I have a soft deadline of Spring Break 2008 for the beta test. Stay tuned!

Saturday

Sunday

Web as the Medium

Last week, a coworker and I were looking at entering Kittelson’s recent advertising landing pages for the Webby Awards. We began by looking at the previous years’ winners in the professional services category, of which we’d be entering under as an civil engineering consulting firm. The results? Well, here’s a screenshot:

The 2007 winner is an over-engineered, inaccessible flash abomination, chock full of animations and video clips, superfluous movement, and music. It’s fantastic for what it is—a movie showing high-end flash development that looks beautiful in a screenshot, but for a professional services firm? This is when I realized that there’s no point in entering the Webbys.

Web Design Isn’t Graphic Design—Does David Bowie Know That?

The Webby Awards are judged by an illustrious crowd of political columnists, singers, musicians, and personalities, including David Bowie and Beck. It should come as no surprise then that sites like the one above win; people outside of this industry view web design just like graphic design—taken at face value for aesthetic purposes.

This struck my coworker and me as very broken, and it appears that Jeffrey Zeldman in A List Apart’s most recent issue agrees:

It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.

…

The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.

…

The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe my work deserves to win, but it’s rather disheartening knowing the biggest and most well-known award in the web industry is missing the mark almost entirely. Outside of some special categories—notably, Best Visual Design - Function and Best Practices (Both of which, by the way, went to Flickr)—the vast majority of all winning sites were flash-based.

Is that really where the internet is headed?

Who’s coming with to snowboard on one foot of snow? I’ll be up Saturday and Sunday.

Well, my invisible audience, it appears that some ridiculous high pressure has built up over Mount Hood and left my dreams of snowboarding this weekend shattered. It does look like the ridge will break on Saturday and more snow will finally fall, hopefully in time for a December 1st opening.

Here’s hoping.

$5 cover at the door. Free play all night. See you there?

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November 15th: Rain on the lenses, barely any white in the photos. Arrrgghhh.

November 17th: Rain still on the lenses, no snow at all at the base.

November 18th, night time: SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW

I lost patience with my pass to Meadows this year, and went up to Timberline on Sunday to finally get on snow this season. With early openings the last two years (at least, it would have opened early had the road not washed out), it’s driving me insane that there is absolutely no snow at all at the base of Meadows as I type.

After Timberline, we went on a hike from Meadows’ lodge to Heather Canyon:

My guess of November 23rd opening is obviously going to be wrong.  There’s no snow, even at ~7,000ft, where those pictures were taken.

Well, I finally got fed up with having consistent downtime and slow page loads, and jumped ship from DreamHost. For anyone looking for a new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a pay-as-you-go, no bullshit host. You pay upfront and they deduct only the bandwidth you use from the total. It’s amazing.