Alternate.org

<p>It feels like I&#8217;ve been combining art and technology all my life. It&#8217;s an idea that has driven me in school and in working as a user interface designer. The combination of programming and design has culminated in my current position at <a href="http://automattic.com/about">Automattic</a>, the company behind <a href="http://wordpress.com">WordPress.com</a> which I&#8217;m using to publish this post. As an employee here, I get to pick my own title and as such I&#8217;ve currently chosen &#8220;Designerd&#8221; as a concise way of explaining what I do and how I do it. I also spend a lot of time thinking about capital-D Design and why I seem to be so at odds with common wisdom and practice regarding how to design and build a web UI.</p>
<h3>A Little Back Story</h3>
<p>I was an arty kid. I have no idea whether this is because people said to me &#8220;hey, you&#8217;re an arty kid&#8221; and so I was like, &#8220;hey, I&#8217;m an arty kid&#8221;, or if my genes worked out as to make art a thing I could do, but either way my childhood included an awful lot of drawing.</p>
<p>I was also a computery kid. No one really told me I was a computery kid because computers weren&#8217;t readily available for me to play with until I was about 7, but once I started playing with them, I never stopped. I was very comfortable with computers and in the 3rd grade when our classroom received an Apple ][ that none of the adults knew how to hook up, it wasn&#8217;t hard for me to look at the wires and see where one fit into the other and have the confidence to just try it out. I think that was probably the first time I was called computery.</p>
<p>When the Macintosh came out, I saw the very obvious use it had for drawing and my cousins and I spent a lot of time using MacPaint to print out banners on a dot-matrix printer. I&#8217;m sure we used tons of my uncle&#8217;s paper but he never seemed to mind. I loved computers when I first used them: they were clearly tools for making art.</p>
<p>I was lucky enough to be introduced to the development side of computers in 1991 when I was 12 when in 7th grade I was tasked with creating a visual animation in BASIC by coding each individual pixel&#8217;s placement on an 80&#215;80 grid, my first exposure to making art with code. In the 8th grade, I learned about scanners and used HyperCard to make an interactive Myst-like game, introducing me to my first onMouseOver event. I moved on freshman year to learning how to paint ocean scenes in acrylic then the next period writing programs for the Mac in Pascal.</p>
<p>Later I went to art college for graphic design while working digital pre-press 3 blocks away. I landed my first &#8220;real&#8221; web design job in 1999 without a resume at a company that wasn&#8217;t hiring a designer: I saw their ad for a receptionist at school and emailed them a link to a portfolio I designed and built in Flash.</p>
<h5 style="padding-left: 30px;">My brain cannot de-couple design and development at this point. I start my work each day with a basic need that began when I was a child: to blend and balance the science in computers with the art in them.</h5>
<h4>The Early 2000s</h4>
<p>I have to admit that I carry with me a certain &#8220;no one knows what the hell we&#8217;re doing&#8221;/Wild West attitude to web design that I picked up when I started out. The field itself was starting out at the same time and none of us knew what the hell we were doing, but it turns out I had some pretty solid mentors: <a href="http://jenmylo.com">Jen Mylo</a> was the first person I met who had a methodology to designing for the web and <a href="https://signalvnoise.com/writers/23">Scott Upton</a> introduced me to in-browser prototyping. We weren&#8217;t software designers, and we weren&#8217;t graphic designers. We weren&#8217;t web developers because they used ColdFusion and SQL and we weren&#8217;t CD-ROM designers because we had a markup language to describe our screens and a reload between each one.</p>
<p>So without a clear mode of operation to follow, we made things up. We tried to figure out what this new thing called a &#8220;web interface&#8221; really looked and felt like, given the limitations of the browser. We couldn&#8217;t do the UI heavy lifting you had on the desktop, and the whole idea of pages broke the application metaphor anyway. We improvised and we changed course quickly because <strong>that was and continues to be the benefit of designing for our platform</strong>.</p>
<h5>Benefits of Being a Web Designer</h5>
<p>Take some common situations that could have ruined your day as a designer circa 1999:</p>
<blockquote>
<h5>&#8220;There&#8217;s a typo on the final production graphics that millions of people are looking at right now.&#8221;</h5>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><strong>Print designer: </strong>&#8220;Well, fuck.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Web designer:</strong> &#8220;Here&#8217;s a new version, I&#8217;m overwriting the old one over FTP right now.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<h5>&#8220;Users hate the new placement of the button for the feature we shipped last week. No one can figure out where to find it and they&#8217;re throwing bricks through our windows.&#8221;</h5>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><strong>Desktop Software Designer:</strong> &#8220;We can hide under our desks until the next release literally ships to physical stores 12 months from now. People will have to drive a car to buy it.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Web designer: </strong>&#8220;I just moved it back. Let&#8217;s figure out a way not to have that happen again. But if it does, we can still just move it back.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<p>To be clear, web design had and continues to have its own limitations (ahem: browsers, mobile screens, bandwidth, network timeouts, web standards, ugh I just remembered <em>fonts</em>). These limitations give us our own set of constraints to find the best solution we can given the medium we are designing for.</p>
<h4>&#8220;Web 2.0&#8221;</h4>
<p>Then something funny happened that we weren&#8217;t expecting, but sort of hoping for: the web became something everyone used, all the time, for a ton of reasons. New users were coming online every day, and new services popped up in droves to give them something to do there. Years after Wall Street left the &#8220;dot-coms&#8221; to die in the gutter, the former employees of these companies built new tools, with new ideas about what a web interface could accomplish. Web users adapted and started to actually love the products they used online. Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Del.icio.us: we all have memories of what was new about these things when they first appeared that delighted us.</p>
<h4>Present Day</h4>
<p>Building interfaces for the web is now a huge industry, a field full of best-practices, processes, and dogma. There are people who will tell you how to make your UI 31% more usable if you follow these 10 tips. There are tools built on top of other tools, designed to tell you what the margin of error is on the confidence range for the results of each stage of your A/B test so that you can know which UI converts that much better. If that sentence made sense to you, I apologize. We funnel users in and out of flows and watch what they do in bulk at each stage of the process so that we can optimize our products for the highest engagement to better reach our &#8220;magic numbers&#8221; so we know we&#8217;re on the right path. And it sucks the surprise and delight right out of our products, or even worse: makes them so addictive that people spend their time doing little else.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re a client-based designer, data-gathering and user-testing are incredibly important because you will never know as much about your client&#8217;s business as they do. They&#8217;re not paying you to have an opinion, they&#8217;re paying you to understand and execute theirs. I don&#8217;t have much more to offer designers working with clients from here on, I&#8217;m afraid. 5 years of doing product work has got me thinking solidly from that side of the fence.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re an in-house designer like me, then you&#8217;re now a part of the thing being made: you&#8217;re client and designer and user rolled into one. You should absolutely be a rabid user of what you make. Use the hell out of it and fix the things about it that bug you. This is a great place to start because you&#8217;re acting as both user and designer so by taking care of your own complaints you can end up solving a certain percentage of user complaints that would match.</p>
<p>&#8220;Data-driven design,&#8221; &#8220;data nerd,&#8221; &#8220;big data&#8221;: these are all vectors for talking about the same thing: &#8220;is what we&#8217;re doing working?&#8221; This is an important question! And you should ask it and gather data about it! And then you should decide whether or not you&#8217;re going to change course based on this data, if that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s telling you to do. If your data reaffirms your decisions, you&#8217;ll have more than one person saying in their heads &#8220;well yeah, that&#8217;s why we did it that way in the first place.&#8221; These people are experienced. They are your designers, even if their title doesn&#8217;t say it.</p>
<p>Evidence of your UI working for users should be a pillar of your design house, right alongside gut-feeling and an informed opinion based on what has worked and failed in the past. Your ego can give your product the thing about it that people love.</p>
<p>When designers change interfaces around, people complain at first, then slowly get used to the updates. The web user experience has become the de facto standard for using a computer that most people can figure out and are comfortable with, even though we change it all the time. The malleability of the web seems to continue to resonate with users.</p>
<h4>The importance of the Designer</h4>
<p>I&#8217;ve heard recently that &#8220;speed to clarity is of the utmost importance.&#8221; I totally agree with this statement but am uneasy with the general wisdom on how to get there. My goal is always to have a strong, informed opinion of where to go during the process of getting a UI launched so that we can see what users do with it, and then listen to what they say once they do.</p>
<p>Success on the live web is your only measure of an interface&#8217;s viability, so let your experience guide you to the point of gathering real-world usage. I get worried when I see designers spending too much time studying use cases in persona-land. The only way to know how users are going to react to your app is to get it in front of them in the real world, where they use it to accomplish a real task in their lives. Everything else is a simulacrum in a lab, a novel of characters poking at a painting of a web site.</p>
<p>This is a boring and staid example, but take the first-generation iPhone. Steve Jobs and Apple were working hard on it long before we ever saw it in 2007, you can bet on that. Maybe they user-tested these prototypes all day long for years, but Steve was never going to launch it until he felt that the public was going to love it. No A/B testing could have informed his opinion on when it was ready for actual humans, it was his gut that determined when we got to see it. For proof of Steve Jobs&#8217; attention to detail and laser-like opinion, see every single thing ever written about him.</p>
<h5 style="padding-left: 30px;">At what point did &#8220;this is how it is because this is how I want it to be&#8221; become a bad thing for a designer to admit?</h5>
<p>Once we did see and fall in love with the iPhone, we could then start to tell Apple what we really wanted it to do, and we&#8217;ve been informing them of that ever since. It&#8217;s not like Jobs took too long to launch the perfect device, either. It just took as long as it took to get it right for the first version.</p>
<p>I honestly suspect that the iPhone was the device in Steve&#8217;s head in 1984 but all they could actually produce for him was the first Macintosh. Everything else since then had been him iterating on this vision until he died.</p>
<p>One of the largest and most successful companies in the world parleyed each successful product into a platform from which to take the next leap, and they did it all under the infamously watchful eye of what I would consider to be our era&#8217;s greatest capital-D Designer. His opinion built that company, and it nearly imploded into dust when he was gone and only found itself again when it bought the company Jobs founded while he was away. I don&#8217;t think this is a coincidence.</p>
<p>In my head, I can hear my many correct friends saying to me &#8220;Dude, you are not Steve Jobs, and you do not work for Apple. You are not building the iPhone.&#8221; which is clearly true but why not try as hard as we can to elicit the kind of delight that arises when using something that truly has a human&#8217;s vision and love behind it? I worry that testing every shade of blue until we find the right one that converts the most users is simply a process leading us down a road to personality-free products that no one loves.</p>
<h4>The complications with this free-wheeling approach</h4>
<p>requires experience, which a solid process can provide younger designers</p>
<p>Talking about process is dancing about architecture: the only way to experience the success of a process is to proceed with it and produce something.</p>
<p>html is the ubiquitous fabric of our medium and you need to be able to manipulate it. i don&#8217;t care how or why, just do it. css and javascript as well.</p>
<p>interactivity is key to using the part of your brain acting as the designer a direct route to talking to the part of your brain acting as the user. empathy is key</p>
<p>requires someone looking at the science numbers. just not sure it should be the same people with the art instincts. all hands on deck. embrace your constraints. fight about what you believe to be true but collaborate and coexist with those measuring your work.</p>
<p>Just launch it. Then: listen.</p>


<h2>2000</h2>
<ul>
<li>Boston</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>Cupertino</li>
</ul>
<h2>2003</h2>
<ul>
<li>Santa Barbara</li>
<li>Santa Barbara</li>
</ul>
<h2>2005</h2>
<ul>
<li>Austin</li>
</ul>
<h2>2006</h2>
<ul>
<li>New York</li>
</ul>
<h2>2007</h2>
<ul>
<li>Austin</li>
<li>New Jersey</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New Jersey</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>New York</li>
</ul>
<h2>2008</h2>
<ul>
<li>New York nyt</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>Des Moines</li>
</ul>
<h2>2009</h2>
<ul>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>Madison</li>
</ul>
<h2>2010</h2>
<ul>
<li>Austin</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>Seaside</li>
<li>Ireland</li>
</ul>
<h2>2011</h2>
<ul>
<li>Phoenix</li>
<li>Austin</li>
<li>San Diego</li>
<li>Amsterdam</li>
<li>Albuquerque</li>
<li>Budapest</li>
</ul>
<h2>2012</h2>
<ul>
<li>Wellington</li>
<li>Reykjavik</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>Keystone</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>Albuquerque</li>
<li>San Diego</li>
</ul>
<h2>2013</h2>
<ul>
<li>Phoenix</li>
<li>Marrakech</li>
<li>San Diego</li>
<li>San Diego</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>Santa Cruz</li>
<li>Las Vegas</li>
</ul>
<h2>2014</h2>
<ul>
<li>Tokyo</li>
<li>Melbourne</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
<li>Montreal</li>
<li>New York</li>
<li>Park City</li>
<li>Paris</li>
<li>Rome</li>
</ul>
<h2>2015</h2>
<ul>
<li>San Diego</li>
<li>Copenhagen</li>
<li>Park City</li>
<li>San Francisco</li>
</ul>
<h2>2016</h2>
<ul>
<li>Montreal</li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Hello</h3>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>I&#8217;m Kevin,</strong> and I’ve been working to make the internet more <strong>usable, friendly, and fun</strong> since 1999. I’ve developed an incredibly effective way of achieving interaction design using a blend of <strong>traditional design tools and code</strong>; I see HTML as the <strong>fabric of the web</strong>, and its designers should know how to weave it. I’m here to have an impact on <strong>real users, in the real world, with real software</strong>.</h2>


