thrift. The staff visually identifies as hipster but without the pretense. They seem to be a mellow crowd. I like any coffee shop thats not about getting people in and out — laptops galore and people who are settled in for the long haul.

I had my Field Notes and she had her MacBook. I powered through the outline and talking points for my upcoming presentation (as well as dipping into Embrocation, Bon Appetit and Paste) and she worked through the chicken scratches of plumbers and the verbosity of interior designers in usability testing notes.

The hot chocolate was crap (but made so much better with a lot of cinnamon) as we’ve found many coffee shops to be, but the water was plentiful and free and the spicy hummus and tabouleh wrap was tasty and they were serious when they meant spicy. It was warm, relatively quiet, cozy and comfortable.

I’ll likely be back when the home studio feels a little too cold.

A quick notice for those in Chicago: I’ll be speaking for the local chapter of AIGA for their Tools of the Trade series of talks. This one is called Creative Content for the Web where I’ll be talking about creating and managing interactive communities and self-initiated projects, as well as some of the basic technology aspects of CMS’s and interface design.

The official blurb: “In 2007, AIGA Chicago introduced Tools of the Trade, a practical business workshop series for designers. Mirroring the Business of Design Series, these events address the hands-on needs of design businesses. Join AIGA Chicago and Naz Hamid as he spreads knowledge on his expertise of interface design and large-scale interactive projects geared to building communities and groups.”

The event happens Thursday, April 24th at the Alliance Francaise at 54 W. Chicago Avenue. Doors are at 7:30am, with the presentation from 8 to 9:30am, with a half hour Q&A session after. Details, registration and cost are here on AIGA Chicago’s site.

Another SXSW related post-post but this pertains to the presentation I gave this year, Design is in the Details. A huge thanks again to all that attended and were curious enough to see what I had to say. It was very nice to see the large crowd that came and I hope it was somewhat useful. But more to the point, I have slides.

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Before heading down to SXSW this year, Aza Raskin, now of Mozilla Labs, got in touch with me to see if I’d be interested in designing some t-shirts for them. Why, yes please.

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The decompression from this year’s SXSW was quick — mostly because time told me that I was there one day too long this year despite being there the same amount of time last year. That idea of time, and a timeline stuck with me and for this year’s SXSW Infographic, I wanted to encapsulate that structure. The look and idea for this one came to me on Monday, if I recall correctly, on the way to the Jackalope on 6th as I explained it to Cinnamon and Andrew.

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When Andrew heard and subsequently saw me working on this site, he asked “Why?” A good question indeed. Why another site when I have a few as it is? I tend to shuffle things around to some degree. Part of it is pure fancy and desire and another part of it has to be a search for some kind of balance. Also, holding onto domains, blurs the line between what I do with them and what I want to do with them.

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Today is the official launch of Patternclash, the site of photographer Francesca Tallone. We’ve been working together on the site in bits and pieces over the summer and amidst a few domain and host issues, have everything sorted out.

Francesca has in the last year, been featured as part of Surface Magazine’s Avant Guardian portfolio — a selection of stateside photographers who are recognized as pushing the boundaries of commercial photography.

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If you’re a photographer who’s embraced the DSLR, you’ve no doubt heard of or work with RAW files.

I made the switch quite a while ago and have been working with them for some time now. The quality is unsurpassed in manipulating digital images. For a long while however, it seemed that the technology for working with RAW files was shoddy and turned many would-be-RAW-shooters right off. Including myself.

Enter Aperture. Enter Lightroom.

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The still-fresh, brand spankin’ new relaunch of AIGA.org has had a lot of well-deserved press around the web. The Happy Cog crew did a hell of a job.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have now been involved in the design processes of two major AIGA redesigns in different capacities. The first time around when Flat redesigned the national website, I worked under Behavior with Khoi Vinh to come up with designs for the Design Forum. This time around, I was again, fortunate to be pulled in to work on the AIGA redesign, but not on the public-facing website, but rather under the hood and behind the scenes on AIGA.org’s CMS interface.

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I’ve mostly recuperated from the behemoth that is SXSW. I took a lot of notes in my moleskine and decided to do an infographic poster regarding my experience (instead of being lengthy with words — I am a designer, so I should flex the muscles a bit and display information concisely and visually) and some of the smaller details and minutiae of the event. You can see a larger version here or you can download the printable 11×17 PDF poster here.

Some notes:

1. Info is as accurate as I remember, refer or calculate.
2. The blocky typeface for SXSW 2007 is custom and created just for this. I started work on it at SXSW itself.
3. Some of it is humourous. Some of it is serious.
4. The list of people I met obviously resembles a tagcloud — the key should be evident — the larger your name is, the more time I spent with you.

My SXSW photos, all 140 of them are here.