Even though I can’t really believe it, today is my last day at Alamo Architects. Thinking back, I realized that this place has seen me get married, have kids, graduate from college, through countless all-nighters, and all the ups and downs that you can imagine would happen to a person in what might prove to be the most transitional five years of their life. If I had to sum up Alamo Architects in one word (which is so cliche, I know) that word would have to be: Patient.
All the time I thought these guys would surely get tired of me dragging my ass into the office after having stayed up all night doing something. Surely there was some limit, some threshold to their patience. I can honestly say I never saw that threshold. The odd thing about this is not that it exists, but that it exists in five men who have worked together spiritedly for the past 23 years towards a common goal.
I had the chance, a week or two ago, to thumb through a set of drawings which were out on the table over by Eve’s desk. It was a very large set of drawings which were crafted with leadholders and mylar in 1984 for the Fairmount Hotel. In those drawings hides much more than is apparent to the naked eye. Teamwork, countless nights of sacrifice together, arguments, discussions, jokes and cracks and knocking off, and an incredible display of refined skill and dedication, are seen by those who know. (Also, only those who know would be able to tell that that’s Mike McGlone’s lettering on Irby’s drawings…;) )
The worst part about leaving this place is losing a daily, close connection with 50 of my best friends. Each one of you whether you realize it or not, has influenced me in some way…
I’m a big fan of Carl Jung.
I haven’t read all of his work, in fact I haven’t read as much as I should. But one concept that rings clear to me is the concept of synchronicity. Really, I feel that syncronicity, as Jung describes in, while he covers it with fantastic attention to detail, is only one facet of the phenomenology of perception and fits somewhere into a much bigger picture of how everything, including ideas are connected through space and time.
Lately, I have been focusing on expanding my network in order to create an avenue through which I can gather resources and work, and perhaps a few account clients. Having worked for architecture firms (attacking the hydra of architectural design and marketing) which were in a relatively small, very specialized niche, I know quite a bit about social and political networking, but I have found myself wondering how to go about creating a professional network.
As I was walking out on the front porch to grab my bag out of the car, I noticed a spider that my father-in-law had been complaining about for a couple of months now. Last week he said, “Tim, if that spider bites me, I’m going to rack you.” He hasn’t really been bothering me or anyone else, so I’ve just sort of let him stay up there and hang out.
Tonight, he was spinning a web. I stopped to look at what he was doing. The primary methodology was simple, but there was a surprise at the end.
- The spider was tracing the circular strands diligently across the set of radials he had created.
- The spider was using his resources to create nodes on the web. If a node presented a difficulty, the spider would noticeably force the node. Much of this was done using the spiders secondary line of resources, the hind legs.
- As the spider finished the work, he carefully inspected the web.
- Then, the spider jumped out to one of the outer regions of the web and began to twitter and jump around the area, as to test the general strength of the web.
- Finally, the spider completely let go of the web and fell into a freefall. Using a thread which he had attached to the center of the web, he caught himself and hung as dead weight, as to further test the strength of the web
I have collected quite a few books on various web design techniques (which I will cite and review throughout the article,) and some of the content that I value most in the work are the areas in which the author shows how to incorporate the various techniques into a workflow.
Documenting a workflow is difficult. If a creative professional has a skill set made up of tools, then the workflow could be seen as their toolbox. I might have screwdrivers of all lengths and sizes for every type of screw possible, but I might organize them according to common application. Certain tools might be organized neatly in their drawers while other tools are thrown into the top compartment for experimentation and trying out.
In the realm and era of Web 2.0, we’re beginning to see more and more people discussing what Web 2.0 is and how to design for the new Web. As exciting as it is for the Web to be entering this new phase, I feel a little hollow about all the articles I’ve seen with titles like “Web 2.0 fonts” or “Web 2.0 design how-to guide.” In architecture, the same concept is considered a “movement.” Of course, those who follow a movement, always attempt to discredit those who follow a different one and make serious attempts to set themselves apart from the rest of the herd.
What we haven’t seen, because the web itself is so young, is very much of this kind of division. We do see, however, rifts in the web development community concerning the best practice for storing, retrieving, accepting and interacting with the data which is centric to the Web 2.0 movement. Proprietary content management and operating systems are becoming more and more obsolete, while the open-source community grows at an exponential rate. The number of completely free and community-supported platforms and frameworks available to the newcomer is overwhelming. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m currently reading Ruby for Rails by David A. Black, and I highly recommend the book to anyone who is attempting to learn the Rails framework. I started working with web languages a little over two years ago, and as i haven’t had much time to throw at it, I feel like I’ve made a little progress, but not as much as I’d like.
I feel like Ruby has supercharged not only my interest in object-oriented web programming, but also my ability to understand the concepts and capabilities of an OOP language. I certainly would not reveal all the secrets that Black invests into his book, and I won’t pull the examples directly, but as a reinforcement to what I’ve learned, I’ll document a few of the concepts here. Read the rest of this entry »
I wanted to write my own blogging platform. I wanted to write it in Ruby on Rails. Finally, I said, “Ah, what the hell.” I figure that I can export the whole thing to XML and so whatever I want with it, once I learn how to do that, anyways.
So many times, I’ve searched and scoured the net trying to find some tutorial about something which is so simple. I usually find what I need, but only after assembling bits and pieces of things I pick up from various places. I know I could post a whole bunch of tutorials on how to do and create various and sundry things in Illustrator, how to maximize performance and quality of product in InDesign, or how to get around AutoCad, Sketchup or the RadRails IDE a little faster. I also have a bunch of skills I rarely get to use in assembling the right computer for the job, or how to make a nice smoking pipe out of a MagLite. Perhaps some of those might show up too. Read the rest of this entry »
