Side of Sauce

I am a big proponent of the motto if something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. It is a creed that has informed all of the work that I do. Good design is made up of a lot of little, seemingly unimportant details, that coalesce to make something truly beautiful. However, there is an inherent danger in this kind of “devil is in the details” thinking and that danger is attachment. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to pour so much of your heart and soul into something without becoming attached to the outcome.

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When I was young, I was an obsessive journaler. I had very little to write about then other than a less-than-ideal home life, the occasional heart-wrenching teenage crush and my smaller-than-a-thimble view of the world erected within the confines of my own backyard. I now (ostensibly) have much more to write about, but I rarely ever seem to put pen to paper. Perhaps it is because most of the writing I contemplate doing is in the form of a blog and it is difficult not to be self-conscious when you know others are reading (even if it only amounts to the 2 people that read this blog on a not-so-regular basis).

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wordle.net

This is mine. Created from my Delicious tags.

I am not sure why, but somehow this new year feels like a fresh start — a giant step beyond the adversity of the past two years of my life. I suppose things could have been worse (they can always be worse), but I won’t lie and say that it has been fun.

While I spent two years taking stock of all that I lost, I forgot to pay heed to what I have gained. Goodbye to 2007 feels like the first warm day after months of cold, dark winter.

Amen to that.

I became a vegetarian during my freshman year of college. The transition from meat-eater to herbivore didn’t happen gradually, but rather all at once when in my freshman year Biology class I was presented with a frog and my very own mini-guillotine with which to dispense of my frog. I didn’t have access to a farm as a child and my father was an avowed animal lover (saver of stray dogs and misguided turtles) and so I found myself wholly unprepared for the moral dilemma that results when one creature takes the life of another.

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I have been working more with the gradient mesh tool to create some detailed icons for the Sharpcast Desktop application. The mesh tool is a great way to get more realistic looking gradients. Until recently I drew most of my icons in Illustrator and then added complex gradients in Photoshop making it kind of impossible to transform them for the most part without placing a larger form and then adding the gradients all over again.
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I have always wanted to launch a design blog and finally, that day is here! Please visit my new design blog, Lickable for all the latest design objects and news!

I have been on a quest to improve the seo (search engine optimization) of my site and I found out that there are a few simple things you can do to really make a difference in your traffic.

1) Sign up for Google analytics — it is free and it is really fun to track your progress.

2) For wordpress users, there are quite a few great SEO plugins out there. I used the all-in-one SEO Pack and SEO Title tag in conjunction with the Ultimate Tag Warrior . All of these require a little bit of manual work to add tags and keywords for each post and page.

3) Let the world know your content has changed. By pinging services when your content has been updated, you let them know it is time to crawl and index your site which increases your site’s popularity. I am using Pingoat

4) Get on the social bookmarking wagon. Make it easy for other to bookmark your site. I found many wordpress plugins out there to do this. I am using Sociable

5) Trade links with other sites that have like content. I haven’t exactly figured out an optimized way to do this yet, other than emailing people I know and asking them to link to my blog. I have found a few services out there that match up people who would be willing to exchange links, but I haven’t tried any myself. If anyone knows of a good service, please let me know.

6) Add rel=”nofollow” to all of your hrefs linking off your site to signal to Google that this is not comment spam. Check out the Google blog for more information on when and where it should be used.

7) Create a site map. I use a Wordpress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator. This will not necessarily increase your traffic, but will make it easier for Google to index your site which may result in a more complete index of your pages.

When my friend and former colleague Audrey Roy left her job we talked briefly about doing some illustration projects together. It never quite got off the ground until last weekend when we spent the whole day drawing. We plan to create enough illustrations between the two of us to launch a site where we will sell t-shirts, note cards and other miscellaneous items.

This is one of the illustrations I did this weekend — our theme was cupcakes.

A few weeks ago I had one of the coolest dining experiences — through a fortuitous affiliation of friends of friends I was invited to eat dinner at Quince restaurant at the Chef’s table. I had never heard of a chef’s table before, but apparently quite a few restaurants have them. Quince’s chef’s table is located in the lower prep kitchen one floor down from the actual restaurant and it has only one table which is cozily nestled in between a shelf of homemade pasta and a flurry of pastry chefs.

It was easily one of the most interesting and varied meals I have ever had. We had our choice of a three or four course a la carte menu from which I chose a parmesan and morel custard, a pici (house-made Italian pasta) and fiddlehead fern (which I chose mostly because the idea of eating fern seemed like an adventure) and finally a nettle pasta with house-smoked ricotta. Our host went to high school with the sommelier and she helped us to pair each of our courses with a different glass of wine.

Sadly, the kitchen at Quince is being remodeled, so the chef’s table there is soon to be a thing of the past.

I am still mildly recovering from my all-nighter on Thursday/Friday. You know you are getting old when staying up for 34 hours, once merely a challegning feat, is now a catastrophic event. I went home on friday and slept through until 9 am the following morning.

