Design Evolves

Finally feeling settled

After moving a couple months back and being the temporary boarding house for a couple friends coming through Boston on the weekends and to my parents on their way back and forth getting prepared for their grand adventure overseas. They’re doing great for anyone that cares, more on that some other time.

I’m finally getting used to what streets connect to what and have been driving different ways to and from Mzinga at my new job. Speaking of which Josh even pointed me to (another) Andrea’s in downtown Woburn where I snagged some pizza last night before heading home. Nothing like good pizza after a great second day to just be the cherry on top.

Today we went to Flatbread’s for lunch, which was a great time, despite the fact that I guess they forgot about me on the first trip down there only to realize, wait, where’s Matt.. I didnt know, and they came back, so meh just a funny part of the day. I’m a big fan of Flatbread’s in Portland and had mentioned last night that I had no clue they had 6 other locations, much less one like a 1/2 mile down the street.

Enough about food, I should be getting pictures on the wall finally in the next couple days, and I’m probably gonna move one of the computers into the other room and set the scanner up in there so that when I draw I can just digitize it in there. It didnt occur to me until the other day, but seems like a good setup for that computer. Then I think I’m finally gonna setup the touchscreen monitor on the kitchen table and have some geek fun with it.

Getting some of the shared server stuff moved over to the newer (month-old) virtual dedicated server is still on the goal list, I might move this blog over in due time. Faster, Better, Stronger is never a bad idea.. but only if its worth my time right now, haha.

By the numbers

Well moments ago I heard back from my publisher regarding how well the theme did in its first week, it did ok. I wouldnt say it was off the charts but hey.. at least its a couple extra bucks in a couple months when they cut the check, and who knows how much it will drop off or how much it does. The publisher seemed to state that it was ‘off to a good start’ which is good news.

They seem happy, which is good and already put it out there if I have more ideas to let them know. A creative outlet is always a good thing.

I’m definately on track to work with the new 360 UI in time, which should be a lot of fun.

How one week.. changes everything.

Last week, around this time, in fact really a little over a week. I was struggling between two job offers. It’s great to be wanted especially after a couple months searching for the right opportunity to come along. Finding 2 that were serious and within 24hrs all of a sudden have serious decision to make.

On the serious, overly dramatic side, you could say, this kind of decision shapes your future to a certain extent. The other side would say, OMG A JOB, cash flow is win! I was caught in between. Two very different oppurtunities presented themselves… I chose to go with my gut, and my heart and the place that represents the culture, atmosphere, people and job that fit me the best. Overall, the people, and the connections I made with them was the deciding factor. I accepted a position as Social Media Designer at Mzinga and I look forward to starting on Monday.

So that would seemingly be enough. However, in the middle of the mix of craziness, I was prepping a second xbox 360 theme to send to DP, my publisher.. yes I have a publisher. That is cool to say. I was also preparing for my first theme to go live on the marketplace to be potentially viewed and purchased by millions.. an intriguingly interesting concept that is still both frightening and cool.

Wordpress iPhone App

Ok so I just downloaded this to the super phone known as the iPhone and I have to say for a free 1.0 release this is pretty slick.

Who knows maybe this ease of blogging will actually start a new series of Blog Wars because Dan now has ecto.

150 Gigs

Most people have a couple files here, a couple files there. I set out a couple years back to collect a large asset collection that runs the gamut, because I knew the faster access and more variety of stuff I had would only make for better efficiency.

However, when a collection of work spans 150gbs, 205,264 files in 10,790 folders.. you start to realize a better organizational structure is needed. This collection doesn’t include any music, movies, personal files, etc.. we are talking pretty much images, illustrations, vector art, fonts and everything in between.

So I’ve begun to restructure and prune, already deleting 30gbs of unneeded stuff last night and moving folders into a larger tiered folder structure.

I just thought in talking about scope and seriousness of design when I talk about how I have assets of royalty free and licensed works, I dont mean one CD full of clipart, I mean quality and LOTS of it.

This however is where the modern Operating System structure fails. PC’s and Macs are both limited by a flat directory structure that limits how a file can be understood by the system, OS X and Vista have made strides in this area over the last 2 years.. however where they fail is most only cover limited image formats.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to split up the instance of a file, regardless of type, tag it for its various parts, like notating an image in flickr, or facebook, and that instance of the file loads or you can load the whole file. Say for example I have a layer named ‘balloons’ in a composition of a website, why can’t that show up in a contextual search for balloons?

Also, since when can a computer not do basic image analysis and tagging on its own. Things like, aspect ratio, color temperature, colors used, contrast, the list of variables of easily accessible data goes on and on, yet most management software on has basic understanding of file type, aspect ratio and other meta data.

Ok so it will take it some time to index all the files.. fine.. store it in a database so I can modify that rather than modify the existing meta data making the file larger, or in some cases the file can’t store meta data.. so what, I can’t do anything to it? Thanks, thanks a lot.