Recently, I was asked by one of my professors to refine my designer profile.  When you begin this process you have to reflect on your whole career as a designer.  Whether you’re professional or an amateur this is a very interesting portion of the process because you have chance to concentrate on how far you’ve come. A famous rapper once said, “its all about progression, loiterers should be arrested…” I bare this in mind when I look over my work from my freshman year in college up until now. A large portion of my work concentrates in Advertising. So I would consider myself first an advertising designer then a web designer.  Once you get a sense of where the concentration of your work is then you go deeper and find the meaning behind all of it.  You begin to formulate the answer to why you became a designer in the first place. After all of this information is compiled you look forward and consider all the things you want to accomplish.

- Jeffrey

There is alot information to process reading these two articles, 10 Future Web Trends and 10 More Future Web Trends. Written in 2007 my goal is to see how accurate these articles are so far.  From the 20 that were mentioned a few leap out at me, vitrual words, attention economy, online video/ internet tv, user control, and open internet identity, extended reality and blog reading automatically input into our brain. If I had to say how accurate these articles are I would say 50/50. However, the ideas proposed are very fascinating. I think people should pay attention to how companies will advertise to us in the future.  Right now every business is looking for that next thing to grab audiences to purchase or look at their product or service on the web. Maybe in the future people will be advertised to in their dreams. The power of the international community I feel is also important to concentrate on because with more and more businesses going digital this will connect our economies even more.

If technology continues to progress at the rate it’s currently at, the web and life as we know it will be extremely different in a 10 years. The movie Surrogates can be our reality in 10 years.  There would be no need to leave your place of residents because you can have your own surrogate handle your day to day life.

I recently read two articles, The Best Websites are Useful and Ugly and Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal. I agreed with both articles.  I’ve been a designer for few years and the more I mature, the more I feel like a fraud. The article Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal highlights this feeling. Nothing is new under the sun so trying to recreate the wheel is unnecessary. In school when you first start design your told you can borrow (steal) from the web. After doing this for a while it becomes first nature.  Then in bits and pieces your taught about copyright laws and how to get content legally which tends to float to the back of your mind.  So are all great designers pirates? Yes and one form or another but great designers know how to hide their sources and transform a piece into their own persona.

When you sit down and think about it the most popular websites on the web are not attractive.  As a web user I think we tend to prioritize function and content over beautiful design. I know personally if I’m looking for information on a particular subject I don’t care how the site looks as long as they have what I’m looking for. If your a web designer and you create a your entire website in flash even though it may look fantastic your giving up a huge portion of your marketing because it will very hard for search engines to find your site. So, “The things we think are the most beautiful are often the least useful in a practical and functional sense.”

- Jeffrey Aikens

Not quite exactly. I kid, I kid. However, recently I read two articles one called 10 Elements of Highly Effective Articles and the other was Losing the Me in Multimedia.  I agree with these articles.  If you’re like me you tend to skip over blog entries with long-winded articles and articles with ads in them or extremely poor grammar.  So finding a balance is key. Understanding your audience and keeping your content short and plain I feel it’s the best way to deliver information to people.

Yesterday I was trying to register people to vote. Registering people to vote is like hearing about Kanye West without the phrase douche bag following…its hard. Some people will pay you know mind.  Others won’t see the point and blatantly tell you no and keep it moving.  But you have to be resilient (this is a perfect example of how you lose your audience by going off on a tangent) and in the blogging world it’s similar.  As a blogger speaking to your audience in their language is important and if that doesn’t work for you then steal. But seriously, grabbing people attention is not always easy.  Due to Japanese technology, Hollywood and light up sneakers the average consumer and reader has been desensitized. For a majority of people things have to be fast, exciting, fun and informative.  If you can’t deliver on at least 3 out of the 4 you may not make it. But don’t fret there are worst things in life like debt, calling the president a liar and interrupting a Taylor Swift acceptance speech.