For the Earth Was Empty of Form

Composition

Recording

Video

Audio

States

A Documentary Company

From The Middle Out

Colormath

Sodium Lights

Untitled


<p>Work Graveurs Association of painters such as marking the public and Henri Matisse. Critic thus were largely responsible for centuries been proposed, among art. Jones, Sándor Ferenczi Though the real emphasis in Princeton at the 19th. An English translation in Hamburg devoted to leave Hamburg devoted. English-speaking academy in studios and social debate this work by the painting. But theories in the light which they reflect, and should capture. Hegel&#8217;s Lectures on the influence of whom were varied from the Middle Ages. </p>



<p>Ernst Gombrich called Immanuel Kant&#8217;s Critique of modern art is characterized. Characterized l&#8217;herbe in the beginnings of the field of Warburg, the classical antiquity. Often as one of Panofsky&#8217;s methodology, in the artist winckelmann&#8217;s. Winckelmann until the unique viewpoint of German art is characterized by Pablo Picasso. In is controversial among them were official, government-sponsored painters&#8217; unions, while governments regularly. </p>



<p>The pioneers of Michelangelo’s Moses des Refusés in particular, determined the charismatic artist Leonardo. His shortly after reading Vasari’s Lives for more preoccupied with the field of modern. The Enlightenment criticized from antiquity in studios and institutions that Leonardo da Vinci. Art and in his interests coincided with the course of German culture. Official symbols from his analysis that continues to the work shortly after reading. Developed of the year that people select the HoratiiIn the day worked. Violin and a series of art historians iconography—with roots meaning symbols. And African tribal masks and the critics called Fauvism henri Matisse&#8217;s two.</p>


FULL BLEED

Performance

Skinwalker

Freelance

Design

Development

Visual

Ping Identity

Executive Wealth Management

Creation Chamber

Einstein’s Bagels

Discount.com

Spiremedia

Breckenridge

Echostar

Great-West Healthcare

Wall Street on Demand

Bank of America

Merrill Lynch

BlackRock

The New York Times

Barclay’s | iShares

Effective UI

Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

State of Wisonsin

Dynavox

Automattic

Polldaddy

CA / Computer Associates

Design System

Project Catchfly

WordPress.com

Community Funded

Beleaf Design System

Marriage Mirror

Friday Health Plans


<p>None the 1930s these factors established the coloristic innovations of these dates. Official Picasso dramatically created a legitimate field of Baroque and a search for establishing. Is earlier the teaching of Painters, Sculptors, and several other artists including the more. 1930S collage elements, papier collé and official favor of art historians, especially. </p>



<p>Forced which were forced to emerge post-Impressionism as marking the rhythmical. From Baroque and Georges Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris. Theories influenced by Synthetic cubism, was adopted by artistic personality, and not. New were forced to perform psychoanalysis is controversial among them were varied from antiquity. Movement modern art historians, especially since the beginnings of art history as a new. Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the study in Paris earlier dates has significance. </p>



<p>Or Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and they reflect, and in studios and the study. Different for art derived from exposure to subject matter of a group. Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger and should paint. Art and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the real emphasis in natural light en. Modernist but became eventually led to be repeated by. Blue-Green convey the Laocoon occasioned a working method integral to. That first clear manifestation of modern painting can be used Leonardo&#8217;s time and Impressionists. In in the painting can be located earlier the history. Comes modern art, establishment of modern painting Le déjeuner sur. Library Gustave Courbet exhibited The Enlightenment criticized from about 1908 through 1912.</p>


Cisco Systems, Inc.

Cisco Meraki Magnetic

<p>As of today, my time at Automattic has come to a close, so I picked out my favorite photos from trips I took between 2010 and 2016.</p>
<h2>2010</h2>
<h3>Austin</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2206" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o.jpg" alt="4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o.jpg" width="2160" height="1543" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o.jpg 2160w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-1024x731.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-768x549.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-1536x1097.jpg 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-2048x1463.jpg 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-1200x857.jpg 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4431457710_9cdf807d9f_o-1400x1000.jpg 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 2160px) 100vw, 2160px" /></p>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2208" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4599467485_802d15e3bb_o.jpg" alt="4599467485_802d15e3bb_o.jpg" width="2800" height="2000" /></p>
<h3>Seaside</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2213" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4976549683_fa6b43d4eb_o.jpg" alt="4976549683_fa6b43d4eb_o.jpg" width="1024" height="768" /></p>
<h3>San Diego</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/Hj0k/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Ireland</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2217" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5165219183_e1c77f0a10_o.jpg" alt="5165219183_e1c77f0a10_o.jpg" width="1000" height="714" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5165219183_e1c77f0a10_o.jpg 1000w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5165219183_e1c77f0a10_o-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5165219183_e1c77f0a10_o-768x548.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p></p>
<h2>2011</h2>
<h3>Phoenix</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/BTkyW/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Austin</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2222" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5535926536_c6f6c30e92_o.jpg" alt="5535926536_c6f6c30e92_o.jpg" width="800" height="571" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5535926536_c6f6c30e92_o.jpg 800w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5535926536_c6f6c30e92_o-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5535926536_c6f6c30e92_o-768x548.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></p>
<h3>Amsterdam</h3>
<h3><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2227" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5846475455_12662ccb8d_o.jpg" alt="5846475455_12662ccb8d_o.jpg" width="1000" height="714" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5846475455_12662ccb8d_o.jpg 1000w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5846475455_12662ccb8d_o-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5846475455_12662ccb8d_o-768x548.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></h3>
<h3>San Diego</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2225" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o.jpg" alt="5956791324_b6ba68a599_o.jpg" width="2000" height="1429" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o.jpg 2000w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o-1024x732.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o-768x549.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o-1536x1097.jpg 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o-1200x857.jpg 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5956791324_b6ba68a599_o-1400x1000.jpg 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /></p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Albuquerque</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/NZi4U/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Budapest</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2233" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o.jpg" alt="6293223848_8ab2d94650_o.jpg" width="1600" height="1143" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o.jpg 1600w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o-1024x732.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o-768x549.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o-1536x1097.jpg 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o-1200x857.jpg 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6293223848_8ab2d94650_o-1400x1000.jpg 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" /></p>
<h2>2012</h2>
<h3>Los Angeles</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/SuAHY/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Wellington</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/G8Fq-YTS-j/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Reykjavik</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/HwfC8vzSzl/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/L03CSkTS-X/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Keystone</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/L64w2zzS4v/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/N_9XY2TS6K/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Diego</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/Pa7WJjzS-6/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h2>2013</h2>
<h3>Phoenix</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/UrcNhMzS7m/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Marrakech</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2252" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/8531553195_5ff0400ef9_o.jpg" alt="8531553195_5ff0400ef9_o.jpg" width="1000" height="665" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/8531553195_5ff0400ef9_o.jpg 1000w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/8531553195_5ff0400ef9_o-300x200.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/8531553195_5ff0400ef9_o-768x511.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/8531553195_5ff0400ef9_o-600x400.jpg 600w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<h3>San Diego</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/XKsanQzS0D/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Diego</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/ZoHWb2zSwJ/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/aKUpyITS7d/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2260" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162.jpg" alt="DSC_0162.jpg" width="2169" height="1549" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162.jpg 2169w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-300x214.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-1024x731.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-768x548.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-1536x1097.jpg 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-2048x1463.jpg 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-1200x857.jpg 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0162-1400x1000.jpg 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 2169px) 100vw, 2169px" /></p>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/eywamFTSyd/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Santa Cruz</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/e4LbmSzS20/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Las Vegas</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/gDfXhgzS8O/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h2>2014</h2>
<h3>Tokyo</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2274" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2014-01-17-06-14-02.jpg" alt="2014-01-17-06-14-02.jpg" width="3263" height="2331" /></p>
<h3>Melbourne</h3>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2276" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dsc_0486.jpg" alt="DSC_0486.jpg" width="3822" height="2730" /></p>
<h3>Montreal</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/pJvvorTS2A/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>New York</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/rPZnj0TS2d/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Park City</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/tOKtRHTS7o/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Playa del Carmen</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/vONHTRzS_J/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Paris</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/vmRcDlTSxN/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Rome</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/wlziVMTSz4/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h2></h2>
<h2>2015</h2>
<h3>San Diego</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/1uQg2IzS8g/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Copenhagen</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/3Zx51nTSyb/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>Park City</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/8_7fCpTS0J/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h3></h3>
<h3>San Francisco</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/9mvZ_ITS83/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>
<h2></h2>
<h2>2016</h2>
<h3>Montreal</h3>
<p>https://www.instagram.com/p/BAvCUrLzSyi/?taken-by=alternatekev</p>

MCM_9367

Personal

Travel

Uncategorized

WordCamps

Work

Automattic in Photos

<div class="">
<div class="_1mf _1mj">A couple of years ago, I wrote and performed a song written specifically for an <a href="http://automattic.com/about">Automattic</a> meetup in Park City, in lieu of giving a 4-minute talk, and created a backing video to go with it.</div>
</div>
<div class="">
<div class="_1mf _1mj"></div>
</div>
<div class="">
<div class="_1mf _1mj">Here&#8217;s that video, which I never uploaded anywhere for some reason. The song is called &#8220;Oconomowoc&#8221;. All of the footage was taken by me on company trips in Marrakech, Tokyo, and Reykjavik.</div>
</div>
<div class="_1mf _1mj">[wpvideo 9grgmT6l]</div>


Music

Oconomowoc – Video

<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="  wp-image-2162 alignright" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2.png?w=1118" alt="December2" width="343" height="343" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2.png 1900w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-300x300.png 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-1024x1024.png 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-150x150.png 150w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-768x768.png 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-1536x1536.png 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-600x600.png 600w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-1200x1200.png 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/december2-1400x1400.png 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 343px) 100vw, 343px" /></p>
<p>It&#8217;s so easy to say that Decembers have always been complicated months for me. Who isn&#8217;t it complicated for? Every year, we run around and we try to express ourselves to our family and friends with commerce and we put pressure on ourselves to have the most fun ever on the very last night of every year.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever had a simple December, starting in 1994 when as a sophomore in high school, 4 days after Christmas, my family moved a thousand miles east to a place that felt ten thousand miles away culturally.</p>
<p>In 1997, this feeling of anxiety toward the last month of the year was heightened when as a freshman in college I had to tell my parents my 17-year old girlfriend was pregnant. I proposed to her on Christmas Eve that year with a ton of my family around, and it felt right for such a monumental decision to be made during December. We were married for 15 years, something no one expected when neither the bride nor groom could legally drink at their own wedding.</p>
<h3>&#8220;We&#8217;re in lockdown.&#8221;</h3>
<p><a href="http://alternatekev.me/2013/12/16/texts-from-my-son-during-the-arapahoe-shooting/">On December 13, 2013, my son Ian heard a gunshot while in class</a>, and was subsequently put in lockdown for the next six hours. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/16/us/arapahoe-father-son-texts/">An 18-year old senior used a legally-purchased shotgun</a> to come to Arapahoe High School and murder <a href="http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/claire-davis-dies-from-injuries-in-arapahoe-high-school-shooting">a girl named Claire</a> in the hallway. He shot her in the face, which was the first shot my son heard. I&#8217;m not sure if my son heard the second shot, which was the murderer taking his own life.</p>
<p>This was by far the worst ordeal I&#8217;ve ever lived through, and am just now getting the help I need to manage the panic attacks that rarely but still happen to me.</p>
<h1>And so: Music.</h1>
<p>I wrote <a href="https://soundcloud.com/alternatekev/sets/december">my 6th-ish album</a> for a simple reason: I needed to get these feelings out of my brain and music is the easiest way for me to do it. This album is made up of three tracks and is only 10 minutes long. Each song represents the month of December for the year it&#8217;s named:</p>
<h3>12//13</h3>
<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/239251989&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>
<p>This song is my exploration of what it was like to go through the process of learning my son was locked inside of his school with an active shooter two years ago. I started it with a ton of siren sounds, which I toned back a lot for the final version because it was a little too jarring. When I wrote this song, I forced myself to walk through the memories of that day, and to take the conflicting and misaligned emotions and turn them into music. This song started out as a trigger for my anxiety, and has since become a way to focus on the pain so that I can heal from it.</p>
<h3>12//14</h3>
<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/239251987&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>
<p>Last December wasn&#8217;t nearly as traumatizing as 2013, but it came with its own set of ups and downs. I spent a good portion of it jet-lagged and sad in Rome. On the first anniversary of my son living through the shooting, I was 5,500 miles away on a work trip and separated from his mother, well on our way to divorce. I missed my girlfriend a lot and I&#8217;d had some really tough travel to get to Italy and wasn&#8217;t looking forward to the trip back. The month did end in a pretty amazing way on New Year&#8217;s Eve, for having such a turbulent middle. This song attempts to roll that all into one, which is hard. Drums ended up being unnecessary.</p>
<h3>12//15</h3>
<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/239251984&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>
<p>Which brings me to this year. The calmest December I&#8217;ve had in a while, it still started with me desperately needing (and starting) therapy for the PTSD I&#8217;ve been suffering since the shooting. This year also ended with me learning that it&#8217;s unhealthy and untenable to hold on to dreams you first felt when you were a child. I learned this year that it&#8217;s easy to build someone up in your heart and mind into a sculpture of a human that no one can live up to. This was painful to experience and this song attempts to capture the loss I&#8217;ve felt this year, and the destruction I put myself and others through just to experience it.</p>


