Stefan Hayden

FeedLounge launched it’s alpha version (is that really a launch?) just days ago and it’s already generating a lot of buzz. From the sound of it I’m already preparing to make the switch. Reading others talk about rss I’m always surprised by the number of people who use desktop rss readers. As a college student (just graduated) I almost can not imagine that. Living in a world where I was up in campus life or the art labs for hours (or days) on end with out my rss reader handy is a painful thought. For these reason whenever I have been given a choice between desktop and web solutions I always chose web. Bloglines has served me in the way hotmail did the job in the 90s. Bloted, clumsey (ewww frames), hard to find help. I found the Bloglines’ help forum once and have never been able to find my way back to it since. I had hoped a quick redesign would have happened once Ask Jeeves bought it as several of google’s purchases seem to have undergone.

Bloglines was my first love and really introduced me to rss. I will never forget bloglines but I’ve been ready for a new rss relationship for a while now. I knew some one somewhere was working on a better solution and I think FeedLounge will be it.

AIGA’s Fresh Dialogue: Friendly Fire, which was their last event for the year and is the first AIGA event I have helped run, was a blast. Escorted by another TCNJer we quick found our selves out of place as all the SVA students seemed very well acquainted with the AIGA staff. Every one was very friendly and we ended up talking with some great people.

As an event it was fairly well planned. They had about 20 volunteers for an event that CUB would have only have had about 10. Mark Byron was well in control and used his large volunteer staff to good effect. He was able to cover a lot of bases that CUB would not have bother with like people at alternate entrances directing people to the correct one.

James Victore moderated and he is very colorful character but did not come across as the best moderator. At times he seemed unprepared though this maybe partly due to the odd nature of the talk. The 62 and the Crye Association (no site?) were not graphic design companies but more along the lines of industrial designers. I am all for the holistic approach to learning about design but James had a hard time bringing the conversation back to design. There was also little talk between the two groups till them end (at which point I had to go back up to get ready to sell books) about how The 62 kind of hates what the Crye Association does (a lot of military design).

Though it was less then a dialog and more of two sets of speakers talking in turn it was really interesting to see the work that both groups were doing. It nice to just be awear what others are doing with in the same industry as you even if you don’t have an interest in doing it your self.

Afterwards a lot of us went down to a very nice bar and hung out with the other volunteers, AIGA professional staff, and the presenters themselves. I’m not really a bar person but I had a lot of fun and talked to some amazing people including Robyn Jordan, one of the AIGA staff, who I got to talk a lot about the AIGA organization and its inner workings.

I had so much fun and really look forward to being involved in more organization up in Boston. Who says graduating from college is a bad thing? Not me.

No matter who complains you always have shadows of doubt. This, on top of the fact that design by committee never seems like a good idea, was why I was worried when 32 graphic designers had to agree on a theme for our Senior Portfolio Review (SPR). The meetings were a mess with no clear direction, leaders thrust into power with out any kind of training, and no clear deadline to be finnished by. I knew two things, our only hope was to pick 1 person to design it and let them work and I did not want it to be me*. Rachel had a great idea and direction of using CMYK because it is the core of what we use** and it would nicely show off the full color postcards we were printing. For all of our sake she was chosen after some preliminary designs and we were all very happy with the results.

Until we sent it all out and two TCNJ alumni had not so nice words about our SPR theme of CMYK. One of our best teachers assured that the one student was horrible and to not listen to a word he says and the other was so insignificant that he could not even remember her***. We all knew what he said to assure us was true and got angry at the alumni instead of depressed for ourselves. We pushed on and the SRP was an amazing success.

While it didn’t bother us the shadows of doubt had lingered in the back of our minds. No one wanted to be called a hack as you were graduating. We were never fully vindicated till I found an article from LogoLounge.com about Fifteen trends in logo design for 2005. On page three I was shocked to find CMKY as a design trend! Even if you disagree with the trend I am beyond happy to know we were with the times with out consciously thinking about what other people where doing. We did what felt right and it worked.

I’m not recommending being trendy but it’s hard to deny that graphic design is very close to fashion design and trends are important in both. It’s a fine line to walk and I’m happy that it seems our senior class walked it very well.

• CUB, ResLife and Campus Life we’re gonna be the death of me. ** though being the odd one out with web I used RGB. ** He then went crazy himself and started psychoanalyzing the people the email was CCed to.

I’m kinda hot and istead of be original I’ve decided to just ReBlog:

Now available at Rhizome: a Raw RSS feed! http://rhizome.org/syndicate/raw.rss Right now this feed re-posts the entire text as posted originally. So it's suitable for reading, reposting, etc., etc. There are now three separate ways to track the discussion on Raw: by email, by web, and by RSS syndication feed. I set the feed to track the last 40 items, which right now means it's a sort of big feed, at 87k. Of course with Raw's traffic the way it is, the resulting feed only tracks about the last 36 hours worth of posts. I'm considering excerpting some of the bigger posts, and having more posts per feed, if 36 hours isn't enough ... anyway, let me know if you're using it and have suggestions for it. This is one of those things that we couldn't have done three weeks ago. I hope y'all find it useful. Francis Hwang Director of Technology Rhizome.org

While gMapTrack still seems kinda of buggy it really looks like it will be as full featured as I had mentioned previously. I really wish google has taken the initiative and added this functionality themselves. It would have blended in nicely with their Google Account system they have going. I’m extra interested in this technology because, as of now, google maps does not list my house on their maps and for the google fanatic I am it’s a little embarrassing.

gMapTrack seems to still be rolling out alot of features (they say this coming Monday) and so I’ll restrain from giving it a review using hReview that’s I’ve been itching to use. I’m looking forward to tagging the world. I would love this to integrate with hCard (my current obsession) and let me up load my contacts and then view their location on the map.