All in all it was a pretty great experience. I was blown away by what everyone was able to acomplish in a mere 24 hours:
–a board game that takes advantage of our sync platform
–a version of mobile hot or not that allows you to take pictures on your mobile phone that appear instantly on hotornot.com
–a collaborative whiteboard space
–push to the web and face tagging
–instant messenger with presence
–and SkyNet which allows us to track actions performed in the desktop app

Cockroach won the prize for most creative. Check out some pictures from the event

It is 5:18 am and if you know me at all, you certainly know that I would never be up at such an ungodly hour, unless of course I never went to sleep. A week or so ago Sharpcast announced that it was going to have its first ever Hack Day. For those who don’t know, a hack day is a 24 hour period in which the engineers can build whatever they want, however they want to build it with no mettling from PM and other such irksome pests. The only rule of our Hack Day is that it must utilize our sync technology.

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Zen and the Art of Wheel Throwing

Wheel throwing might be one of the most frustrating activities I have ever engaged in. Like so many things in life, it looks simply effortless when you are standing there watching someone else throw a perfectly proportioned vase out of a lump of wet clay, but when you sit down at the wheel to create your own pièce de résistance, you find the clay is actually master.

I threw for several years before I actually considered myself a halfway decent potter. What began years ago as a tenuous foray into a new art form, became a full scale obsession. I found myself spending more time in the ceramic studio than in the lab – staying up late to fire the kiln before eventually falling asleep on the shiny red bench in the studio bathroom. I took graduate courses in glaze chemistry, I threw pots so big that I had to stand on a chair to make the last pull – the ceramic studio is where I found myself in college.

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A year ago, I set off into the woods to attend a 4 day meditation retreat. During my journey across the Golden Gate Bridge and all along the way to Fairfax where the retreat was situated, I couldn’t help but imagine what lay in store for me. I suppose I conjured images of myself sitting under a tree in a sort of blissfully serene state, solving all the world’s problems (or maybe just one or two of my own). I didn’t really have a clear expectation of what I would gain from the experience, but I figured I didn’t have much to lose either. I certainly didn’t imagine that meditating would be very hard, after all when you think about it you are doing…well, nothing.

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On the eve of my 30th birthday I find myself learning lessons I should have learned a long time ago.

I have a new rule. My new rule is that I do not work for friends. Working for friends is like lending your brother money or discussing politics with your extremely conservative best friend; you just don’t want to do it. Avoid the friend sand-trap snafu and you will be glad you did.

I guess this sounds pretty cynical and in truth I am really not a cynical person, it is just that I have been burned more times than I can count (or want to count for the sake of pride) on two hands.

Working for demanding clients can be difficult and frustrating at times, but by far some of the most frustrating experiences I have had as a designer is when I have agreed to do work for friends. This is a lesson I should have learned a long time ago because it has always yielded disastrous results, yet I continue to make the mistake over and over again simply because it is hard to say no. Saying “no” to a friend feels as icky as eating a steak dinner in front of a starving puppy. Never-the-less I am changing my ways (keep reading to find out why, or don’t and wonder…)

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Sharpcast announced a sister product to its already existing photos software. The new files product will do everything Sharpcast Photos does — sync across the web/PC/Mac/Mobile device and automatically back it all up.The product was nicknamed Hummingbird this weekend in a fit of creativity by Sharpcast CEO, Gibu Thomas. I had exactly an hour to bust out an icon and here is the result.

Sharpcast Desktop Organizer gets an icon make-over.

Over the past year and change I have been refining my icon creation skills. Making icons is deceptively difficult and time consuming, but there is something rewarding about drawing on a pixel level only to zoom out and see that the whole creation has depth and complexity.

Click the “Read More” link to see some recent additions to our icon library.

This past year has been a tumultuous one for me. In my struggle to get down to the heart of who I am, I have sought to become more independent. This show of independence most recently manifested itself in the form of a four day trip to the Appalachians where I enrolled myself in an Outward Bound course. I am not sure what I expected from the experience, but I will tell you one thing, it far exceeded any expectations I could have dreamed up. It was, simply put, the most terrifying, physically and mentally challenging experience I have had to-date.

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­­I am an obsessive packrat by nature. In fact, my desire to amass and accumulate is so strong, that in the past I have made a cross country move every few years in a vain attempt to encourage myself to simplify. Only then, do I seem able to extinguish the beguiling desire to keep that beat up old sweater I have had since 1994.

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I know this girl that is so lucky; it seems that everything she touches turns to gold. She isn’t rich, but she always seems to have a comfortable amount of money. She always gets her dream job and seems to continually find meaning and fulfillment in the things that she does. She is smart, charismatic, humble and interesting. It is enough to make you want to projectile vomit.

There have been times in my life where I have wished that I was as resilient as my friend. I often stand on the sidelines and watch her barreling into the unknown with abundant gusto heretofore unseen and I feel scared for her, worrying that she will get her hopes dashed. Truthfully though, I mostly feel envious.

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