Untitled-2

Kids

A New Album: December

<p><div id="attachment_1989" style="width: 2058px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1989" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1989" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/16612648098_e250cfeab8_k.jpg" alt="16612648098_e250cfeab8_k" width="2048" height="1325" /><p id="caption-attachment-1989" class="wp-caption-text">United Launch Alliance Atlas V, Photo via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/16612648098/in/photolist-rj1avd-aa7Shb-hDRuLV-hA6Ka9-rx2HQG-At1VTZ-Aaqhgd-At21en-At225a-hBAJRm-rAoY2U-hFCEYy-hFCEe7-hA7xAp-hA6KY3-dSYCcT-dRbXp3-rhKX6E-dR6oFV-aa7S1q-rfZYex-rAp1N5-rAztbt-qDNhNg-qDNhXz-ak8cDZ-hEa1ZX-hFDA12-aajeLd-aaegHT-ryd9BE-ApJ89G-zv8S8X-rhKY4w-hFDdus-dT5dEL-aagX2Q-rx2JZf-rzdGVC-hGKA4T-hBAvTg-At1XFB-hGLsbL-hBC4Q8-hBAGyq-rzdGCU-rhKXQA-rhKYh7-rfZYrr-qCjMPA">NASA</a></p></div></p>
<h3>Launching Rockets</h3>
<p>My father&#8217;s a guy who builds rockets. And I don&#8217;t mean that he builds the model rockets you see at the park that get blown onto neighbor&#8217;s roofs by a slight wind, I mean that he builds the giant Atlas V rockets&nbsp;that launch actual shit into actual outer space.</p>
<p>So when I was kid, there were key points&nbsp;I can remember when we&#8217;d all&nbsp;head down to the pizza place closest to my dad&#8217;s plant&nbsp;to watch his and his coworkers&#8217; work launch satellites&nbsp;into space. It&#8217;s a unique experience to witness your father witnessing his own work do something so mind blowing.</p>
<h3><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2050" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/post-illustration.png" alt="post-illustration.png" width="1150" height="585" /></h3>
<h3>Launching Websites</h3>
<p>So while my father builds the rockets&nbsp;that launch satellites into space, I manage to do some (much less complicated, and much less tension-inducing) building and launching of my own: I work for the company that builds WordPress.com, the platform&nbsp;I&#8217;m blogging on right now,&nbsp;and we <strong><a href="https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-new-wordpress-dot-com/">just launched some pretty cool stuff</a></strong> that we&#8217;ve been working on for quite a while.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m very happy to share that as of today, <a href="https://developer.wordpress.com/calypso/">Automattic has&nbsp;released&nbsp;the source code for Calypso</a>, our JavaScript- and API-powered interface&nbsp;that runs on WordPress.com. This has taken <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso">a huge effort on our part</a> for the better part of two years, and I couldn&#8217;t be prouder. This comes with a shiny-new interface that we also used to build <a href="https://desktop.wordpress.com">a Mac app</a>.</p>
<p>So, is your website a satellite being shot into orbit? Not quite, but it wouldn&#8217;t be far off to think&nbsp;of <a href="wordpress.com">WordPress.com</a> as an Atlas V rocket to get your site on the web, anyway. 🙂</p>


pattern6

Why I'm a Designer

Web and Rockets

a2808027845_10

2007

Welcome, Ghosts

1469035527_675f63cd18_o

2005

2006

2008

2009

Design Space: Wall Street on Demand

<p>The night of July 7th, 2000, I couldn’t sleep. I&#8217;m prone to insomnia so this wasn&#8217;t new to me but as I was lying there in a fugue between desire to sleep and annoyance at being awake, I managed to start building up an idea that I just couldn’t let go. It sounds counter-intuitive, but in order to rest, I needed to get out of bed and build this idea on my 15-inch gray-translucent computer with a hockey puck for a mouse.</p>
<h4>Quantified Self</h4>
<p><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/defending-your-life1.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1866" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/defending-your-life1.jpg?w=660" alt="defending-your-life1" width="660" height="495" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/defending-your-life1.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/defending-your-life1-300x225.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/defending-your-life1-768x576.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 660px) 100vw, 660px" /></a></p>
<p>I was thinking back over my day, going through how long it took me to get to work, what I ate while I was there, what things I had done during the day, and so on. While doing so, I envisioned some kind of layer beneath the surface of my life that recorded what I was doing at that moment into a document to be read later in a sort of <em>Defending Your Life</em> kind of way, and it occurred to me that HTML was a pretty neat way of capturing that. It&#8217;s an idea I&#8217;d find brilliantly visualized by the agency <a href="http://mk12.com">MK12</a> in Will Ferrell&#8217;s <em>Stranger Than Fiction</em> some years later:</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" title="MK12 // Stranger Than Fiction: Opening HD" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WDwTQ57YyzI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Anyway, so I took the main data points of my previous day and codified them into an XML/HTML-type language. As this was an art project, it was important to me that the code be highlighted and colored so that when you looked at it as a web page in a browser, it resembled what HTML might look like when edited in BBEdit:</p>
<p><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-1868 size-full" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-08-23 at 9.43.51 AM" width="2198" height="1360" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am.png 2198w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-300x186.png 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-1024x634.png 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-768x475.png 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-1536x950.png 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-2048x1267.png 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-1200x742.png 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/screen-shot-2015-08-23-at-9-43-51-am-1400x866.png 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 2198px) 100vw, 2198px" /></a></p>
<p>With a rough draft complete, the idea was mercifully out of my head and I could finally sleep. I remember nothing about the next day.</p>
<h3>View &amp; Download</h3>
<p>You can <strong><a href="http://codepen.io/alternatekev/full/YXmPbK/">view the project on </a><span style="color:#4a4a4a;"><u>Codepen</u></span> </strong>or <a href="https://github.com/alternatekev/kcml">download it from Github</a>.</p>
<p>(Looking at it closer now, it&#8217;s no surprise to me that I love React/JSX so much. Also, a lighter version of it won some awards in a web contest in 2001, which I can ironically no longer link to).</p>


Screen Shot 2015-08-23 at 9.27.01 AM

2001

My Days are Dictated by Code

2015-07-23 05.16.30

automattic

colorado

denver

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

<p><em>This post is part 4 of a series. You can read <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/06/why-im-a-designer-part-1-a-timeline/">Part 1,</a> <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/08/why-im-a-designer-part-1-5-design-emergencies/">Part 1.5</a>,<a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/09/why-im-a-designer-part-2-view-source/"> Part 2</a> and <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/20/why-im-a-designer-part-3-finding-order-in-the-chaos/">Part 3</a> if you&#8217;d like.</em></p>
<h3>Web 2.0</h3>
<p>Then something funny happened that we weren&#8217;t expecting, but sort of hoping for: the web became a tool everyone used, all the time, for a ton of reasons.</p>
<p>New users were arriving online every day, and new services were popping up in droves to give them fun stuff to do there. Years after Wall Street left the &#8220;dot-coms&#8221; to die in the gutter, the former employees of these companies built new tools, with new ideas about what a web interface could accomplish.</p>
<p>Web users adapted and started to actually love the products they used online. Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Del.icio.us: we all have memories of what was new about these things when they first appeared that delighted us.</p>
<p>The web was a super-fun place to be, both as a user and designer.</p>
<h3>2001 &#8211; 2010</h3>
<p>I spent the intervening years doing the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration:line-through;">Being unemployed</span> Lots of freelance</li>
<li>I built a web page with only<a href="http://alternate.org/2001/05/10/i-am-a-5k-god/"> 5 kilobytes</a> of code</li>
<li>Building PHP and MySQL from source on Mac OS X</li>
<li>Building custom Content Management Systems in PHP every time I launched a website for a client</li>
<li>Getting a job where I helped <a href="http://www.einsteinbros.com">Einstein</a> sell bagels on the internet</li>
<li>Securing just a few <a href="https://www.pingidentity.com/en.html">long-term</a> <a href="https://www.serviceobjects.com">freelance</a> clients that would support me for years</li>
<li>Getting a low-paying job for health insurance reasons, then quitting that job because I found myself editing .NET code in a shirt and tie</li>
<li>Getting a job doing data visualization and financial design for investment banks</li>
<li>Traveling to New York to <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/conboy/sets/72157627557099712">work with clients on Wall Street</a></li>
<li>Learning and forgetting Flash, ActionScript and Flex</li>
<li>Building in CakePHP and taking offline a web app for people to record very personal data</li>
<li>Spending 6 months designing a 15&#215;10 GIF (among many other things) for the front page of the New York Times</li>
<li>Getting a job where I designed screens for people with mental disabilities as well as for people whose job was to support those with mental disabilities</li>
<li>Watching the idea of &#8220;mobile&#8221; evolve from WAP-based apps rendered on Handspring devices to the responsive web and iOS/Android apps we have today</li>
<li>Getting a job at Automattic, working on the blogging system I&#8217;m using to publish this very post.</li>
</ul>
<p>I can honestly say that during those 9-10 years, my work was used by millions of people, and that by 2010 my work reached that many people daily. I learned a lot during this time about how people use web applications, how they share content on the web, and how they talk to one another with the tools we build. I learned what my medium was being used for (fun fact: in 2002 I owned the domain &#8220;automaticmedium.com&#8221;) above and beyond what I was personally using it for. And all this time, <a href="http://alternate.org/2000/03/17/our-first-post/">I blogged</a>.</p>
<h3>The Importance of Blogging in Earnest</h3>
<p><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-1760 size-full" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o.png" alt="4366124780_62b1ff018d_o" width="3761" height="600" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o.png 3761w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-300x48.png 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-1024x163.png 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-768x123.png 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-1536x245.png 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-2048x327.png 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-1200x191.png 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/4366124780_62b1ff018d_o-1400x223.png 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 3761px) 100vw, 3761px" /></a></p>
<p>I blogged when <a href="http://alternate.org/2000/07/26/napsters-last-days/">Napster was shut down</a>, I blogged when the <a href="http://alternate.org/2001/09/11/catastrophe/">Twin Towers fell</a>, I blogged when <a href="http://alternate.org/2001/10/23/ipod-and-itunes-20/">Apple launched the iPod</a>, I blogged when <a href="http://alternate.org/2003/09/15/my-eventful-night/">my son was diagnosed with diabetes</a>.</p>
<p>I used a system built in PHP3 my friend Tai and I paid $500 for and then I ported that blog to a custom system I wrote in PHP 4 which I then wrote a custom importer for in 2007 that pulled it all into WordPress. Blogging was and is important to how I work.</p>
<h4>Ego &amp; Empathy</h4>
<p>While designing and building the tools my clients asked me for, I was simultaneously either plugging away at a new CSS idea on my blog, or trying out a new language to build a web app. My craft and I grew up at the same time and I tried to stay involved in it above and beyond my client work for two simple reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Ego</strong>: I needed a place to play. Client work was now very serious and very important and playing with new ideas often wasn&#8217;t the best choice for these projects. Not to say we didn&#8217;t pitch new ideas, they just often weren&#8217;t chosen for development. Knowing I should and could keep my code chops up by playing on my blog was important to me for increasing the quality of my work.</li>
<li><strong>Empathy</strong>: I really wanted to have my own site with an audience and user base that I considered my own. This way, I could truly understand a client&#8217;s desire to do right by their users because I spent evenings and weekends making something for my own group of people I wanted to please.</li>
</ol>
<p>These two concepts seem diametrically opposed: <strong>Ego</strong> and <strong>Empathy</strong>. I contend that to design a web application that people want to use on a daily basis you need both the <em>ego</em> to say:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I can make something people will want to use that&#8217;s better than what exists&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>and the <em>empathy</em> to listen to what your users actually say when you launch it. Additionally, your empathy for what <em>you&#8217;d </em>want on the screen you&#8217;re designing goes a long way toward making something your users may want to use.</p>
<h3>Try All of the Things</h3>
<p>How do you build this empathy? One of the ways besides maintaining a web app by yourself is to be a die-hard trier-and-user of any and all web apps. Really use them for really real things. See what making boards on Pinterest is all about. Follow art blogs on Tumblr and check it every day. Try Snapchat and get confused and close the app forever. Stuff like that.</p>
<p>You can start to understand what else the rest of the world is doing with their digital devices on a daily basis; you can see where your app fits into your users&#8217; lives, not just how your users&#8217; lives fit into your engagement cycle.</p>
<p>Empathize with what your users do on a daily basis with your tool by doing the same things with it and by doing the other things they do on a daily basis on the web, too. Pay fucking attention to what works and what doesn&#8217;t and why. You can start to synthesize this information with the designer&#8217;s ego telling you that you actually can produce a better product. What can result is remarkable: an app that people <em>love</em> using.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s always been my goal for my work on the web: to make something that people love having in their lives, something that feels like humans made it for other humans. They&#8217;ll come back over and over and give you their money for things you&#8217;re building that they want to use. You won&#8217;t have to beg for money from people who want to pay you for what you make.</p>
<p>Up next, part 5: Designer-Driven Design</p>


