Badass Ideas

I participate in several organizations and attend many industry events that work to foster creativity and innovation within the design and web communities and time after time people will feel like its OK to complain about the performance of these organizations. I firmly believe that constructive criticism helps to improve anything, whether it be a design or a design event, but its not the critique take issue with… it is the people doing the complaining. This is where I am going to publicly say: If you have a problem with your local design/web organization or an event, get off your ass and help change it. People who bitch don’t achieve anything, people who get shit done make a difference.

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This year’s SXSW was a very special experience for me. Many people have blogged about the fact that the “people” are really what makes this conference unique, but this year I didn’t just feel like I left with new networking connections, I felt like I left with friends. Along with the strong the DC community (which attends annually in full force) there were so many people who shared insight and inspiration with me between panels and over brunch that gave me a whole new sense of motivation for the work I do as a designer day to day. In addition to those folks I had a special opportunity to connect with other web educators and typographers to really become inspired on a whole new level. I would like to share with you the details of the 3 most important things I picked up this go around…
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After reading the article A Not-So-Sweet Tale of Digital Type on the AIGA website I knew that there was a SXSW Panel in the making. The article raises many interesting issues that I could debate at length, but Andrew Twigg very specifically made a statement that caught my attention…

I had built my site using semantic code, meaning that content is structured into different levels … and the structure of the document has meaning…

All of this is good because it allows the website to be indexed more easily by search engines. It also means that people with web accessibility issues will be able to read the page content more easily…

And it also means that the type can be a bit ugly.”

Ugly, O rly?

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Beast Pieces Letterpress Blog
Who doesn’t love some good letterpress? This blog features some great pieces from posters to business cards, a great source of inspiration.
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The new design is up, and what a relief! This design is the third iteration of badassideas.com, and I decided to take it in a whole new direction than the previous two. Inspired by a piece of paper I bought in the art store and all of the different snippets from my inspiration board, I went for a handmade, typographic, printed feel. This design reflects who I am and the style that I fancy. I love site redesign launches because its so much fun writing posts about process, but this site’s process was anything but usual because I was the client.

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