I’m thinking I need another sweet toy to add to the collection to help build some motivation. My office is running stale with the same old gadgets and we all know how much a new piece of equipment can spice up the office life. Not sure if it’s a new computer, monitors, paint, desk, lamps, time capsule, iPhone.. who knows. I do think it’s time to make a little purchase. With the looming announcement of the new iPhone I don’t think I’ll be falling for that one. I just got mine back in December. I don’t have any real complaints about it, so I’m going to try and tune myself out from anything iPhone 2.0. Now if they want to release a new monitor or some other sweet gadget for me to spend my cash on, great.

If anyone has some other ideas of a sweet new tech toy that would help for the office, let me know.

I wonder sometimes, when building a new site, does design even matter that much? Sure there are things like making sure the navigation and certain elements are easy to find.. I get that. But do the actual designed elements of the site even matter? Take a look at www.paparazzi-boutique.com and tell me if you find that at all visually appealing? At first glance to me, I was repulsed. There are so many bad things going on with the site, but the navigation is relatively easy to find, the basic functions of the site work, and it loads alright.

Reena took a look at this site and couldn’t see anything wrong with it. She thought it was fine and couldn’t understand why I had such a problem with it. Granted she does spend 10 hours on Myspace everyday, so her idea of “design” is a little skewed. Now what really gets my blood boiling with a site like this is how someone can pay a company to design and develop something like this, and then on top of that, go back to this company and have them develop a shopping cart system as well.

Does the average user, the main visitor of a site, really care if the site is visually appealing, or do they just care about getting the information they need? Does it matter how that information is delivered? Has Myspace ruined any progress that the design world has tried to make in the last 10 years?

In the last two weeks I have been consumed with freelance projects and working with a bunch of people that contacted me through my portfolio site. The site was featured in a handful of showcase galleries, so that response has been awesome. I really appreciate everyone checking it out and all of the positive feedback. I don’t really consider my work anything extraordinary, but it’s nice to hear the comments and encouragement from others.

Last weekend I also made the jump to Leopard Mac OS 10.5. My initial reaction was, “Wow, this looks beautiful.” The screenshots that I saw did not do the enhancements justice. My favorite feature might be time machine. When I purchased Leopard I also got another external hard drive, just for that. It has already saved my world once. I was having some trouble with Firefox, so I thought deleting it and re-installing would work. It did, but then I lost all of my bookmarks, passwords, usernames, everything.. Just flipped back a few days with Time Machine and grabbed the necessary files. Bam, back to normal.

I don’t know if it’s because I only did a fresh upgrade to Leopard or what, but I do notice a couple little quirks. For instance, when I drag a file from Finder onto my desktop, sometimes the icon/file doesn’t appear. I have to adjust the grid positioning on the desktop and they just magically appear. Firefox is also a pain in Leopard. I don’t think I can go an entire session without having to restart Firefox a couple times. It just locks up and I have to force it to quit. Another little thing is when I click to open finder, it doesn’t always come into focus. That happens to a couple other programs as well. I also had a problem with conflicting fonts. I have hundreds of fonts on my system and when i re-installed Leopard a couple were duplicated I guess. I just went through and deleted the problems and so that was easily fixed.

Ok that probably seems like a lot of problems, and it is, but that is expected from a new release, especially from Apple. They are notorious for releasing things that are bug ridden. But with all of that, I still really enjoy using Leopard. The look is still very impressive and I have faith that updates are soon on their way to fix these little things.

Well that’s about it for now. Sorry for the delay in postings, just been so consumed in these other projects lately. There was one post between now and last one where Leeks wanted to “F” the Red Sox but I thought it would be best to censor him. He said he was going to post about “The Man” holding the little guy down, but I just said I would censor that too. Alright well back to work.

Smashing Magazine is always coming up with massive lists of just about everything on the web and tools for developers/designers. Their recent posting is exactly what I am looking for. I am a huge fan of reference books and inspiration ideas. 80 percent of my library consists of books with tutorials, how-to, inspirations, latest trends, and just about everything else dealing with web development/design. Everything I know today is from teaching myself and learning from books and others. So anyways this list is 40 or more of the best books for Web development. Definitely check them out. 40+ Books for Professional Design & Development

I took my monthly stroll to Barnes and Noble last night, to pick up a copy of Web Designer. It’s probably one of the best magazines. They are always full of awesome tutorials and things to get some other ideas rolling. In this issue they had an awesome tutorial on creating a expanding photo gallery with jQuery and Thickbox, using Interface. I have piece together the final outcome from the tutorial. Go check it out and let me know what you think.

Smooth Photo Gallery

GoDaddy.com just announced they will be offering “Custom built” websites along with their hosting and other such services. GoDaddy is probably the leader in hosting and now people will be using these Frontpage designs. From the screenshots they have (main page) they seem to be an extension of the Myspace realm. There is this mis-conception out there that any website is a good website, and I really believe the world of Myspace has punished web

It has been a long long time since any type of post. I just wanted to apologize for the lack of attention. It has been a pretty crazy last month, well not really but I like to sound as if I’m busy. I have been working on a few new web projects, creating logos, finished up some print materials, and moving Bryce down to Florida. Reena and I have also started some house shopping, so things are getting pretty

My brother has a seminar that he’s speaking at tomorrow night so we decided to spruce up the nYq Design Studio site just a bite. Give it a fresh new feel and something with a little more substance and capable growth. The new site will give us many features we didn’t have or were limited to with the old design. Obviously the text and content is still being developed but we should have something together in time for his