Hello, Comrade!
So has the sky fallen yet?
No? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
So has the sky fallen yet?
No? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Video from two opposing health care rallies in Columbus, Ohio. Here tea baggers mock a Parkinson’s victim.
So I got home from SxSW late on Tuesday. I didn’t recap the last couple of days of the event because I was catching up on sleep and fighting what I had thought was a wicked case of allergies. Turns out – walking pneumonia. (Also turns out that I managed to spell that word correctly the first time, which given the state of my woozy, drugged-up head right now, impresses the hell out of me, at least.) Yeah. I spent yesterday zoning out and finally got to the doctor late in the day when she delivered the bad news. So I’m forbidden to return to work for a couple days, and I’m on some wicked strong antibiotics and Mucinex.
I feel like poo.
And I feel like quite a douche, because I insisted to everyone that I wasn’t sick, that it was just allergies and I was really not contagious. I swear I thought that was the case; it really did feel just like when my allergies are out of control – runny nose, stuffed up head, sore throat. I didn’t have any other cold symptoms, and I didn’t feel bad enough to seek out a doctor (until Tuesday, when we were already flying home) and also felt like I had a responsibility to learn as much as I could while I was there. I’ve felt much worse at other times in the past, so this severe diagnosis makes me wonder. The thing that really sealed the deal was the two plane rides home though, where my ears popped and I couldn’t hear a thing, and my sinuses felt like they were going to jump out of my face from the air pressure changes. My left ear is still not right.
I so wanted this trip to Austin to go well.
Web Content Management Systems from a Designer’s Perspective
The Right Way to Wireframe, Part 1
4 different interaction designers took four different tools to prototype with. A number of things stood out for me:
1) Balsamiq is probably the wireframing tool we should be using.
2) They have a longer research/prototyping phase and peer reviews prior to showing work to clients.
3) There is a clear distinction between Interaction Design roles and visual/graphic design roles on all 4 of the teams involved – the two are separate people.
CSS Framework Shootout
The did an overview of four major CSS Frameworks. some of them we’ve already been playing with to consider possibilities of making our CSS cleaner and lighter. Lots of good information there. I need to explore OOCSS more closely because I think it may be the approach we take going forward.
CSS3 Design with HTML5
Lots of cool new stuff you can do with html 5 and CSS3 – doesn’t have complete cross-browser support, so we’d have to consider progressive enhancement and whether that would work for our clients.
CSS and Fonts: Fluid Web Typography
Jason Cranford Teague
My favorite panel so far. On Typography – the major change this year is that more browsers are starting to support embedding font types, so @font-face will work in more browsers. There are still EULA issues to think about, but this opens up new possibilities for us in terms of design.