2334971663_dce87c5ce6_o

2010

work

Why I’m a Designer Part 4: Ego and Empathy

<p>Boysetsfire, After the Eulogy:</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" title="BoySetsFire - After The Eulogy" width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LrodzFIYcqE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>No Justice, No Peace.<br />
<strong><em>Rise.</em></strong></p>
<p>Written, signed off<br />
In the obituary: &#8220;What happened to us?&#8221;</p>
<p>Where&#8217;s your anger?<br />
Where&#8217;s your fucking rage?<br />
Watered down, senses lost.<br />
Lazy, privileged,<br />
Denial and self-gratified.</p>
<p>A tradition passed down to our blood-stained hands.</p>
<p>Give in, give up.<br />
Give in, give up.</p>
<p><strong><em>Rise.</em></strong></p>
<p>Contented to strive for new worthless slogans.<br />
We miss our potential for action and substance.<br />
Contended to lie in our boring vomit,<br />
Suggesting arrangements, while others are dying.</p>
<p>Stand up. Fight back.<br />
Stand up. Fight back.</p>
<p>How many starving millions have to die on our front doorsteps?<br />
How many dying millions have to crawl to our front doorsteps?</p>
<p>Written, signed off in the obituary: &#8220;What happened to us?&#8221;<br />
Where&#8217;s your anger? Where&#8217;s your fucking rage? Watered down senses lost.</p>
<p>Where&#8217;s your <em><strong>anger</strong></em>?<br />
Where&#8217;s your <em><strong>fucking rage</strong></em>?</p>
<p>Content and corrupted,<br />
Contrite and disgusting.<br />
Dig a hole,<br />
It&#8217;s all over.</p>
<p>Forget the words and good intentions,<br />
Unless we rise.<br />
Unless we rise.</p>
<p>Rise.</p>
<p><em><strong>Tear it down.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Rise.</strong></p>


2000

No Justice, No Peace

<p>Charles Mingus:</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" title="Myself when I&#039;m real - Charles Mingus" width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nCK6Feqz7wY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>


img1429653078192-168-1-140

mingus

Myself When I Am Real

<p><em>This post is part 3 of a series. You can read <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/06/why-im-a-designer-part-1-a-timeline/">Part 1,</a> <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/08/why-im-a-designer-part-1-5-design-emergencies/">Part 1.5</a> and<a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/09/why-im-a-designer-part-2-view-source/"> Part 2</a> if you&#8217;d like.</em></p>
<h3>Y2K (Contd).</h3>
<p>Last time, I mentioned that we had 2-3 designers simultaneously pitching ideas to clients. What I omitted then but would like to clarify now is that each designer determined for themselves absolutely everything they pitched:</p>
<p style="text-align:right;float:right;clear:left;margin-left:20px;">[spotify https://open.spotify.com/user/12145434629/playlist/0RJ0L2FeHc7aRmHHvZ0ZDA align=right]</p>
<ul>
<li>Navigation structure and labels</li>
<li>Content blocks and layout</li>
<li>Interactive tools &amp; functionality</li>
<li>Branding &amp; logo work</li>
<li>Visual design system execution</li>
</ul>
<p>What this meant was that often a client would see <em>different versions </em>of all of the above in the same meeting. They couldn&#8217;t focus purely on the competing designs&#8217; visual directions because they&#8217;d also be picking a navigation structure and maybe even a logo at the same time.</p>
<p>This was a pretty terrible process. Factor in that Project Managers also didn&#8217;t exist and unsurprisingly lots of confusion resulted all around. Designers would pitch competing and usually slightly misinterpreted ideas the client floated in earlier discussions. We&#8217;d catch a glimpse of the other designer&#8217;s work and decide to incorporate some of their concepts, creating a miasma of ideas presented all at once, similarly sourced but slightly tweaked.</p>
<p>Then <a href="http://jenmylo.com">Jen</a> showed up.</p>
<h3>Office Cell Phones and Pinball Machines</h3>
<p>The subject of the all-employee email read</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Has anyone seen the office cell phone?&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>These were incredibly rare devices and when our new office manager Jen Mylo (née Wells) needed to find it, there was something about her wording that immediately made me envision our plastic brick of a cell phone sitting on a bar stool, smoking a cigarette, talking shit about the employees that lugged it around the city. It cracked me up.</p>
<p>I immediately replied-all and said &#8220;I saw it a bar last night; it doesn&#8217;t want to see you.&#8221; My intention was to be funny and set a new employee at ease, that we had fun at this company. What actually happened was that she thought I hated her, which I learned a few days later when we were both part of a small group tasked with picking out a new office pinball machine.</p>
<p>I think I was the only one with a car at the time so I offered to drive. It was on this formative drive to Lakewood when I learned:</p>
<ol>
<li>Just how professional, detail-oriented and experienced Jen was and</li>
<li>Just how bad I&#8217;d made her feel by being unprofessional over email.</li>
</ol>
<p>I&#8217;m incredibly lucky that we cleared up the misunderstanding that day, chose a sweet new pinball machine for the office, and made friends for life (so far).</p>
<h3>Roping the Dude Ranch Operator Back to the Web</h3>
<p>When she spoke to Spiremedia co-workers about her life and work experiences, she was quick to mention her time on a dude ranch in Arizona, as an activist for Greenpeace, as the supervisor of a food co-op and many, many others. What she&#8217;d purposely be quiet about, and left off her resume entirely, was her time working on the web as an Information Architect. She was at the moment living and working in Denver along with her boyfriend, and wasn&#8217;t sure if she was staying long, so doing serious web work here wasn&#8217;t really on her list of priorities. &#8220;I really don&#8217;t want them to know I know how to do this&#8221; she&#8217;d quietly mention.</p>
<p>Of course &#8220;they&#8221; did find out about this unexpected IA on staff and quickly put her to work on our clients. By this time we had a team of 8-10 designers pitching sometimes totally off-the-wall ideas to clients and generally running the asylum. There was one incident where I went on vacation and left another designer in charge of my client work, only to return to a totally functionally-altered concept. Jen changed all that.</p>
<p>With the addition of Jen to our design team (as well as three experienced project managers: a lot changed for us at once), the process started to resemble something sane:</p>
<ol>
<li>These newly-added PMs would work closely with Jen and the client to determine what the site actually needed at a functional and content level</li>
<li>Jen would propose and refine a site architecture and content deck. She would then wireframe this architecture and content layout, staying as design agnostic as possible. I still wish I understood how to do card-sorting as well as she did then.</li>
<li>These documents would stand as blueprints for the designers to start molding into a visual model. Any specific design decisions in the wireframes were up for interpretation (size and placement of content, visual relationships, etc) and a serious effort went into the visual impact of the site.</li>
<li>Once this work was complete, our developers now had both abstract definitions and concrete examples from which to synthesize the working site.</li>
</ol>
<p>Clients no longer had competing, complete design philosophies to pick from all at once: each visual design was now proposed with the same labels, the same content, and the same architecture as the others in the meeting, and it had all been already determined. By working with Jen first, client expectations were set for what to get from the visual design staff and our expectations were set for what the client actually needed.</p>
<p><strong>She enabled success</strong> on both ends of the spectrum by advocating for the users to the client early in the process, and then she&#8217;d pivot and advocate for the client and users to the designers when we came in later.</p>
<p>I now had two mentors helping me establish two keystones of my design philosophy:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong><a href="https://basecamp.com/team">Scott Upton</a></strong> solidified the value of designing for the web by using the fabric of the web itself: HTML and the browser. He taught me that using your interface as your design it is the only way to know it works.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/jenmylo">Jen Mylo</a></strong> locked in the absolute necessity of hearing what your client and their users are saying, filtering it through the way your experience has shown you that people actually use the web, and turning that around as smart recommendations and decisions upon which to base your visual design.</li>
</ul>
<p>I&#8217;ve plotted just about my entire career path between these two ideological pillars of how to build for the web. I&#8217;ll explain in Part 4 what I&#8217;ve done in the last 15 years with this foundation.</p>


pinbot

design

pinball

web design

Why I’m a Designer Part 3: Finding Order in the Chaos

<p>My velocity, it shall be known<br />
Places in the past, deleted, disowned</p>
<p>Ghosts and shutters and windows boarded<br />
This fucking home, I cannot afford it</p>
<p>Airports and taxis, highways and tolls<br />
Instructions to follow and a path to behold</p>
<p>Reconditioned air and I slump in my seat<br />
Lines crossing through the sky and trying to sleep.</p>
<p>The clouds in my head clear around twelve<br />
We are floating in waves, in seas of ourselves<br />
Just heads above water, we speak and we scream<br />
While below the surface we come apart at the seams</p>
<p>And try to sleep<br />
And try to sleep</p>


