When going into design, the majority of students are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They were the kid who was always drawing and painting, the one whose parents probably covered their fridge in water colors. So, they would certainly think I’m crazy to say they should also program.

However, design is not art.

There, I said it.

One of the most common misconceptions I receive from my family is that I am in some shape or form an artist. While I do illustrations (such as the one pictured in this post – which, by the way, was inspired by this Adobe Illustrator coffee cup tutorial), I do not consider myself an artist. Granted, I am currently working toward a degree in software engineering, with design as my secondary major (and the way I put the food on the table), but this is why I have come to the conclusion that programming is an invaluable skill to any designer. Read more »

It seems to me that spammers are getting more and more creative.

One of the most recent spams I received was actually through two IM conversations. The first was on GTalk; I have a GTalk account set up specially for BeLink’d to communicate with clients et cetera without utilizing my personal account. Well, I received a friend request; not sure what it was, I accepted.

Later that day, while working on a site, I received an IM asking if it was a good time to discuss web development software that I had been solicited in the past over my work line. I told said marketer to please remove me from their contact list when they initially called me, and now I was being IM’d by them.

And that wasn’t the last time. I also use Skype for personal, and received a friends request from a random person. I add them… and it turns out to be yet another marketer. Wonderful. Blocked and removed; the major annoyance, however, is that now they attempt to message me and send me notifications, which are… excessively annoying. Read more »

I am a Mac person. However, before I entered the world of Apple, I was a PC person.

I was introduced to Mac through Dre, who manages the server-side issues of this site. I wanted a computer I could do development and design work on, yet at the same time use casually.

Frankly, once you go Mac, you never honestly go back. Read more »

So, I’ve recently begun to work in an office once again, as opposed from home.

I can’t complain. In many ways I prefer to work in an office; instead of having to shoot off emails, for the most part I can just lean over to the next office and say whatever I need, request whatever I need, et cetera, in addition to being able to see things as they happen or from the other person’s screen. Read more »

I will begin by stating that jQuery has certainly made everyone’s life much, much easier. Specifically, I find that I enjoy the toggle function.

You see the little RSS icon on my bar over there? You know, the orange square. Click it – I dare you. See how nice and easy that text appears? Well, you can add a nice, easy, and cute RSS feed to your own site as well.

All it takes is a little bit of imagination, a few snippets of code, and an even smaller amount of jQuery. Read more »