I had the opportunity to attend the 4th annual Ignite Boulder a few weeks ago and had a wonderful time. For those who have not heard of Ignite, I would highly recommend checking out their website. In short, however, Ignite is described as:

“A night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides, that automatically advance after 15 seconds.”

I think my favorite of the night was “My Mom Just Joined Facebook. Now What?” by Ryan Wanger, but “‘Ye Olde Prince of Bel-Air’, a medieval translation” by David Mason followed in a close second.

The first annual Ignite Fort Collins will be happening on May 28th, and tickets go on sale tomorrow morning at 9:25 a.m. Hope to see you all there!

For the past couple of months, I have been busy designing and developing a website for my friend Ryan’s band, Ephesus. The site has finally launched – please check it out!

As this is one of the first sites I have designed myself in a long time, I wanted it to be good. When I get in designing mode, I find that what looked great to me the night before looks like crap the following morning. I have no formal training in design other than all the books and websites I’ve read, and what may take a professional designer 6 hours may end up taking me 3 days. I don’t mind, though, as it’s always a great learning process. The one thing I’ve learned from every design project I’ve done, though, is that things can always be better. I’d like to use the Ephesus site as an example. Here is the first mockup I sent Ryan back in early January:

Not very pretty, eh? It looked great to me at the time (after 4 hours of messing in Photoshop, at least). After sitting on it for awhile, I came up with mockup number 2 in early February:

Better. I still felt like it was missing something, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I put the design on hold for the time being while I worked on the content/functionality of the site. Then one day in late April, it hit me. I knew exactly what it was missing, and I came up with this:

Now, that’s more like it. As I was driving home one day, I realized that I needed to incorporate more “hand drawn” elements into the template to go along with Ephesus’ signature hand-drawn guitar logo that I used in the background. I also wanted to incorporate some Polaroid photos to go along with their jacket art on their CD, and doing this allowed me to free up some room at the top and position the sidebar differently. Of course, I’m sure even this layout could be loads better, but I’m pretty happy with it, considering it’s my first major design in about 2 years.

Lesson learned (in case you didn’t get it above): things can always be better!