Khaled, I’ll save the rhetoric and be blunt. You clearly have had more passion about Habari’s design over the long term and of late than anyone else. Anything in this that reads like an attack is probably coming across more strenuously than I meant it, and it’s not directed at you personally, but these specific ideas. Just to be clear.
You didn’t understand the intent of the original request for the logo.
Many designers (and the people that hire them) don’t realize or appreciate what happens on the development side of their web projects. Tweaking things a pixel this way or that for them is a matter of dragging it around in Photoshop until it looks good. They then hand it off to a developer expecting it’s done, when in reality we not only need to do the same thing they did (at least in terms of positioning, if not aesthetics), but we have to do it by typing in code that they’re typically completely incapable of producing themselves. Regardless of having to reproduce their designs in code, we frequently need at least rudimentary skills with design tools like Photoshop both to open their files and prepare their designs for the web, and the overlap is such that the only things we’re really missing are 4 years of design classes (trivial compared to what we’re forced by our profession to learn almost daily), and that harder to obtain ineffable sense of what “looks good”.
In addition to converting their designs to code, we often need to produce, install, or at least troubleshoot a back end that lets someone create content, make it account in some way for the fact that those content creators are going to screw up the designer’s pixel-perfect vision for the site with poorly-formed content, and code it all so that it scales over hundreds of pages that individually vary the one or two designs they’ve so elegantly produced. And too often, we’re left to explain issues to the client of why the site doesn’t do anything interactive (because there’s no design for it), or why their navigation colors won’t appear on top of the image that the client swaps in later (because it doesn’t magically change from low-contrast black to high-contrast white), or why search engines will never find that paragraph of text that absolutely must be in that bizzaro font in that weird texture pattern in front of that stock art I’ve seen lately on your competitor’s site.
On Saturday Berta and I attended the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference in Harrisburg. I presented a talk on the Business of Open Source Licening, which was well-received, but somewhat under the level of most of those who attended.
This year, the conference was at the Harrisburg University, which is a new school
Since Berta started her new job this summer, I’ve been responsible for getting the kids to school. I wake both kids at the same time, if Abby doesn’t get up on her own, and get them both ready in time for Abby’s bus. As the seasons change and the weather gets confusingly colder, it’s been difficult getting Riley ready for school in the mornings.
Riley is very picky about the clothes that he will wear. There is no pattern to his preferences as far as I can tell. He will seem to like the shirts with motocycles on them, and then the next day, hate all shirts with motorcycles. Also, I have to watch carefully to make sure that he doesn’t re-wear the Spiderrman socks day-to-day, since he seems to love those. But the biggest challenge in the colder weather has been switching to long sleeves and pants.
Do you do this at your home? Does everyone sit at the same seat around the dinner table every night? I wonder why that is.
Since we moved into this house, we’ve all seated ourselves at the kitchen table in the same seats. Part of the seating seems to be practicality - Berta sits closest to the kitchen, since she’s most often the one making dinner and having to run back and forth to get things. Me sitting opposite her seems natural to that, and the kids on either side, with Abby (being the elder of 3 years) sitting on her preferred side; the side near the windows, not looking out them into the sun in the evening.