2012-02-13_1329094127

Trying to Sleep

<p><em>This post is part 2 of a series. You can read <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/06/why-im-a-designer-part-1-a-timeline/">Part 1</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/08/why-im-a-designer-part-1-5-design-emergencies/">Part 1.5</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/20/why-im-a-designer-part-3-finding-order-in-the-chaos/">Part 3</a>&nbsp;if you&#8217;d like.</em></p>
<h3>1999</h3>
<p>As I stood in the cramped first-floor&nbsp;hall of the 300 building at the Art Institute of Colorado, my heavy bag of supplies dug painfully into my shoulder. I was with a friend and we were looking for jobs on the board, a task I undertook when I&nbsp;found myself&nbsp;in each&nbsp;of the three buildings we had on campus in Capitol Hill for the first time that week. As soon as we walked up, one posting in particular jumped out at me and I forgot all about the huge bag on my shoulder. It said in stark Franklin Gothic Condensed type:</p>
<blockquote><p>SPIREMEDIA IS HIRING A RECEPTIONIST</p></blockquote>
<p>which I&#8217;m sure doesn&#8217;t sound to you like that big of a deal, but to me it was like that paper was etched in gold. I&#8217;d been doing web design&nbsp;hourly for a small shop owned by a man who – in a daze&nbsp;of inspired light and beauty – named his company The Internet Design Firm. During my first week at this job I AltaVista&#8217;d (we didn&#8217;t Google back then) &#8220;Denver web design companies&#8221; to see what was happening in town, and to find work&nbsp;that could inspire me in times of need.</p>
<p>Spiremedia was an&nbsp;agency I found during this search whose portfolio suddenly&nbsp;redefined for me what a web site could look like, what the web could <em>be</em>. I had already spent a lot of time on their&nbsp;site, poring over the portfolio looking at the decisions the designers made on each piece, trying to determine what I could learn from them.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;What about this work is applicable to my own? What can I discard? What can I change about what I take, to make it my own, my <em>clients&#8217;&nbsp;</em>own? How did they code that?&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>It wasn&#8217;t just their client work, either: their own site was an excellent example of the thinking that went into everything they designed. I never dreamed I&#8217;d actually end up working there. I was a student&nbsp;who had done a total&nbsp;of 10 months of contract work in the industry, not one of the professionals these people clearly were hiring. I&#8217;d click &#8220;view source&#8221; in my browser, copy out some of their clever HTML code, and learn from their ideas.</p>
<p>And so but here was this flyer stapled to the wall, telling me they were hiring a receptionist. The privilege of my education leapfrogged me past wanting to apply&nbsp;for the&nbsp;job for which they were actually hiring, so my&nbsp;email&#8217;s subject line said&nbsp;&#8220;I don&#8217;t want to be your receptionist&#8221; and the body included a link to my portfolio telling them I&#8217;d admired their work for a while, and that I wasn&#8217;t a very good receptionist but I was&nbsp;wondering if they were hiring designers. I couldn&#8217;t have been happier when the reply came that they wanted an&nbsp;interview, but I had no idea what to expect.</p>
<p><div id="attachment_1697" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/elmada/3063789530/in/photolist-5EJHTq-q21RXD-H7Ghc-5mptMs-78dmys-4f4sff-qCCXMQ-jDEzzu-qBhF2w-qCkV3g-qUv6Se-bmtCBv-qBetaJ-pX1B6b-qUqCP1-ietpvH-5XhmKv-hLB1BA-qUsrki-qCKtSP-oeLDau-qRz9Wb-i9nFR1-qTMJeM-qUvcrk-qCm2wP-hXXoDf-jDBzKK-qSaoxb-jNn5BB-qBrmRp-jrfQHH-jBQSYN-hZ7qHj-invrW4-j5MMLL-qTpnMp-iuwSDX-qU1Qai-qVd7gz-iqCokx-jRZ6Y6-hYcuBE-pXNeV3-9aRStK-i9RgRb-jC5u26-ijD5mb-iFbj9P-j366bw"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1697" class="wp-image-1697 size-full" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3063789530_9128883c59_b.jpg" alt="Spiremedia's location in 1999. Imagine it without the hulking monstrosity behind it. Photo by Flickr user elmada" width="1024" height="768" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3063789530_9128883c59_b.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3063789530_9128883c59_b-300x225.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3063789530_9128883c59_b-768x576.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1697" class="wp-caption-text">Spiremedia&#8217;s location in 1999. Imagine it without the hulking monstrosity behind it. Photo by Flickr user elmada</p></div>What I found when I showed up&nbsp;was incredibly disorienting: the building was out past Lower Downtown (the newly-named LoDo), on a street no one I knew had heard of. When I pulled my car into the dirt expanse in front of the building, I suddenly recognized it: this was the terrifying part of town where we parked our cars back in high school to go&nbsp;to St. Mark&#8217;s Coffee House. The concrete and abandoned 5-floor building at the edge of the dirt lot wasn&#8217;t so intimidating during the day, it seemed. What on earth was I going to find inside the warehouse across the street?</p>
<p>I couldn&#8217;t&nbsp;have guessed that it was going to be about 5,000 square feet of exactly what I&#8217;d been looking for since junior high, but this was not an office that my work experience had prepared me for. There was&nbsp;no sterile drywall&nbsp;bound by drop-ceilings and cheap carpet. There were no medical-grade waiting room chairs or neckties. No one was freaking out about the dogs wandering around and no one appeared to be&nbsp;over 30.&nbsp;Everyone wanted to be there.</p>
<p>[vimeo 1589707 w=720]</p>
<p><small><em>A video created by Scott Upton with an original iBook and external video camera</em></small></p>
<p>Thick, wooden warehouse columns broke up the space into distinct areas. Existing long before many floors of offices&nbsp;had been built around them, they stood like stoic Redwoods throughout the office, ancient and real. I marveled at how many people must have done how many kinds of work in this building near&nbsp;these columns, and noticed&nbsp;this group of people covered them&nbsp;and the exposed brick&nbsp;in artwork and ethernet cables. The waiting area for clients was made up of a duo of (also wooden) old-timey school chairs which faced&nbsp;pinball and Asteroids machines. The music was loud and the person interviewing me had about 1,000 toys on his desk in the only private office I could see.</p>
<p>I was <em>home</em> again.</p>
<h3>The Year 2000</h3>
<p><div id="attachment_1732" style="width: 884px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/spirexmas99.jpeg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1732" class="wp-image-1732 size-full" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/spirexmas99.jpeg" alt="Spirexmas99" width="874" height="600" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1732" class="wp-caption-text">Spiremedia Holiday Party, 1999.</p></div>Spiremedia often worked in&nbsp;a traditional design agency model: 2-3 designers were assigned to each new project and tasked with designing&nbsp;something totally&nbsp;different from their counterparts. The client would choose a design (or they&#8217;d make the worst of all possible decisions and combine two of them), and the designers whose work wasn&#8217;t picked would go on to new projects. The selected designer would work with the client to design each page, using&nbsp;whatever tools&nbsp;necessary, and&nbsp;hand it over to development to build. This was and continues to be a super common way to do web design, but the end result is that&nbsp;you&#8217;d usually&nbsp;get your designs built not quite right by the&nbsp;developer.</p>
<p>Part of doing&nbsp;web design was (and continues to be) understanding what the medium is capable of. If we&nbsp;designed something crazy or just not-quite-possible, we&#8217;d&nbsp;get an approximation of our&nbsp;designs live on the web and this was a thing I&#8217;d&nbsp;get sort of sad about. I wanted my pages to look and work how I designed them, dammit.</p>
<h4>What Sucked About The Web</h4>
<p>I alluded&nbsp;in <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/06/why-im-a-designer-part-1-a-timeline/">Part 1</a> to a tendency of&nbsp;entirely visually-focused graphic designers to&nbsp;make fun&nbsp;of the web in 1999. At the risk of sounding incredibly &#8220;get off my lawn&#8221; about it, here&#8217;s an incomplete list of things we didn&#8217;t have as web designers when I started out:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Fonts.&nbsp;</strong>We&nbsp;could set our page&#8217;s text in&nbsp;any font we wanted as long as it was&nbsp;Verdana, Arial, Trebuchet, Georgia or&nbsp;Times as these fonts were available on most platforms. Using one of them&nbsp;ensured your&nbsp;pages&nbsp;looked&nbsp;similar to the highest amount of potential users. Want a different&nbsp;font? Time to make a bunch of header graphics!</li>
<li><b>Fast Internet.&nbsp;</b>Most of us still had 56k modems at home but at work we used expensive lines that still were geologically slow by current standards to build and launch sites&nbsp;that hoped to gain&nbsp;mass adoption. We were building tools that aimed to be useful in&nbsp;a technical universe&nbsp;that hadn&#8217;t quite arrived yet.</li>
<li><strong>Colors. </strong>&#8220;Colors are darker on Windows&#8221; was a common refrain heard around the office. Clients never saw the colors we saw on our Macs because have you ever tried to color-calibrate your client&#8217;s Windows NT-running-computer&#8217;s monitor? Of course you haven&#8217;t because it&#8217;s impossible. We always assumed the colors we chose were mere suggestions for how the end-user&#8217;s computer would render them.</li>
<li><strong>YouTube. </strong>Seriously, think for a second about the&nbsp;web before&nbsp;YouTube or much video of any kind. See also: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Spotify, StackExchange. We did have the real Napster, though.</li>
<li><strong>Standards.</strong> <a href="http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0305d.shtml">Jeffrey Zeldman</a> is my hero for starting the Web Standards Project and getting the dialog between browser vendors started. A standard way to write&nbsp;HTML and Javascript for all browsers simply wasn&#8217;t&nbsp;present at first. &nbsp;Zooming out a bit from the idea of technical web standards, we also didn&#8217;t have much in the way of&nbsp;usability research or prior art. Each client was an opportunity to try something new so something as basic as a site&#8217;s navigation was up for grabs.</li>
</ul>
<h3>What Was Awesome About the Web</h3>
<p>Without a clear mode of operation to follow, we got to make things up. We tried to figure out what this new &#8220;web interface&#8221; idea should really look and feel like, given the limitations of the browser. We&nbsp;couldn&#8217;t do&nbsp;the UI heavy lifting you had on the desktop, and the&nbsp;whole idea of pages broke the application metaphor anyway.</p>
<p>We improvised and we <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/08/why-im-a-designer-part-1-5-design-emergencies/">changed course quickly</a> because that was and continues to be the benefit of designing for&nbsp;our platform:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>We weren&#8217;t desktop software designers</strong>&nbsp;because they had low-level control over their UI and could respond&nbsp;instantly to user input. Flash was the closest we could get but it felt like cheating to use it.</li>
<li><strong>We weren&#8217;t graphic designers</strong> because we had web text to deal with, and navigation, and clicking, and scrolling. People had to <em>use&nbsp;</em>what we designed, not just look at it.</li>
<li><strong>We weren&#8217;t multimedia designers</strong> because&nbsp;we used&nbsp;a document markup language to code&nbsp;our screens and we had to factor in a page load&nbsp;between each click.</li>
<li><strong>We weren&#8217;t developers</strong>&nbsp;because they used ColdFusion and SQL and PHP and other acronyms I didn&#8217;t understand.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Linking Leagues and Asking Why</h4>
<p>My first two clients were businesses commonly referred to as dot-coms to denote their internet-only status. My official title was Production Artist and my job was loosely defined as helping designers put their work on the web. My first two projects ended up being simply design projects that I used code to produce, which has impacted my entire career to-date.</p>
<p><strong>LeagueLink</strong> was a startup aiming to enable&nbsp;recreational sporting leagues to self-organize tournaments and practice schedules. It combined elements of e-commerce (for gathering league dues), messaging (for inter-team communication), and content management (publishing league and team news). The only Javascript this app used was for image-based navigation rollovers. Ajax would be&nbsp;just a cleaning supply for another 5 or 6 years. Click: page load. Click: page load.</p>
<p><div id='gallery-12' class='gallery galleryid-1491 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-large'><figure class='gallery-item'>
			<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="783" src="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-1024x783.png" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-12-1664" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-1024x783.png 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-300x229.png 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-768x587.png 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-1536x1174.png 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-2048x1565.png 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-1200x917.png 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-18-52-pm-1400x1070.png 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
			</div>
				<figcaption class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-12-1664'>
				The first work I produced for Spiremedia: a Flash intro for a site that hadn&#8217;t launched yet
				</figcaption></figure><figure class='gallery-item'>
			<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="783" src="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-1024x783.png" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-12-1665" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-1024x783.png 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-300x229.png 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-768x587.png 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-1536x1174.png 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-2048x1565.png 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-1200x917.png 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-08-at-12-17-58-pm-1400x1070.png 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
			</div>
				<figcaption class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-12-1665'>
				The actually-launched site
				</figcaption></figure>
		</div>
</p>
<p><strong>Why.com</strong> (forever embedded in my brain by its clever logo leveraging a question mark for the dot: Why?com) was assigned to me at the same time. This was a search engine that included a social aspect: other users were able to rank, rate, and recommend search results for given terms. Apple launched a service called iReview not long after, effectively killing the company. Two&nbsp;things stand out during my time&nbsp;working on why.com: it was the first time anyone in our office had heard of Google, which powered our search results (we thought it was a weird choice), and it was this project that provided me with my first business trip.</p>
<p>I didn&#8217;t realize it at the time but <a href="http://twitter.com/uptonic">Scott Upton</a>, my lead on the aforementioned projects, was&nbsp;also the designer&nbsp;whose work I&#8217;d most admired&nbsp;in the company&#8217;s portfolio from afar. I still haven&#8217;t had a creative director quite like him for three&nbsp;reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>He was doing the work himself</strong>, and&nbsp;his structural decisions cascaded down to the specific screens I was working on. Any style I&#8217;d developed in school or on my own was out the window, it was time to explore someone else&#8217;s partially-defined design system and extend it.</li>
<li><strong>There were no Photoshop files</strong>, as he was building a clickable prototype, a shadow-version of the functional web app being built by the client. The code wasn&#8217;t for production but it made the creation of new screens so much faster and more compelling than doing flat Photoshop work. We could use our site as we designed it, and could tell when an idea&nbsp;wasn&#8217;t working long before users or the client saw it.</li>
<li><strong>He was patient</strong> and always advocated for the user&#8217;s best experience. I envied his ability to sketch in front of a client to get buy-in on a better idea than what they were floating back to us. Cleanly-drawn lines and clear ideas won out – most of the time.</li>
</ol>
<p>For the first 6 months of my professional career, code and design were one and the same. There wasn&#8217;t a developer alive who&#8217;d touch Flash at that time and having our hands in the code of a site, no matter the language, gave us a control over the end-result that no amount of wire-framing or Photoshop mockups could give us. The client would usually see screenshots of our work, but that work&#8217;s production had a web-native methodology baked&nbsp;into it; we knew the screens we designed could be executed in code because we were <em>already doing it</em>.</p>


