Gradients is perhaps part of what defines “web 2.0″, or rather, the current trends in web design as per the last few years. The problem that I’ve seen thus far is the abuse of gradients – while it’s fine to use them (I, after all, use gradients on my own site design), it’s not so fine to over use them, or to use them improperly.

Gradients can create a very visually appealing site which pulls the audience in – or they can be overly distracting and cliche’d. So let’s take a look at a few sites which use such gradients. Read more »

One of the biggest sins our society has made is its creation of lies. Lies and slander, even, concerning the educational system in particular. We tell our students that they are preparing themselves for life by getting their college degree, and that by getting this slip of paper after four years of work they will be able to step out immediately into the real world. Just check out the University of California sites – their way of enticing students to pay a higher price for their education is to show very exceptional students who are being hired right out of school.

The problem I have with this is my own experience. I have already learned for myself that the world does not work this way. Part of why I have chosen to attend college in a field other than design is that I know that yes the degree helps, but I also know that design is a very difficult field to enter into, especially without a very strong resume. Read more »

The past few months have been absolutely amazing. I can’t really describe it any better than that; I realize I haven’t updated in quite a time, but part of this is because the passage of time has absolutely flown by.

I realized today that I was never able to update my portfolio. Well, that’s okay; I did get caught up in one or two other projects I was working on, admittedly.

The last few days, the weather has been almost perfect. We’ve had some rain storms, and a few times the power lines have come down. I read some statistic that Sacramento has more trees per square inch than people, so I find this all right; the longest we had was one that lasted for a few hours. It definitely beat out Louisiana, which had weeks and weeks of power outages at a time. Read more »

It feels strange changing the header on my emails, but that’s what this week has turned into: change.

This week, I am moving six hundred miles away from Las Vegas, Nevada, into the city of Sacramento, California, in part to further my education in software engineering (I am learning this to further my programming skills; I will still be designing) as well as to look into more design-type jobs.

While Las Vegas has plenty of jobs in my area of expertise, I am looking forward to the change. It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now that I finally have the opportunity, I’ve definitely become terribly excited over it. I will be leaving Las Vegas Thursday morning and stopping in Fresno for the night, and then continuing onward and upwards to Sacramento the following Friday morning. Read more »

Life is a river; it is always changing and moving with rhythm and time. It’s not always refreshing, but it certainly has plenty of rocks along the way.

Lately I’ve been looking back a bit, at the same time as forward. I’m enjoying the present one day at a time, but there are moments during which I am reminded of something from childhood. Today, someone I’m following on Twitter linked some older pictures from the original (and best) Star Wars. What a great piece of history, I thought to myself. I remember watching the original movies when I was really young. At the time, we didn’t have DVD players, and music came on casette tapes. We didn’t have Black Eyed Peas, and rock was still the major form of music style – there wasn’t really much in the way of “rap” that took the mainstream until much later.

I remember that my mom practically raised my brother and I on real originals. Things like The Neverending Story, The Labyrinth, and a mess of other Jim Henson movies – and alongside those, like a great sage in and of itself, the original Star Wars trilogy. What she didn’t realize at the time was that she had just made the recipe to create a daughter who grew to be an absolute technology junky and a geek to the core. I bear these titles with pride. Read more »