As any designer worth their salt, while I am without a full-time job, I want to take the downtime to work on some personal projects and do some freelance work with some folks I know in town

The first project I am going to be working on is a really interesting idea: Branding America. If our entire country was a visual brand, how would we advertise ourselves to the rest of the world? There is a lot of potential in such a wide open theme, and some possible themes that come to mind immediately are political, economical, and industrial.

I can definitely see interesting web banners and a site coming out of a project like this, but I’m wondering if it might be nice to also do a printed piece…

Oh well, dont want to get too ahead of myself, this is just a rough idea sketched in the mind so far.

I must admit, I have not always been a huge fan of Firefox for Mac, but the plugins available for FF are just great. Firebug in particular is a awesome tool to debug the xhtml and css on sites like this one, and if you’ve been here before you may notice small changes here and there. I really went through the site, trying as much as possible to adhere to a pretty strict grid, but the glory of xhtml and css is it’s not the same thing for all users. Firebug really helped me cut down the time of tracking down lines of css by having a great split screen UI in the FF browser that very much resembles the split screen of Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

The icing on the cake is that in addition to viewing the code, you can alter the code and see a real-time version of what that alteration would look like. Mind=Blown.

When one thinks of the Super Bowl, thoughts of the best advertisements pop culture has to offer usually follows a close second to thoughts of actual football. So synonymous are the two, that to hold the Super Bowl commercial free would probably bring uproar of furious proportions–even by those who would normally prefer their viewing go uninterrupted. And usually they would be correct in thinking the ads would at very least be entertaining, if not quotable by the mornings water cooler chatter. This year however, it seems even the best advertisements were pretty uncreative, and the worst of them outright obnoxious. I think the most interesting commercial I saw was for McDonalds–a take on the “classic” commercial of Larry Bird and Michael Jordan playing in an empty stadium making impossible shots to win a Big Mac sandwich. Pretty lame when the best you an really do is emulate something you’ve already done decades ago.

Back when I was attending Ringling, I held a variety  of jobs–everything from making espresso at the local opera house to mixing paint at a Home Depot. Somehow through the trials and tribulations of all these jobs I saved enough to purchase my first good quality printer, a Canon i9900. At the time I had to print on several different paper types at sizes from the very small to 13″x 19″ almost on a daily basis, and the i9900’s 8 separate ink tanks appealed to me. Also part of my choice was based on the Canon not being locked into a specific paper like many of the similarly equipped Epson models were. So I purchased the i9900, and it became a cornerstone of my computer design setup. (more…)