Bring the collaborative power of the internet to print by helping Be A Design Group design the cover of STEP Inside Design’s prestigious STEP 100. You can comment on existing designs, or have your photography featured on the cover. Here’s how to contribute:

1. Sign up for a Flickr account (if you don’t already have one).
2. Join the Be A Design Group…group on flickr.
3. Much like the “BA” photos you see scattered throughout Be A Design Group and the flickr group, take as many photos of “100’s” as you can and upload them to the Be A Design Group…group with the tag “step100.” Be creative.
4. Comment on and root for your favorite photos in the flickr group.
5. As our cover develops in the following rounds we will experiment with different ways of presenting the collection of everyone’s “100” photos.
6. See the best photos on the cover of the STEP 100.

In finally being on a team responsible for the development of some sites with considerable functionality, I have been searching for a way to communicate the site visually so that the entire team can have a set of documents to work off of for each release. After spending three years at an architecture firm and seeing the documents involved in getting a building built, I was sure there must be some equivalent visual language and documenting system for web design. After some research, I found that visual language, and a nicely-priced tool for executing it.

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The possessions that by far take up the most space in my self-proclaimed lifestyle of minimalism are my books and my records. Until now, I just had a crappy WAL-MART (yes, I went shopping there, but only once, I swear) shelf for my books, and a bunch of cardboard boxes for my records. Besides looking bad, this system also wasn’t very space-efficient, so I decided to search for something much less crappy.

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I’ve been looking for a new cell phone, and I am extremely frustrated and disappointed with the selection of cell phones on the U.S. market. The service providers and cell phone manufacturers just don’t seem to get it. Camera phones really are of little use, and cell phones need video capability even less. What does have potential and is actually useful is text messaging - which is absolutely huge in most of the world and is spreading. I have found that text messaging is a necessary component of socializing in California, so naturally I would like to have a cell phone with some sort of efficient system for text messaging. Unfortunately, all of the phones that have QWERTY keyboards and the like have way too many features and as a result are enormous. I don’t want a picture phone. I don’t want to surf the web. I don’t even want a color screen. All I want is the smallest phone possible with good reception, the capability to text with the quickness, and Bluetooth to back up my address book.

I think Google has the right idea with Google SMS on what is really useful in a cell phone (they’re always right). Very little of the information that we actually want to consume while out and about involves video or even pictures ��� it’s textual information like movie showtimes or business addresses and phone numbers. No, I don’t want to watch TV on my cell phone. I can appreciate that there may be a miniscule segment of the population in car-dependent America that may want to watch TV during commute, but this idea…is fucking stupid.

Along with all of these new and useless features comes interfaces and form factors that are more and more unusable. Now that color screens are pretty much standard, every interface has convoluted icons that bounce, twinkle and do whatever else they can do to make them absolutely useless in communicating what they represent. The phones themselves appear to have been designed by out-of-work comic book illustrators, complete with swooshy keypad designs and other unnecessary intricacies.

After looking at some European cell phone reviews, it looks like the Nokia 6822 (buy on Amazon) is about as close to “the phone for me” as I will find. I think I can get my hands on one through eBay (making sure to get an unlocked one), and if I change to a GSM provider such as Cingular or T-Mobile, rather than a CDMA provider (which will involve me surrendering my grandfathered-in 8 o’clock off-peak with Sprint), I can just swap out the SIM card. GSM and the flexibility of SIM cards sounds superior anyway, and will come in handy in the event of a trip abroad.

Obviously I won’t make it, but if you’re in the Omaha area, you shouldn’t miss it. Tour homes designed by Omaha’s premiere Architects at AIA Omaha’s Architect’s Home Tour. I was a part of the inaugural home tour two years ago and it was a huge success. AIA Omaha has put together another great lineup of homes that exemplify great architecture. You know where you can find homes that don’t exemplify great architecture. The tour will take place from noon-5pm on Sunday, September 25th 2005.

When a video capable iPod comes out, and you know it will, the concept of a static album cover will soon be outdated. Instead of a still image, short animations or videos will be more appropriate to have flash upon your iPod screen as you start playing an album. Naturally, your iPod will play music videos, too.

As I promised so long ago, I have redesigned kadavy.net. With the exception of the masthead I’m still going ornament-free (after all of the effort it took to get the Dundee Theater to put my name on the marquee, I wasn’t about to omit that picture), but the typography has been tweaked quite a bit. I’ve also added my portfolio, inspired by Stopdesign’s Movable Type managed portfolio. With some ingenuity, and some modest PHP skills, one can manage all sorts of content. Douglas Bowman (stopdesign) posted a tutorial on making a portfolio with Movable Type, but maybe someday I’ll write a post covering some of the things he left out. Using the Movable Type content management system will make it easy for me to keep my portfolio updated. Other new features are…

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During my college years, I had the pleasure of spending a semester in Rome, Italy. The most amazing place in all of Rome, and in what I have seen of the world, is the Pantheon. Built circa 118 A.D., it is one of the Architectural marvels of the world. The 142 foot, almost perfectly spherical dome is supported by 20 foot thick masonry and is topped off with an oculus that permits light (and yes, rain) into the building.

Words can’t do justice to what it is like to enter this space. I’m afraid pictures cannot either, but I’ll give it a try.

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Here’s a sampling of my photos from my recent trip to Milwaukee to see my friend get married – best wishes Tundé and Keira Fajemisin.

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I don’t know when this happened, but today I noticed that Craig Kroeger’s miniml.com has gone from a Flash-based interface to a more accessible, search engine friendly, standard’s compliant design. This is ironic, because the pixel fonts sold there are generally for use in Flash and bitmap images, but I think it’s always wise to keep text you would like to have accessible, remain as pure text.

I believe his work to be historically significant because it has taken aknowledgement of the limitations of screen display to the extreme. I also dig the (almost) ornament-free design.