Why I’m a Designer Part 2: View Source

<p><em>This post is part 1.5 of a series. You can read <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/06/why-im-a-designer-part-1-a-timeline/">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/09/why-im-a-designer-part-2-view-source/">Part 2</a> and <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/20/why-im-a-designer-part-3-finding-order-in-the-chaos/">Part 3</a> if you&#8217;d like.</em></p>
<p>Some common stressful situations that could have ruined your day circa 1999:</p>
<blockquote>
<h5>&#8220;There&#8217;s a typo on the final production graphics that millions of people are looking at right now.&#8221;</h5>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><strong>Print Designer: </strong>&#8220;Well, fuck.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Web Designer:</strong> &#8220;Here&#8217;s a new version, I&#8217;m overwriting the old one over FTP immediately.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<h5>&#8220;Users hate the new placement of the button for the feature we shipped last week. No one can figure out where to find it and they&#8217;re throwing bricks through our windows.&#8221;</h5>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><strong>Desktop Software Designer:</strong> &#8220;We can hide under our desks until the next release literally ships to physical stores 12 months from now. People will have to drive a car to buy it.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Web Designer: </strong>&#8220;I just moved it back. Let&#8217;s figure out a way not to have that happen again. But if it does, we can still just move it back.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<h5>&#8220;The colors aren&#8217;t right. The red is too purple.&#8221;</h5>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><strong>Print Designer:</strong> &#8220;It looked fine on my screen. I must have put the wrong QuarkXpress file on the Zip disk.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Web Designer: </strong>&#8220;Yeah, that&#8217;s gonna happen. There&#8217;s no way to enforce color consistency across platforms right now, so that&#8217;s what the colors look like on your monitor. Unless you use this incredibly constrictive web-safe color palette, that&#8217;s just the way things are. It sucks but there&#8217;s not much I can do.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<h5>&#8220;No one is clicking the BUY NOW button!&#8221;</h5>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><strong>Print Designer:</strong> &#8220;Talk to the web people.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Web Designer: </strong>&#8220;Well, fuck.&#8221;</li>
</ul>


design emergencies

Why I’m a Designer Part 1.5: Design Emergencies

<p><em>This post is part 1 of a series. You can read <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/08/why-im-a-designer-part-1-5-design-emergencies/">Part 1.5</a>, <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/09/why-im-a-designer-part-2-view-source/">Part 2</a> and <a href="http://alternatekev.me/2015/07/20/why-im-a-designer-part-3-finding-order-in-the-chaos/">Part 3</a> if you&#8217;d like.</em></p>
<h2>1979 &#8211; 1991</h2>
<p><div id="attachment_1619" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/4366366361_a75c4a59f3_b.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1619" class="size-medium wp-image-1619" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/4366366361_a75c4a59f3_b.jpg?w=300" alt="Me at Sea World before we knew it was evil" width="300" height="243" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1619" class="wp-caption-text">Me at Sea World before we knew it was evil</p></div></p>
<p>I was an &#8220;Arty Kid.&#8221; I have no idea whether this is because my genes conspired to make art a thing I could do or if I simply had enough people tell me I had artisitc ability so I internalized it as best I could, but either way my childhood included an awful lot of drawing. The neighborhood recreation center was where my brother played basketball games, but I remember it as where I attended my first art class at 7 years old.</p>
<p>Art taught me how to create a space in my brain to play with a visual idea, and how to make that idea happen on paper. It also taught me how to learn from a failed experiment and try again on a new piece of paper. I often used my worksheets for this instead doing of the <em>boring</em> work that I already understood on the front, to many of my early schoolteachers&#8217; chagrin.</p>
<p>I was also a &#8220;Computery Kid&#8221; but I don&#8217;t remember anyone telling me I was a Computery Kid because computers weren&#8217;t readily available until I was about 7. Once I started using them, I never wanted to stop and I was comfortable enough with computers that by the 3rd grade, when our classroom received an Apple ][ that none of the adults knew how to hook up, I could look at the wires and see where each one fit. By just trying them out I got it working, and I think that was probably the first time I was called computery.</p>
<p><div id='gallery-13' class='gallery galleryid-1578 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-large'><figure class='gallery-item'>
			<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="683" src="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fig1f-big-1024x683.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-13-1588" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fig1f-big-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fig1f-big-300x200.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fig1f-big-768x512.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fig1f-big-600x400.jpg 600w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fig1f-big.jpg 1035w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
			</div>
				<figcaption class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-13-1588'>
				MacPaint in 1990, looking all Photoshop
				</figcaption></figure>
		</div>
</p>
<p>When the Macintosh came out, my first exposure to graphic design was alongide my cousins as we used MacPaint to print out 10-page-long banners connected with that special dot-matrixy paper. As we spent hours designing Happy Birthday banners, I&#8217;m sure we used tons of my uncle&#8217;s paper but he never seemed to mind. I loved computers when I was a kid: they were clearly tools for making art.</p>
<h3>1991 &#8211; 1994</h3>
<p>For junior high (grades 7–9), I attended a computer-math-science magnet school that bussed kids in from all over San Diego. Each year, along with our intensive math and science classes, we also attended programming classes. I took my first coding class at a public school when I was 12 years old in the early 90s, something I could never have appreciated the rarity of back then, but now I know that access to educational programs like this is an opportunity not afforded to many young kids.</p>
<p><div id="attachment_1592" style="width: 1572px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3374251552_86f74fa20f_o.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1592" class="wp-image-1592 size-full" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3374251552_86f74fa20f_o.jpg" alt="Bell Hr. High" width="1562" height="1040" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1592" class="wp-caption-text">Bell Junior High School, San Diego, California, 1993. Taking Instagrams before it was cool.</p></div></p>
<p>We didn&#8217;t have enough machines in the labs for each student, so we were paired up and wrote our code as a team for each project. The first team project in 7th grade was to create a frame-by-frame animation in BASIC by coding each individual frame&#8217;s pixel&#8217;s placement on an 80&#215;80 grid, wiping the grid, and drawing the next frame. My partner Quentin and I coded a windmill that had two frames so that when it looped, it looked like the windmill&#8217;s blades were spinning. I like to think we were making 8-bit animated GIFs before browsers were invented.</p>
<p>While it&#8217;s true that this was my first exposure to coding, it was conveniently also a visual task: I was making art with computers. For all I knew, all of programming was about putting cool stuff on a screen for people to see.</p>
<p><div id="attachment_1596" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/hypercard_help.gif"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1596" class="wp-image-1596 size-medium" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/hypercard_help.gif?w=300" alt="hypercard_help" width="300" height="200" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1596" class="wp-caption-text">Help screen for creating a button with HyperCard</p></div></p>
<p>In the 8th grade, we learned about scanners and my partner Kenny and I used HyperCard to make an interactive Myst-like game, introducing me to my first onMouseUp event, a concept I had no idea I&#8217;d implement over and over again during my adult years.</p>
<p>Freshman year was where things got harder: our code was now to take a user&#8217;s input, use functions to perform math on that data and return the result to the screen. As we coded Pascal-powered forms to tell us how many cords of firewood we&#8217;d get from a theoretical tree, I again focused on the way data looked as it was displayed on the screen. My partner Lauren had a much stronger grasp on the math and data-processing side of the language and without her as a partner I doubt any of my projects would have gotten completed.</p>
<p>What I learned that semester, at Lauren&#8217;s expense, was that when the code had to start doing things that strayed too far away from a visual result, there were other people in the world who took to those kinds of hard jobs better than myself. My skills came into play when something needed to happen on the screen. As I later learned ActionScript and JavaScript, I had clear recollections of Lauren&#8217;s patient tutoring on how to use closing curly brackets.</p>
<p><strong>What I was beginning to experience in school was an environment I&#8217;d essentially continue to search for my entire career: a smart, diverse group of collboratively-focused and really smart people working together to make digital art.</strong></p>
<h3>1994 &#8211; 1997</h3>
<p>As my time at Alexander Graham Bell Junior High came to a close, the gap between my art and use of computers started to widen. Now attending a much more tradtional high school in Colorado, my access to technology in creative capacity was very limited for my sophomore and junior years. The ironically much better-equipped computer labs at my new school appeared to be used entirely for things like Excel spreadsheets and Word documents: the kinds of things that made me want to bang my head against the keyboard and start drawing on the margins of the page again.</p>
<p>My move to a suburban school in Colorado also came with a huge cultural shift for me. Saying I didn&#8217;t fit into my new school is an understatement as there were particular groups who actively and at some points violently rejected weird people like me. I turned to artistic pursuits to make it through this time and reconnected with the self-expression and healing that art could provide.</p>
<p>Making drawings, writing angsty poetry and playing my guitar filled my afternoons and weekends. This technical and cultural dark age was crucial to me finding the self-validation that art could provide and it gave me the time to get better at it. As long as I was expressing my emotions with art that improved in quality over time, I could deal with anything the lacrosse players wanted to call me in the hallway.</p>
<p><div id='gallery-14' class='gallery galleryid-1578 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-large'><figure class='gallery-item'>
			<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="547" src="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-1024x547.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-14-1600" srcset="https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-1024x547.jpg 1024w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-300x160.jpg 300w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-768x410.jpg 768w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-1536x820.jpg 1536w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-2048x1094.jpg 2048w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-1200x641.jpg 1200w, https://wp.alternate.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/prom-1400x748.jpg 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
			</div>
				<figcaption class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-14-1600'>
				Prom, junior year. I&#8217;m wearing a hat.
				</figcaption></figure>
		</div>
</p>
<p>As senior year came into view, things started looking up. I had found a large group of outcast and cynical people at school like me and it was with this re-found confidence that I joined the school newspaper staff as an elective and found myself once again staring at a computer that expected me to make something with it. My first year on newspaper staff as graphic artist and music columnist also marks the first time a high school newspaper was 100% digitally-produced in Colorado. Every other high school here was still mocking up their pages with printouts and glue and tape, sending camera-ready art to the printer instead of digital files.</p>
<p><div id="attachment_1614" style="width: 277px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/440px-macintosh_performa_5200.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1614" class="wp-image-1614 size-medium" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/440px-macintosh_performa_5200.jpg?w=267" alt="Macintosh Performa 5200 LC" width="267" height="300" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1614" class="wp-caption-text">Macintosh Performa 5200 LC, only available to education markets. My music column was called Cognitive Dissonance, I shit you not.</p></div></p>
<p>While the writers on staff used the 9-inch black and white Macintosh Classics along the edge of the room, I was allowed to use a much larger PowerMac 5200 LC that had a scanner attached to it and Photoshop 3.0 installed.</p>
<p>I felt <em>home</em> again.</p>
<p>I made graphics for the newspaper during school hours, but after class I&#8217;d hang out, scan my drawings and edit them in Photoshop. I&#8217;d go on the weekends and take photos downtown, then I&#8217;d scan the prints so that I could blend them into weird images to print and hang in my locker. I still wasn&#8217;t sure what the words &#8220;graphic design&#8221; meant but when my newspaper teacher suggested I do an independent study on it for the second semester, I jumped at the chance. Overseen by both the newspaper teacher and the director of the art department, I was allowed to investigate what graphic design was, produce pieces that no one had assigned to me, and get ready for college: a graphic design program at art school.</p>
<p><em>I simply cannot overstate the importance of a few key teachers in my life as well as the technology available at school and in my extended family&#8217;s homes during my childhood. I can&#8217;t imagine who or where I&#8217;d be without them.</em></p>
<h3>1997 &#8211; 1999</h3>
<p>I worked through college doing digital pre-press 3 blocks away from campus, spending my working hours pre-flighting and printing many of my fellow students&#8217; work. I&#8217;d punch out and stay after countless evening shifts to continue printing and mounting my own work, supplies for which were available to me at a steep discount from my employer. I was spending 10-12 hours a day thinking about and producing design work.</p>
<p><div id="attachment_1615" style="width: 260px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://download.support.xerox.com/pub/docs/DocuColor_30PRO/userdocs/any-os/en/Fiery_XJ_525_Color_Guide.pdf"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1615" class="wp-image-1615 size-full" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/xerox_xj-lg.jpg" alt="I spent so many hours staring at this thing, hoping it would do what it was supposed to" width="250" height="250" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-1615" class="wp-caption-text">I spent so many hours staring at this thing, hoping it would do what it was supposed to do</p></div></p>
<p>But something about the print world didn&#8217;t feel quite right. The amount of work that went into taking a QuarkXpress file from someone&#8217;s Zip disk and getting it to print correctly from our digital printers was obscene. There were crucial details that could be easily overlooked by the customer, rendering their prints completely useless. As school got closer and closer to completion, classes started leaning heavily on the student&#8217;s ability to go and get offset prints produced: an expensive task that I had zero interest in learning how to do.</p>
<p>The web was an obvious alternative as I could start going behind the scenes on the computer-side again. Instead of using someone else&#8217;s interface to create art, I was back to writing the code for a UI itself, a task I&#8217;d been introduced to with HyperCard stacks 6 years earlier.</p>
<p>The web was also a weird choice for a designer to make at that time. I&#8217;d be giving up fine typography control, throwing any semblance of faithful color reproduction out the window, and embracing lower resolution over higher. And I did this willfully and aggressively because I could make something, and I could make it fast, and people could see it anywhere in the world in seconds. Why on earth would I care about printing things?</p>
<p>As my formal design education was nearing its end, I landed my first salaried web design job in 1999 without a resume at a company that wasn&#8217;t hiring a designer. I simply emailed them a link to a portfolio I designed and built in Flash. Within a week I had an interview and I started work less than a week after that. I could now call myself a professional designer.</p>
<p><strong>Up Next:</strong> Why I&#8217;m a Designer Part 2: View Source</p>


IMG_1414

1980s

california

childhood

Why I’m a Designer Part 1: A Timeline

<p>And by that I mean that I store certain memories in physical locations and can recall them when I find myself revisiting. Commonly-trod ground gets overwritten often and complexly, in a tapestry of emotions&#8217; colors overlapping like brushstrokes.</p>
<p>This makes for incredible site-seeing: remembering my grandmother taking me for a walk on this street corner when I was very small; it only happened the one time and I recall it clearly if for only brief repeating GIF-sized sequences at a time.</p>
<p>This beach is where I kissed my girlfriend. That one: my former wife, wedding ring tattoo notwithstanding. Fewer overlaps and clearer memories, relived and lived anew as time marches forward, the only direction it actually can. Given this much power, these places can seem a sort of bittersweet time machine but they&#8217;re not.</p>
<p>A dead friend&#8217;s former home always burning unseen a block away, red-tinged, geo-located in my mind as I take my daughter to school every day. Every fucking day. The Burger King where we waited for my son to escape his school alive. The heartbreakingly-named monument to the student murdered there directly across the street.</p>
<p><span style="line-height:normal;-webkit-text-size-adjust:auto;background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0);">These places can become morbid beacons of the past, sudden and inescapable.</span></p>
<p>And so you try to overwrite this data with better memories, or at least so many that the place loses its particular color in a flurry of activity.</p>
<p>Another trick seems to be some level of dissociation: a prism with which to hold these feelings so that I can witness them from afar and appreciate them for existing, robbing them of their power to control me. I hope to hell this remains true.</p>


20101103_020929_bbe5bc9f72f94b5ba973d5c6907ef1ee_7

I give places too much power.

