Grafiks.org

Siteseeing - TED: Ideas worth spreading

Posted by Emily | Filed under ideas, inspiration, siteseeing

TED: Ideas worth spreading
“TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration.”

Visit to Silicon Valley and elsewhere

Posted by Emily | Filed under corporations, google, travel

Last week I was able to visit the Silicon Valley area for the first time. Although it was not the purpose of the trip, it was great to visit the “leading high-tech hub” in the US. I stayed with some friends in Mountain View who live a few blocks from Google (pictures may be posted soon). I learned that Google offered to give free WiFi to the whole town of Mountain View (more about that here and here). My friends who live there did not get it because it apparently runs fairly slowly and contains advertisements. What can you expect though, it is free after all.

While I was in CA I also got took a tour of Current TV where my friend Stephanie works. It’s definitely a cool place, as well as a cool network. It was started 2 years ago by Al Gore, and the concept behind it is to cut out the middle man and create media content for viewers, by viewers, giving regular citizens the opportunity to “create and influence what airs on TV”. They also just won an Emmy Award this year, not too shabby.

Desktop Background #2

Posted by Emily | Filed under design, desktop backgrounds

Download this background - 1024 x 768

Desktop Background #1

Posted by Emily | Filed under design, desktop backgrounds

I am in the process of creating some desktop backgrounds for people to download on this site. Here is one I just created:

Grafiks Wallpaper
Download this background - 1024 x 768

More to come soon!

Web Super Powers

Posted by Emily | Filed under opinion

As web designers, developers and all around web gurus, I believe we have the ability to impact our world and society around us more than most. Whether we do so or not is up to us, but we certainly have great avenues to do so. With the right strategy and technique you can potentially launch a website that reaches thousands to millions of people. I mean, sure, technically anyone can sign up for a free blog or website and start writing content that attracts many visitors, but with the ability to tweak and write code comes great power. Although, with great power comes great responsibility, so they say. Use your powers wisely!

For the love of WordPress

Posted by Emily | Filed under cms, resources, webdev, wordpress

Out of all of the open source Content Management Systems that I have dabbled with, I am becoming more and more fond of using WordPress as a CMS. The latest version 2.2 makes it even easier to do this. Here are some good links to check out if you are interested:

Portfolio revamping and Poetic Terrorism

Posted by Emily | Filed under Portfolio, design, poetic terrorism

My portfolio is currently undergoing major construction. If all goes well it will be launched sometime early next week. Revamp checklist:

Remove funky, outdated code and update appropriately
Remove untouched 6 year old websites from my portfolio
Possibly create a new design altogether

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome. Also, I recently launched this one page experimental website:

Poetic Terrorism

The site is based on the essay The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchy by Hakim Bey, and right now consists of one page with the excerpt. Within two weeks it succeeded being one of the top Google listings for ‘poetic terrorism’, but I’ll eventually have it branch out to contain much more info. My hopes are to create a site in which people will submit their own stories of acts of poetic terrorism, or submit artwork, similar to this recent photoshop creation of mine:

Unless you have superhuman powers, chances are you cannot read the text in the graphic above. View the enlarged version here!Â

David Carson

Posted by Emily | Filed under design, inspiration, opinion

As much as I love David Carson (my favorite graphic designer), his website seems like it could use a lot of help.

An Event Apart, some links

Posted by Emily | Filed under alistapart, conferences, design, resources, webdev

Back in March I attended An Event Apart, Boston at the Boston Marriott Copley, and was priviliged to see such great speakers as Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, and… the list goes on. I was also surprised to see that the majority of the web developers, designers, and tech geeks there used Macs and not PCs. Go figure!

Here is a list of links I compiled (aka scribbled in the back of my notebook) throughout the conference, for your viewing pleasure:

Microformats - “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”
Yahoo! Developer Network
WebTypography.net - The elements of typographic style, applied to the web
Position Is Everything - Info on CSS bugs, behaviors, and table-less layouts
Firebug - A great Firefox add on for web developers