David John Mead

Brad Colbow on how “not making the logo bigger”…

Lean Dog opened the doors to their office (which is really a boat) to the CWSA tonight, letting us hear Brad Colbow’s presentation titled “Don’t make the logo bigger! Happiness for you and your clients”.

Giving us a whirlwind tour through his early steps in web design, which included some of his first concepts, Brad then stepped us through some of the pointers he’s picked up along the way.

“Design should never say ‘Look at me’. It should always say ‘Look at this’”.
David Craib

Sharing stories that we’ve all had to stumble through from time to time, like the ever changing background color and lack of content or client direction, Brad then laid out some tips that he’s gained by confronting the problems head-on.  These have now helped his freelance career, securing work for Starbucks, NationBuilder, and working with Jeremy Keith on an upcoming project.

It was a great presentation, and gave me a chance to meet up with some familiar faces in a cool space, exactly the kind of thing that the CWSA excels at. Brad also writes and draws an online comic strip called ‘The Brads‘.

Technorati tags: bradcolbow, presentation, cwsa, web, design, freelance, cleveland, ohio, july

A seemingly British week in Cleveland…

For some reason this week has been, for us at least, very British.
I got a photo from my wife during this week of an old British bakers van (Hovis to be specific). Not too interesting I suppose, except it was driving through Mentor!

Two guys, from very close to where we lived in the UK, were recreating a race across America in Ford Model-T’s.  You can follow their exploits on their website.

Then, returning from Amazone (great fun, but I’m not all that at Lasertag), we stopped off at Gaelic Imports. If you live around Cleveland you have to stop in and grab some of their fantastic baked good. I stocked up with some sausage rolls, pasties and bakewell tarts amongst other things. I also grabbed one of their breakfast pies. They are just so tasty!

We also picked up some canned goods from “back home” too.  Now these are hard times I know, but when someone if baking this stuff fresh, and its so cheap, you’ve gotta support them.  They also sell through Reilly’s at the Westside Market.

Technorati tags: british, food, baked, race, cleveland, ohio

The connectedness strikes again…

So I’m catching up on my RSS feeds and I saw that Jon Hicks posted about one of my favorite bands, Stars of the Lid.  They are releasing a film (not until 2010 mind you) of what looks like a series of live performances, similar to Sigur Ros’s excellent Heima.

Stars of the Lid . teaser 1 from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Now the people that made this also had some footage of dancers, shot on the amazing new red camera (which I just read about in Wired). When I took a look at that, I recognized the background as W6th in Cleveland, just outside my old employer, Optiem.

MorrisonDance pt.l from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Never take for granted how people will find you on the internet. Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to add some Dead Texan and SOTL to a favtape of mine.