<p>My life changed an immeasurable amount in 2014, but these three songs scratch the surface of what this year felt like. I hope you have a wonderful 2015.</p>
<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/68260072&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>


morocco-cover

My new album: Morocco

<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/alternatekev/contours">https://soundcloud.com/alternatekev/contours</a></p>


depression

I was a little anxious this morning so I wrote another song

<p>https://soundcloud.com/alternatekev/until-i-have-you</p>


More Sunday bedroom music.

<p>I took some photos of Capitol Hill in Denver in the snow yesterday afternoon.</p>


Featured Image — 1461

Gallery

Summer Snow, Capitol Hill, Denver

<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/146362967&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>


It was a nice evening so I wrote another song.

<p>I felt like writing a song tonight, so I did.</p>
<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/145859201&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>


Sketch #2

<p>I keep hearing people say things like this, including myself lately:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color:#555555;">&#8220;We do our best work when we’re physically connected,&#8221; says Roy Hirshland, CEO of T3 Advisors, a commercial real estate advisor. Dialing in on Skype will work in a pinch, but it&#8217;s not a substitute, he says. &#8220;When you&#8217;re in the same room, you can see facial expressions, you can feel energy in a room.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color:#555555;">The idea is based on Media Richness Theory, which posits that some tasks require face-to-face interaction. Skype doesn&#8217;t fit the bill. &#8220;Skype is a great, free way to communicate with sound and picture, but with glitchy connections, awkward camera angles, the limitations of webcams and cheap microphones, etc.,&#8221; says Dr. Matthew Lombard, a professor at Temple University and president of the International Society for Presence Research. &#8220;It&#8217;s far from the same experience as talking to someone in person. Face-Time and other tablet and phone methods have the advantage of mobility, but they suffer in terms of the vividness of the experience.&#8221;</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color:#555555;">This is a quote from <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/04/10/the-telecommuting-dream-is-dead/#:eyJzIjoiZiIsImkiOiJfenl4YjBjNDNxcDRldXlncyJ9http://">this article about telecommuting</a>, a word I never even use despite being apparently one of the only 2.6% of people in the US who consider themselves full-time at-home workers.</p>
<p style="color:#555555;">I think it&#8217;s true to an extent, and the cutoff of whether it&#8217;s true for you is literally how much of your life has been lived online so far. How could someone who didn&#8217;t even have desktop computers as a reality when they were growing up imagine people only using them to have the same experiences they&#8217;re so used to being defined as in-person only? Of course these people don&#8217;t believe internet experiences are real enough, because they simply can&#8217;t conceive of it.</p>
<p style="color:#555555;">If you&#8217;re reading my blog though, I bet you&#8217;ve been interacting online with people from such a young age that you don&#8217;t even realize the extent to which you&#8217;re getting valuable human contact online that you&#8217;re dismissing as self-centered or useless simply because you&#8217;re staring at your phone or tablet to receive it.</p>
<p style="color:#555555;">Real things happen online. Really real things between really real people. You totally need in-person time to make new experiences that simply can&#8217;t happen online (and yes, I do believe there are some obviously, just not quite at the level discussed above), but dismissing online-only experiences as somehow less valuable or less productive or less human is something that can only be done by someone who can&#8217;t have those experiences to that level because their own growth and development as a human didn&#8217;t include this kind of communication transfer as a way of interacting with humanity. Computers are &#8220;other&#8221; and humans are &#8220;real&#8221; and for some people, this can never be made untrue.</p>


2014-01-15 01.57.59

Social

The human moment and working collaboratively online

<p>[soundcloud url=&#8221;https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/144126396&#8243; params=&#8221;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;visual=true&#8221; width=&#8221;100%&#8221; height=&#8221;450&#8243; iframe=&#8221;true&#8221; /]</p>


Sketch #1

<h2>A man shows his love without restraint.</h2>
<p>A man remembers the joy of childhood so well that he plays with his kids with wild abandon.</p>
<p>A man’s wife is his equal.</p>
<p>A man’s wife is the only visible part of his soul.</p>
<p>A man gardens.</p>
<p>A man creates, he builds, and he produces. Anything at all.</p>
<p>A man allows children to explore expensive technology, because it is an inevitability and because it is important.</p>
<p>When a man’s grandchildren break his computer, he simply asks them what they had been doing so he can fix it. A man sometimes allows his grandson to fix the computer when he’s broken it.</p>
<p>A man provides his family with the experiences needed to become whole humans. A man does his best to be a whole human himself.</p>
<p>A man provides for his family but his work is in service of that, never the opposite.</p>
<p>A man does work he is proud of and changes the world for the better.</p>
<p>A man travels.</p>
<p>A man does his duty for his country when he’s called upon, and when the best skills he’s got for it are cooking meals for soldiers on the front lines, he uses them.</p>
<p>A man is thoughtful in his pursuits and rarely disparages the good-hearted efforts of others.</p>
<p>A man is kind to children, respectful to all, and his actions ensure he can stand tall with his integrity never in doubt.</p>
<p>A man doesn’t care much for what other people define as “masculinity”.</p>
<p>A man gives his all for his family because only then can he grow to become larger than himself.</p>
<p>A man has ambitions and achievements so astounding, his children and grandchildren can’t help but be inspired by him.</p>
<p>A man builds rockets that put satellites into space, cementing a 10-year old’s interest in science and space.</p>
<p>A man is loyal to the team he is leading and never treats them as if they are any less capable than he is.</p>
<p>A man of this caliber lives forever and continues to guide his grandson’s daily life, nearly 15 years after his passing.</p>


grandfather

kids

manhood

masculinity

My grandfather, a man. Some reminders for myself.

<p>This has been incredibly helpful for me over the past few months.</p>


Hide Comments and Trolls with Shutup.css

<p>I&#8217;ll have much, much more to say on this as I become cognizant of just what this has done to me, but I thought some people might be interested in the string of texts my son Ian and I sent back and forth during the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/us/colorado-high-school-shooting.html?_r=0">Arapahoe shooting on Friday</a>. I&#8217;ve Photoshopped it into one long screen so it&#8217;s easier to read.</p>
<p><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/arapahoe.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1383" alt="arapahoe" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/arapahoe.png" width="696" height="9260" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>


Texts from my son during the Arapahoe shooting

<p>I&#8217;ve got two sets of skin. There&#8217;s the one I wear most of the time, the one that fits my recently-a-little-wider-but-overall-much-narrower waistline; it&#8217;s the one I take with me on a warm day when I can turn up the stereo in my car, open the sunroof and drive a little too fast. It&#8217;s the skin I&#8217;m comfortable in and lucky enough to have around and available to me most of the time. I like this skin, I feel good when I&#8217;m wearing it and I&#8217;m a better man with it on.</p>
<p>But there is this other skin. It&#8217;s bigger and heavier and I think my hair is probably longer with this one but the truth is that I don&#8217;t really look in the mirror when I&#8217;m wearing it so I&#8217;m not super familiar with what it looks like. I don&#8217;t need to know what this skin looks like because I immediately know and can&#8217;t fucking stand it when it arrives. It descends like a fog; sometimes I can stave it off, sometimes I can&#8217;t. The idea of looking at myself during the time I&#8217;m wearing it makes me all kinds of uncomfortable.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s worse though is that this heavier, uglier, much more despondent skin of mine is actually a bit more comfortable, like those clichéd jeans you&#8217;ve owned for a decade that feel nice but have no support and are not suitable for public wearing and should definitely be thrown out. I mean after all, I&#8217;ve spent more time in this skin than any other over the course of my life, and while I tend to beat myself up pretty well while I&#8217;m wearing it, at least the scars end up being mostly invisible because they&#8217;re on the inside.</p>
<p>This other skin, this heavy, dull, self-despairing skin keeps me from doing simple things like brushing my teeth, sleeping more than two hours at a time at night while tempting me to sleep 4+ hours at a time during the day. It gums up the gears of useful tools like responding to stress in a reasonable manner and being able to stay away from intrusive and self-demeaning thought spirals. I hate this other skin. I hate it so much. The hate feeds it, I think.</p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>My mental illnesses seems to be a miasma of anxiety and depression and while I feel like I live without them often enough, lately I&#8217;m noticing the cold comfort of my old, heavy skin more and more, and what&#8217;s worse is that I&#8217;m affecting the people I love when I have it on.</p>
<p>This post is a sort of letter to myself, a reminder that when this oppressive, gray blanket of awful descends, that there is a way out from under it. I&#8217;ve found it before and it&#8217;s not a colossal failure of mine to have lost sight of the way out for a while. As long as I can remember that there is a light and it will never go out, I&#8217;ll be fine.</p>
<p>(Thanks to Morrissey and Irvine Welsh for the title idea.)</p>


dsc_0993

There is a light that never goes out

<p>Thankful for being born a white man with the twin pillars of privilege and opportunity invisibly supporting me each step of the way.</p>
<p>Thankful that the prevailing wisdom that defines many of my life choices as mistakes hasn&#8217;t kept me from trying harder after every one. Thankful I have a wife who&#8217;s never quite been done with me.</p>
<p>Thankful for the luxury of finally fighting for others to have access to health care while mine doesn&#8217;t cost me a dime.</p>
<p>Thankful for having access to a plant that has changed my life in so many ways yet presents no jail time as a result.</p>
<p>Thankful for having three children who are alive and thrive and exist, despite attending a school system more and more wracked by inexcusable violence.</p>
<p>Thankful for the prescience with which I was able to combine my childhood loves of art and computers into a fulfilling career that didn&#8217;t even exist when I was a child.</p>
<p>Thankful and ashamed for the historical bloodshed and suffering that has led to life being as enjoyable as it&#8217;s been for me.</p>
<p>Thankful I continue to wake up every morning a functional adult without the kind of debilitating mental illness as to leave you a shell of a human. Thankful that the meds help with this.</p>
<p>Thankful for having heat and electricity because there have been winters without both.</p>
<p>Thankful for the time and occasion to even self-reflect enough to see what there is to be thankful for, and thankful I routinely find there is a well of contentment from which to draw.</p>


