Archive for Work

04.01.08

March Madness

Posted in Stories, Work at 9:56 pm by Ben

This post does not have anything to do with basketball. Rather it has to do with my recent and current work schedule. Due to major deadlines I actually needed to work three 9-9.5 hour days in a row. Fortunately we completed the project on-time and the client was pleased with the work. On top of this I have a website roll-out coming up this Wednesday (I designed and developed the template). Then I have another website design project due the following week – fortunately it’s a pretty basic site. Also due this week are some cover designs for a grant proposal. On top of this I’m part of the MPHI website redesign committee. Fortunately the committee is pretty good about listening to the designer (that’s me) and we’re making fairly decent progress. Also I need to photograph all the MPHI programs at some point for the website. And I also need to help “project-manage” the in-house development of a Web-Based Training review and commenting application. Anyway that’s just a small sampling of what’s been pouring down the pipeline at the end of March. Hence, March madness.

03.19.08

Recent doings as of March 2008

Posted in Design, Personal, Work at 8:55 pm by Ben

Work:

  • Lots of video editing. It’s been very interesting – especially managing client expectations.
  • Various website designs and development, some coming soon
  • Lots of pleased clients both internally and externally.
  • The CHAMPS project continues to push back it’s completion date. I’d love to tell you all about this monster of a project but its both a political and sensitive subject due to the various entities involved.

Freelance:

  • More icons for Maietta-Hatch Kinaesthetics

Personal:

  • The wife and I will be moving to a new apartment come the first of May
  • The new apartment has lots more space and central air.

Michigan Life:

  • The weather is definitely heading towards spring although winter keeps trying to get a last hurrah in.
  • The birds are all twitter-pated. The morning sounds are wonderful.
  • Need to post some more photos. I’m thinking of building a Flash – XML powered web gallery and hooking it up somewhere on the site. I know, it’s been done before but hey – I’ll get to dust off my Flash skills and have some coding fun!

Anyway, that’s the recent doings as of March 2008.

12.05.07

Funny Work Stories December 5th, 2007

Posted in Stories, Work at 9:52 pm by Ben

Funny story from work: So a client had their website redesigned (after my redesign which got royally messed up by how many navigation buttons they wanted stick on) and they chose a different company to do it. The design looks good and does a great job of capturing the problematic navigation that killed my design. But as clients are wont, they decided to flip some colors around and add another button (obviously this client is predisposed to add buttons). The client didn’t want to use the original designer for whatever reason and decided to use us (again). The color switching and adding the new button went really well after we bought the missing font that the original designer had used. Anyway the images were fine and dandy. And this is now where the story gets funny. I’m looking at the HTML and CSS and find that there are a bjillion different stylesheets. Each page in the site has its own 2 stylesheets. Mind boggling crazy it becomes funny. But that’s not the worst of it. I drop in the images into the proper folder(s – don’t get me started on how they organized the file structure) and open up the appropriate style sheets to make some text color changes appropriate to the image color changes I’ve made. To make sure that I edit the correct style I also open up one of the html files – and I spot a <p class=”heading”>. I think, huh, that’s interesting, because generally one uses an <h> tag for headings…And as I look over the HTML code and the CSS I start to laugh as it becomes clear no <h> tags were used throughout the entire page! Although to be honest I didn’t search that hard. There’s nothing wrong with <p class=”heading”> but when it’s being used to replace an <h> tag, it’s not semantic or appropriate! That and the various non-breaking space code that littered the page made me laugh. Someone new to CSS perhaps?

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