Once a year, we here at New City Media step away from the business of building websites and spend a day working with Habitat for Humanity. Like last year, we joined up with other volunteers in Pulaski, VA, to continue work on a group of houses being built down there. Read More
We’re sorry to say goodbye to Brian McGill today. It’s his last day at New City Media, and we’re sending him off with a cookout this afternoon. Brian’s moving to Stuarts Draft, Virginia, to be closer to his girlfriend Sarah. He’s been hired as a web developer at Augusta Medical Center in nearby Waynesboro, where Sarah works as a registered nurse.
All I can say is that Augusta Medical Center is about to get way more web dude than most hospitals could ever ask for. Brian joined us fresh out of school four years ago this May. Since then he’s grown to be an indispensable part of our team, as a user interface designer, HTML/CSS pro, and Flash wizard par excellence. We’ll miss him. Our clients will miss him.
Brian, we wish you the very best.
If you know Brian and would like to contact him, please send an email to Jane Horner and she’ll give you his new contact information.
We’re looking for someone to lead our team in the area of user experience and information architecture. Our current Director of User Experience, Jim Vogt, is going off to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon. We’re excited for him but it leaves us with a big hole!
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This is a great and fun online post where designers can create a political button - however serious, funny or totally whacky - and post it to their site for a chance at prizes. There’s a lot of great political button designs here! - and also a few that you look at and say “how did that #%*@# get here?”
http://24-7designheaven.com/button/landing.php
It’s called 24-7 Design Heaven sponsored by Sappi & McCoy Papers. Click the “View All” link under the right column section “From The Button Gallery” to see a gallery of all the latest “approved” buttons entered so far.
Give it a try. Download the template and play around in Photoshop for a bit. The entries in the actual button submit section are reviewed before they are put up live - but it’s all in fun anyways. Oh, yeah - did I mention that the first 1000 designers to enter will get a $10 iTunes gift card???
Support your candidate, share your views, or just plain have fun!!! It seams that these days during the voting year, there’s so much mud slinging, all you can do to keep sane is to throw some back.
Well, then maybe a video is worth 1000 pictures…
When I am not at my desk at New City Media, doing the things I do here, I am off working on my property or at my parent’s farm. Often “at my parent’s farm” means the same thing as “spending time with our Friesian horses”.
It is foaling season and this week we had a new horse baby born on the farm. I made a little announcement and was soon peppered with folks asking for pictures - please post pictures! But with my handy dandy pocket canon camera I was able to do one better. I took some video.
It was a pretty easy exercise to do a little editing and put in some music, then post the whole thing to our family website via youtube’s streaming server. My youtube account has subscribers from around the world - people who love horses in general and Friesian horses in particular. So within minutes of posting my video I was getting comments back. People were viewing the video not only to see a cute baby horse, but also to look at the type of offspring that might be produced when you crossed certain bloodlines. Then again, some people wrote just to say they were touched by the video and the music. And, even better, some people wrote wondering what the sales price would be of the foal.
Not a bad return for an hour’s worth of work. Thank you Mr. Internet.
Oh, and if you want to see a cute Friesian foal, meet Beau:
Not too many previous jobs ago, my career was set in the halls of one of the largest ad agencies in the world. The office I worked in was only one of about 300 in the network. We would go into meetings with clients and talk about their print ads, their radio spots and their TV commercials. We would talk about the budget for each. We would talk about strategy and timelines and who would be in charge of what. Then, as we were all getting ready to leave, someone would say, “Oh, hey, what about the website?”
New City Media is showcased in Graphis’ DesingersUSA 2, which highlights the work of 50 top design firms in America. We received a special invitation from Graphis based on the creative merit of our recent work.
Graphis has been the premier publication covering graphic communications world-wide for over 60 years. It is a compelling record of the most significant and influential communication work being produced today.
I bought a used lawnmower today and gained insight on my writing at the same time.
Here in Blacksburg, there’s a power equipment shop that’s exactly like the one you probably went to with your dad at some point during your childhood. For starters, it’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. When you pull into the parking lot you notice two buildings, and for first time visitors, it’s a toss up as to which one is the warehouse and which one contains the showroom.
Then there’s the collection of about 200 push mowers, riding mowers, garden tillers, log splitters, sod cutters, pressure washers, chain saws and weed eaters laying around ready to be fixed or harvested for parts.
I love that place.
Thanks for stopping by today - glad to see there is encouragement in our public schools to interact with the community. We are always happy to share some insight into what we do, so here are some things to get you started:
You can download WAMP which will install the basics (Apache, Mysql, SQLite, and PHP) for you on Windows . If you own a Mac or Linux most of these things are already installed and just need a little configuration. If you do just a little searching, you will find installers for all of these languages and applications for your platform.
When you are ready to start programming all you really need is a text editor. All of these applications and languages are free. You can use them as much as you like to create whatever you want. The web is multilingual in every sense of the word so keep learning and never stop.
Keep us posted.
Nick
