A Little Digital Design

That is a question I keep asking myself and recently my opinion is changing. When I went full time freelance in February of this year I had a fire under my seat to get my ducks in a row such as business cards, website and so on. The first item on the list is get a website up and running so people could see my skills and work examples. I had spend about a day on a simple design and haven’t really done much more since then.

My theory was that if my website looks better than my clients I’m spending more time on it than theirs. Thinking back that might be a misguided approach. Originally I wanted something clean and simple to get the point across but now it feels empty in need of more content.

It’s easier to create designs for others but when I comes to my own nothing seems to feel right. I posted the new design on Monday and now working on the Wordpress theme to match. It will need more refinements but it’s much better than what I had before. Now I need to update my business cards to match the new look.

A few years ago I started a website called The Nashville Feed, it originally was a home for my podcast and eventually turned into a standard blog. I researched content management systems and settled on Drupal. I choose Drupal because my original plan for the site was much more grand than it turned out in the end. My goal was to create a site that looked more like a newspaper than a blog and Drupal could do that from what I could tell at that time.

Drupal is a powerful content management system with lots of plug-ins that make it do anything but it is very complex. I had hoped that in the end I could leverage some of my technical skills with my design skills to achieve the site I wanted.

Looking back at all the struggles with updates and resetting themes I should have dropped it for something more easy to use a long time ago. I really really wanted to like Drupal, honestly.

I always thought Drupal was better because I wanted a content management system unlike others at the time like Wordpress and TypePad which I though were blogging systems. I wanted something more and figured it would be better in the end. So after all my tinkering and reading online I still struggled with the basic functions of the system.

About a month ago I decided to give Wordpress a try for my design blog which you’re reading right now and my expectations have been exceeded. I installed in a few minutes and the setup was quick and easy along with any plug-ins or themes. It is simply push button easy compared to Drupal. Everytime I tried to upgrade Drupal I pretty much lost all my settings and data. It was a nightmare for a techie light like me.

One of the nicest features in Wordpress is the auto save function which is missing from the standard Drupal install. I can’t remember how many times I lost posts using the old system.

Looking back I have to wonder why I didn’t move sooner. My next goals is to update the template to match the rest of the website.

A long time ago when I was 14 and got my first job working at a buffet in a suburb of Milwaukee I had met a man who gave me some good advice for which I still use to this day. He said it often “David, work smarter not harder.”

It seems like simple and common sense advice but it was important. The gentleman’s name was Duran and he was an African American man in his 4os at the time working 3 jobs trying to support a family and pay back debt for previous mistakes. He worked mostly days and I would see him when I arrived after school to start my shift. Our time would overlap for a few hours and he always had a smile and a good attitude while talking with me. Usually after he was done he would head on to his second job for the day and continue for another 6-8 hours. He worked weekends a third job for which I don’t recall but he made me tired just telling me about it.

He would tell me don’t be like him and have to work so hard and to learn from his mistakes. I don’t think I was old enough to learn the “don’t over extend yourself if real estate” lesson at 14 but I did understand the try to be smart when you begin working on any task. I try to keep that in mine when ever I begin something new, course we are but just human and I go astray. Like the my hooking the HD DirecTV to Windows Media Center project but that is another post.

So the lesson isn’t just trying to work smarter but that sometimes the simplest advice can make a big impact.

“Hello world!” is usually the first text you use in any type of programming training as well as the default first post for a new Wordpress install so I thought it would be appropriate for my first blog post here.

What are you going to read on this blog? I’m really not sure beyond my digital design experiences and articles I want to point out from around the web. What you won’t find is me complaining about clients or other designers and any type of professional writing (”Damit Jim I’m a Designer not a Copywriter!”). I try to get my ideas across so if you can suffer through grammar and punctuation I hope you learn something.

I plan on posting when inspiration hits so forgive me if there is some time between posts. So with that said I’ll leave you with something found via twitter this morning which is how I feel about this blog…I’m going to let it build.