SelecTrucks
Three SelecTrucks sites launched this month: Las Vegas, Charlotte, and Springfield. Vegas is a funny design, kinda dirty like a worksite, Charlotte is obviously Nascar-themed, and Springfield... Well, let's just say that Springfield is special. Dave, the designer, said that it was something he comped up for fun, and was suprised when the client went with it. It's a fun little design, and I enjoyed helping out with it.
LifeWorks NW
LifeWorks NW had been working with us for quite awhile on a complete redesign of their site, and in July I was assigned to apply some finishing touches and bring the site to Alpha. I was able to do this around the middle of the month, and immediately started working on preparations to push the site into Beta. This site was a challenge for me to work on, because I hadn't been very involved early on, so a lot of my time was spent figuring out how things were being done, and adapting my workflow to match. Still, the design is great, and I'm looking forward to finishing it up.
Tufte Course
This month I was invited to attend an Edward Tufte event, which was fantastic. You may have heard of Tufte from Wired magazine, who published an article of his called "PowerPoint is Evil." He is all about the display of information, and despite the rather dry titles of his books (such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), he's fascinating. During his lecture, he briefly summaried all four of his books (which we all got free copies of!) and told stories about how bad PowerPoint presentations at NASA may have contributed to Columbia disaster.
WebVisions
I also attended WebVisions '06, a web conference held here in Portland. There were way more lectures that anyone could attend, but two of the best ones I attended were the Mobile panel by Brian Fling from Blue Flavor and one by Derek Powazek about building online communities. Speaking of, I actually met Powazek in the hallway (when he mistook me for a friend of his), and we talked for quite awhile. He's pretty cool, and it was exciting to meet one of the people I look up to on the net.
Six-Month Review
In July I had my six-month review, which was exciting, since at that point, I basically had two bosses. Still, things went well, and I'm happy with my job here.
Convert to SubVersion
This is a minor thing, but in July we also made the switch from CVS to Subversion, and I assisted with the migration of all the SelecTrucks sites to the new version control system.