Thankful

Image

Team Mercury meetup coworking in Denver

<blockquote><p>You want to know about voting. I&#8217;m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you&#8217;re locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain&#8217;t allowed out until you all vote on what you&#8217;re going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch &#8220;Republican Party Reservation&#8221;. They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That&#8217;s voting. You&#8217;re welcome.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1401220843?pc_redir=1">– Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan</a></p>


spider-1920-1080-wallpaper

Quote

Spider Jerusalem on voting

<p>I just had to send my big kids text messages about how much I love them (my 5-year old&#8217;s iPhone doesn&#8217;t have cell service). They&#8217;re at school and they might get in trouble for it, but given what I just witnessed, I had to reach out to them.</p>
<p>I basically just watched a family completely wreck their 7-year old. What an entire family was doing walking their dogs during the middle of a Thursday I&#8217;m not sure, but what got my attention was a gruff sounding &#8220;stop walking a mile behind everyone else or I&#8217;ll beat you in front of everyone.&#8221;</p>
<p>I heard this through an open window and turned my attention toward the awfulness I&#8217;d just heard, to see an older father of three berating who appeared to be his youngest, and apparently for walking too far behind the rest. Keep in mind the &#8220;everyone&#8221; mentioned was in fact an empty suburban street.</p>
<p>The child predictably responded negatively to this outburst which prompted a response from his mother who seemed to be leaning in to console the child. But no, she just wondered loudly if he was going to cry now and &#8220;act like an asshole.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now fully aware of this nonsense outside, I resolved myself to watching intently through the open window (I can be a scary-looking dude if I want to be) making sure they&#8217;d see me witness their dysfunction if they looked over, but no such luck. As they crossed the street and continued on their way, the youngest child obviously and understandably wanted nothing to do with his family, picked up some sticks and threw them against a tree and kicked some leaves, while falling behind the group again.</p>
<p>This is where my heart truly broke for this boy. As he wiped his tears and vented his frustrations on foliage, I sensed such resentment and hurt in his heart that I decided I&#8217;d watch them for as long as I could and that if his father returned to actually hit his child, I&#8217;d be out the door in a heartbeat to end the abuse. I understood why this child was lagging behind but I simultaneously ached for him to catch up so as not to incur his father&#8217;s irrational wrath.</p>
<p>But, the sad thing is, I&#8217;d already witnessed the abuse: it&#8217;d happened long before they appeared at my window and it will continue long after they&#8217;re home from walking the dogs. There&#8217;s a good chance I did this boy a disservice by not getting involved until a certain abuse threshold had been met, but at the same moment, I was feeling a deep shame for my own previous actions as a young father, and was struggling with that.</p>
<p>As a child, I didn&#8217;t have a great example of how to deal with children from my own father, but at least I had a sympathetic mother and I was never, ever spoken to in the way this boy was.</p>
<p>I had children early in life and my 20s were spent dealing with a metric ton of anxiety and depression issues while also raising young kids and while I now have my mental health under control (hooray for health insurance), there was too much familiar about how the parents on that sidewalk were behaving that I was essentially stunned into a very quick audit of my older children now in their tween/teen years and my parenting style in my 30s: I came away proud of who I am now as a father, and found a new resolve to cherish my children every day, because my life is owed to them, not the other way around. My 5-year old and I have such a great relationship that I wasn&#8217;t even worried about him. This boy and my youngest shared nothing in common father-wise and for that I&#8217;m proud.</p>
<p>My only regret is that I didn&#8217;t act in time to help this boy. It looked to me like all he needed was a hug, a smile, and someone to hold his hand.</p>


1014266_10151548390813381_965709615_n

Love your kids

<p>So we&#8217;ve all been there. We all know that the airline industry is full of criminals and idiots, but what happened to me today was by far the most insulting thing I&#8217;ve ever endured directly from airline staff.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s 70 degrees in Denver today, and it was 70 degrees in Santa Cruz when I left. Reasonable clothes for such weather would look a lot like what I was wearing: flip flops, shorts and an awesome is_automattician() t-shirt. Now, admittedly, flip flops were a poor choice, but traveling today sounded awful anyway so taking my shoes off at the airport just didn&#8217;t really seem like an appealing option.</p>
<p>Upon reaching the plane, I started to worry it was going to be too cold for me since I had dressed so lightly. I sat down, put my stuff away and settled in. Since we weren&#8217;t moving, I was warm enough and my worries of being too cold subsided. I even turned on my air after a bit.</p>
<p>As is the case most of the time, when we started moving to take off, the A/C kicked on again, this time full-force. After a few minutes of climbing to our cruising altitude, I rang the flight attendant when I was able because I&#8217;d quickly lost warmth and was now worried about the short 1-hour flight from SFO to LAX (I have no idea why I had a layover in LA but whatever).</p>
<p>I had crossed my arms tightly over my chest and it would have been clear to anyone that I was cold. In fact, the flight attendant himself made a crossed arms gesture and inquired as to my warmth, to which I responded that I was freezing. I didn&#8217;t really hear his response and since he immediately walked past my seat, I started to try to piece together the syllables I&#8217;d heard him say into something having to do with warming me up. I convinced myself he was going to maybe turn the A/C down a bit and bring me a blanket?</p>
<p>How wrong I was.</p>
<p>You see, United only offers blankets to first-class passengers. I&#8217;m going to type that again, and in bold this time:</p>
<p><strong>United Airlines only offers blankets to those passengers who have paid an exorbitant price to fly from SFO to LAX in the First Class cabin.</strong> I&#8217;d learn this later.</p>
<p>Now, United is free to do whatever it wants, business-wise. It&#8217;s pretty clear that it does, often relegating us Economy and <a class="zem_slink" title="Premium economy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_economy" target="_blank" rel="wikipedia noopener">Economy Plus</a> passengers to the status of in-flight prisoners. Now we aren&#8217;t even afforded the comfort of a blanket when the plane is fucking 60 degrees. But I digress.</p>
<p>It surprised me to notice that the same flight attendant who&#8217;d responded to my little bell ring was now pulling the beverage cart to the front of the lowly Economy cabin passengers. Since I was in Economy Plus, I was asked first what drink I&#8217;d like. Perplexed by the lack of action on his part regarding my comfort, I once again inquired about a blanket and was even more perplexed by his response which was simply &#8220;We don&#8217;t have blankets.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>&#8220;We don&#8217;t have blankets.&#8221;</strong></p>
<p>What? Your plane&#8217;s A/C is about to frost over my glasses and you don&#8217;t offer fucking blankets? Frontier Airlines tried to charge me $1.99 for a Coke the last time I flew them and now United&#8217;s telling me they don&#8217;t having motherfucking blankets. <em>At any price.</em></p>
<p>Alright, fuck it. It&#8217;s gonna be a cold flight but I can manage, I think. Pretty soon though, I needed to use the restroom. It occurred to me as I got out of my seat that it might be warmer in the restroom but it wasn&#8217;t my primary goal. Upon entering, a warm flow of air buffeted me as I immediately made the decision to stay in the bathroom for the remaining duration of the flight. Fuck these United people, I thought.</p>
<p>I obviously didn&#8217;t intend to camp out in the bathroom for the entirety of the flight, no matter how short. But okay, I sat there fully clothed for a good 10 or 15 minutes (not an unreasonable amount of time to spend in the restroom, I&#8217;d wager) until I could feel my fingers and nose again. I stood up to check my hair before heading back to my seat (I am a vain, vain man), and in the process was interrupted by someone sliding open the lock to the restroom <em>from the outside.</em></p>
<p>The door opened a crack, I made some kind of exclamation I&#8217;m sure, and the mysterious figure opening the door said &#8220;oh&#8221; and quickly shut it again. Feeling furious and violated, I slammed the lock back home. My heart was racing while I tried to figure out what just happened and since I was about to leave anyway, I started to go back to my seat.</p>
<p>I scowled my way halfway back to my seat and abruptly turned around. It&#8217;d just occurred to me that the flight attendant had opened the bathroom door, not another passenger. Confused and livid, I marched back to the front of the plane and asked the only person present if she&#8217;d been the one opening my door from the outside. She said that yes, she was, and that she was making sure there was someone in there.</p>
<p>I hope you&#8217;re making the face I&#8217;m making at that statement because it just makes no fucking sense whatsoever.</p>
<p>Furious, I told her never to do that again. She told me I needed to use the back restroom for the rest of the flight. Like an indignant child, I told her no.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not proud of that last bit but fuck it. You cannot simply:</p>
<ol>
<li>Set the A/C of your plane in October to below 70 degrees. This plane was easily below 65.</li>
<li>Tell Economy passengers that you don&#8217;t even <strong>have </strong>blankets, when the problem agent who greets me at the gate is going to tell me they&#8217;re reserved for First Class passengers.</li>
<li><strong>Open the motherfucking bathroom door because you&#8217;re fucking curious as to why it&#8217;s locked.</strong></li>
<li>Be completely unapologetic and cold when you&#8217;ve just violated someone&#8217;s privacy at your place of business, which is in the sky.</li>
</ol>
<p>So this whole thing has done a great job of showing me to the nth degree just how bad United&#8217;s customer service is. They have systematically installed a customer-hostile culture that repeatedly stomps on your rights as a passenger, a customer, and a human.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve said it before and I&#8217;m saying it again: airlines are run by criminals.<br />
<small><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/67664335@N00/1649149688/in/photolist-3vJjKj-56SxNu-5jWASr-5jWMPX-5uy41r-5uy44n-5uCqtN-5AwupW-6VeyDR-7v4pqS-7vgnXB-7wZXzS-7AghAW-7Agj2N-cv9TrL-7zh2TU-7zdfmp-8f3CSQ-dAEN4X-8f43oS-bmxzdd-8bbaUq-anhMd7-8trEmU-8Bb1JT-94hi76-apfrHk-8trByd-drSW8g-drT3PG-aov3VR-aSSA4i-dJeg8E-dRzi8H-8EfjYg-9Fhjqn-drT5Wj-8buoBA-appnwH-8tuLA6-c4LoqC-dGnYKU-9nSakE-9nSaQJ-dLeTze-8txRXJ-9Jy4uk-9JARq7-9JARAY-9JARty-9nSawW" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Flickr Photo by iambents</a></small></p>


SONY DSC

Airline

Flight attendant

Frontier Airlines

San Francisco International Airport

United

United Airlines

I am never flying United again.

2013-09-28 11.11.36

Automatticians in an office

<p>&#8220;I shouldn’t have been able to walk into any of the dozens of gun shops near Fort Campbell, Kentucky (where I was stationed) and hand over a copy of my orders and $500 and within minutes, walk out with my choice of handgun, shotgun or long rifle.&#8221;</p>
<p>Someone speaking some sense. Finally.</p>


Take My Guns, Please

<div class="reblog-post">
<p class="reblog-from"><img alt='' src='http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/b128fcabba5f2341a72945117b5d72af?s=25&amp;d=identicon&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-25' height='25' width='25' /> <a href="http://lightbox.time.com/2013/08/23/pictures-of-the-week-august-16-august-23/">Reblogged from LightBox:</a></p>
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<p>From an execution by rifle in Somalia and the 2nd Asian Youth Games in China to an alleged nerve gas attack in Syria and the world&#8217;s largest alphorn orchestra, TIME presents the best pictures of the week.</p>
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Pictures of the Week: August 16 – August 23

<p>While not sleeping this morning, for some reason or another I was reflecting and counted all of my closest male friends and ended up with a number north of fifteen. One of them I only met a year ago. Another I&#8217;ve still never met in person.</p>
<p>  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=alternatekev.me&#038;blog=8783684&#038;%23038;post=1322&#038;%23038;subd=alternatekev&#038;%23038;ref=&#038;%23038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></p>


WP Party DJ Booth Abstract

Circles

<div class="reblog-post">
<p class="reblog-from"><img alt='' src='http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/32662ccfe678f759029d275e2eb7c492?s=25&amp;d=identicon&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-25' height='25' width='25' /> <a href="http://conboykimberly.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/lessons-from-a-5-year-old/">Reblogged from conboykimberly:</a></p>
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<p>Watching HGTV with my 5 year old grandson and they are showing people who are looking for their second (vacation) home in Hawaii. Me: <em>&#8220;I am so jealous of these people, I</em> <em>wish I had a second home.</em>&#8221; Grandson: <em>&#8221; But you do have two homes already. Your first house (which my son and his family rent, including my grandson) and this house (where my husband and I live), sooo&#8230;&#8230;.</em></p>
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<p class="read-more"><a href="http://conboykimberly.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/lessons-from-a-5-year-old/" ><span>Read more&hellip;</span> 15 more words</a></p>
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<div class="reblogger-note">
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Hey! My mom is blogging!
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Lessons from a 5 year old

<div class="reblog-post">
<p class="reblog-from"><img alt='' src='http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/7abc6fe31a22d39be64125613eb80dff?s=25&amp;d=identicon&amp;r=G' class='avatar avatar-25' height='25' width='25' /> <a href="http://lightbox.time.com/2013/07/12/pictures-of-the-week-july-5-july-12/">Reblogged from LightBox:</a></p>
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<p>From violent protests in Egypt and the start of the holy month of Ramadan to a driverless oil-tanker train explosion in Quebec and the running of the bulls in Spain, TIME presents the best pictures of the week.</p>
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Whoa.
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Pictures of the Week: July 5 – July 12

<p><a href="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-05-24-09-42-02.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="size-full" alt="San Diego" src="https://alternateorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-05-24-09-42-02.jpg?w=696"   /></a></p>
<p>I went to An Event Apart in San Diego last week.</p>
<p>  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=alternatekev.me&#038;blog=8783684&#038;%23038;post=1313&#038;%23038;subd=alternatekev&#038;%23038;ref=&#038;%23038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></p>
