I am sure this is a problem for anyone that has had a design featured on CSS galleries. People will take those designs and just rip them completely. They don’t bother changing any part of the site, except a simple logo adjustment. It’s one thing to take a design and use it as influence, but when you completely rip a design and then take credit for the items in that portfolio, that crosses the line. Usually these rips are from firms/designers outside of the US, which makes it impossible to pursue any legal action. Luckily for me, this tool is homegrown.

The Fake BrettNyquist.com

The Original Portfolio Design

This douche even felt like ripping my resume. Copied the objective and modified one of my job positions to reflect his own. The reason why people like this disgust me is the fact they are using someone elses work to get more clients, apply for jobs. I don’t have as much of a problem with this tool completely ripping the design and resume as I do with him taking credit for the work that I have done. There really needs to be an easier way to exploit these designers and easier legal action to attack them. Luckily for me, one of the sites he wishes to take credit for, is a local law firm that would be more than willing to help me out in possible action.

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?

I like taking a trip every now and then to Barnes and Noble to pick up the most recent Practical Web Design magazine. I then find myself browsing through all of the other techie books that I should really read. I get about 3 or 4 in my hand then add up the prices on those bad boys. It’s usually always over 100 dollars. I mean 100 dollars is a small price to pay to help better your computer hacking skills.. but it’s still 100 dollars. What I have been doing lately is checking out the books I want real quick then once I get home just jump on Amazon. I can find ALL the books I want for half price easily.

Last night I had magazines/books that would have totaled about 130 bucks. I was about 2 minutes from just getting them because I’m extremely impatient like that. Instead I put them back and hopped on Amazon when I got home. Got everything for 50 bucks. The other awesome thing about Amazon, is their shipping. For some reason even if you just get the standard shipping rate, you’ll have your order in about 2 days. It’s pretty sweet buying something on Saturday and it showing up on your doorstep on Monday.. without having to fork over 30 bucks for overnight delivery. Amazon is definitely the way to go.

I think with all of the debates going on and the races starting to heat up, the candidates need to start discussing real issues. Issues like clean code, valid XHTML, usability, and coolness. Each candidate has rather up to date websites, in terms of look and standards. All are filled with ads, flashy galleries, sign-up forms every where, videos from YouTube. For me, my vote is going to come down to who has the cleanest XHTML, great use of standards and usability, because a candidate that cares about their site, cares about the people.

Worst Code
Taking a look underneath the hood of each site, you’ll be able to see just how well these sites are groomed. While all of them are up to date with certain 2.0 trends, there are a few that missed the boat. John McCain takes the Worst Code award. Very disorganized and bloated with inline JavaScript. Sorry but I just can’t look a candidate in the eye and believe what they are saying when they have coding practices like this. Coming in a close second is Mitt Romney. Full inline CSS style sheet just isn’t very 2008.

Most Like a Billboard
The winner of this category goes to Hill-Dawg. This site is piled high with ads or announcements that look like ads. I wonder if she has those tied into Google Adwords and just gets paid by herself for serving them, bold strategy. The rest don’t have a huge amount of advertising and actually cram a lot of content in the correct places.. so points to everyone else cept Hill-Dawg on this one.

Best Logo Design
Obama has by far the best logo of the bunch. It’s intuitive and fitting, really presents him the best. Others have various renditions of the flag or else there’s McCain who just has a standard Photoshop shape of a star as his logo. Minus 5 points for McCain again. I think a lot of thought went into creating Obama’s logo and it definitely shows in the end results. Obama 10 everyone else 2, except McCain who’s sitting at negative 10.

Best Color Scheme
This is a tough one to judge because it’s a little hard to waiver from the red, white, and blue.. but I think Obama shows the best use of a great palette. The vibrant blues and reds show off well with glowing accents and other effects throughout the site. A few others use a rather dull and boring palette, but McCain once again scores at the bottom with his use of heavy black tones. Trust me it’s nothing personal against McCain, I just don’t like him.

Overall Design Concepts
Huckabee’s is probably the most bloggish looking site, but with Chuck Norris on his back I don’t really want to go any further on that one. Guiliani I think, has the best integrated video player. Almost every other candidate went the easy route and just embedded some other video source. Best rotating feature pane goes to Obama, surprise surprise. It flows very well with the rest of the site and doesn’t look like every other rotating pane.

Conclusion
Adding up the points, looks like Obama wins with a score of 124 while the next closest, Ron Paul comes in at 34. This rating system is based solely on the time of day and how many cups of coffee I have had at that time. Other notables are Hill-Dawg with 8 points, and John McCain comes in at -17 points. So looks like based on these issues, which every true American should weigh, Obama is the clear favorite in 2008.

I have been looking for posters to put up in the office for awhile. I was specifically interested in the ISO50 posters and was looking around for them for awhile. The other day I was dropping Tommy off at this detailing shop when right next door I notice these posters. They had boxes and boxes full of them, the exact same ones I was looking for. I immediately got out of the truck and took a look. Apparently, tucked away between a detailing shop and a auto repair shop is a place called Merchline.

Merchline specializes in online store fronts for bands, artists, etc.. They had all of the ISO50 prints right there. They also had hundreds and hundreds of t-shirts, stickers, hats, cds.. anything and everything. We talked for the guys running the place and they were awesome. There are only three of them that do all of the online orders, packaging, shipping, inventory, updating.. everything for the sites. They have a huge list of clients. I definitely recommend checking them out.

I just posted some photos to my Flickr Account.. They are picture taken on our little trip up to Orlando to check out the Ikea store. We walked out with a bunch of stuff for the house and saved a butt load too. I can’t believe how inexpensive that store was. It was kind of a pain to have to put everything together but it was really easy. I also got a couple new monitors this past weekend. I finally upgraded to a 23″ monitor to help out with all of the design work that has been flowing in. When I first got it, it had a dead pixel right in the middle of the screen. Luckily the people at the Apple store were awesome enough to swap it out for me. Gotta love great customer service.

Anyways hope you enjoy the pictures. More will come. Well don’t count on that though cause the time between this batch and the last one was around 6 months.. so don’t get your hopes up.

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.