Work

I’ve been designing and developing for the web for almost 14 years. I’ve been teaching people how to do it for more than 10 years. Where the hell did the time go?

I’m a right-brain dominant kind of guy, so you won’t catch me messing around with PHP, server configurations or databases any more than I have to. My focus was originally on “making things pretty” then evolved into “making things useful” and now sits somewhere around taking those first two and meshing them with “making things effective for your intended audience” which can be significantly harder to do.

I’m interested in how things work as a whole. Seeing patterns in the pieces and making them work well together. This means having an understanding of the underlying structures and processes, and the tools needed to make them work. Reading that back, it sounds kind of corny, so I’ll probably edit this at some point to make me sound more intelligent. In the meantime, suffice to say that I’m interested in exploring issues in:

• information architecture
• interaction design
• user experience design
• business analysis
• usability
• visual design & typography

All broad topics to be sure. But given that I spend more time on the strategic (read: meetings, meetings, meetings) side these days – as opposed to marking up XHTML and CSS – that should give you some indication of topics to be discussed. Having said that, I’m interested in expanding my knowledge of all things web-related, so the topics are sufficiently broad to allow me the freedom to explore at will.

Also, I wouldn’t mind designing my own theme for this blog. Given my design background, I feel kind of weird using a layout for my website that I didn’t create. I’ll take care of that in my spare time I guess.