Pop Art Blog

Now that Pop Art has set up this very snazzy company blog (shout out to Scott!) I feel a certain amount of pressure to represent my little corner of the organization. However, as an Account/Project Manager I'm looking at a dearth of topics that would be both professional and interesting enough to post. "Interesting" Let's see, should I start with a rundown of the various approaches one could take to create a project schedule or should I dive right into tools for tracking and monthly... Read More...

SelecTrucks Center Sites We launched two new Center Sites in November. Kansas City was a challenging design, with lots of absolute positioning, which caused a few problems when IE7 came out. The client was really excited about the puzzle theme. Birmingham is, I think, one of the best looking designs we've done. The diagonal navigation is really sweet. Updates to existing sites We helped out several clients with minor updates to their sites. In one case, we redesigned their homepage to emphasize... Read More...

SelecTrucks We're nearing the end of the SelecTrucks project, and only launched one site this month: Tampa . I really like the water in the design, with the little diver swimming through. Carrier We did some small projects for Carrier this month, mostly SEM tweaks. The cool part is that we added a media center, which will be going live soon. One of our designers, Ben, put a lot of work into getting a flash video player working, so that we can set up a cool XML-driven player, that will let the... Read More...

SelecTrucks We launched two sites this month, Detroit and Jacksonville . Detroit is a SWEET design, and one of the ones I was most excited to see go out the door. Jacksonville is also cool, and has a neat suprise in the form of a gator at the bottom of the page. We worked on several other sites this month as well, but they weren't ready to launch in time. LifeWorks NW Lots of progress on the LWNW front, but nothing I can report or show here. The client is looking at the site, and we're working... Read More...

SelecTrucks We launched four SelecTrucks sites this month, and all four feature landscape shots. Denver has a nice big mountain, and lots of wet-floor reflections on their photos. Cleveland has several landmarks in a photomontage, Twin Cities has a great landscape shot at sunset, while Seattle has a very nice cityscape, including the space needle. All four were fun to work on, and we're really getting our production process down pat. LifeWorks NW We managed to push LifeWorks' site into Beta... Read More...

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... Read More...

SelecTrucks We launched four new sites this month: Grand Rapids, Little Rock, Miami, and Nashville. Miami is a particularly striking design, heavily inspired by old cigar and fruit boxes. We were playing a bit of catch-up this month, but we managed to get back on our feet with a new production process that's resulting in these sites getting out the door quite a bit faster than before. Detroit Diesel I am very proud of this site. DDC is the first Pop Art site where I've done the template creation... Read More...

The video from the presentation that Pop Art gave at DevGroupNW, There's a Freightliner in my CSS Zen Garden , is available on Google Video now. It's a full hour long, but I think it's pretty interesting. The whole thing is broken up into several 10-minute segments, so it actually flows pretty quickly. The best part is the last section, where the designers go over the wide variety of designs we've done. Right at this moment, you can view six of the sites live: Memphis Louisville Chicago Massachusetts... Read More...

SelecTrucks In the last month, we launched three more SelecTrucks sites ( Chicago , Massachusetts , and Los Angeles ), and got one more to Alpha, but at that point we were two-three weeks behind on the project, depending on which estimate you were looking at, and with a major redesign on my desk for Detroit Diesel, it was clear that we were only going to fall further behind. Thanks to some clever planning by Andrew and Justin, in the last two weeks we came up with an emergency plan of action, and... Read More...

Training I continued my ASP.NET 2.0 training, and have gotten through five chapters in my book, the most recent about theming. Based on this, I gave a presentation to the office titled .NET 101 , which just gave a brief overview of what .NET is and isn't, and an really short demo of how to use Visual Studio 2005. I spent too much time preparing for that, though, and didn't get to cover the original topic Andrew assigned me, talking about themes and skinning in .NET 2.0 - I'll probably pick that up... Read More...