Archive for April, 2009

Saw this on graffitiresearchlab.com:

Instructions on how to make them here. This would make a great summer night activity.

A couple years ago I stumbled over Enrico Casarosa’s Venice Chronicles, an online serial comic now available as a book. At the same time I found Sketchcrawl, a drawing marathon he started that has become a worldwide phenomenon.

Check out the forum for results from around the world — you can see sketches from Barcelona, San Francisco, Yokohama, and Blue Mountains in Australia, just to name a few.

Update: Check out these results from Oxford, UK. Beautiful.

What is Analytics?
How many visitors does your site get a month? Where are they and what websites do they come from? What pages do they look at and for how long? Analytics is a fancy term for the data that answers questions like these. Analytics helps you analyze your site’s performance.

What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics takes the complex information traditional analytics provides and makes it accessible to you. With customizable charts, reports, and graphs, Google Analytics puts this information in a format you can grasp and act upon. And best of all, it’s free.

What Do I Do?
Seth Kimball Design provides installation, testing, and consulting using Google Analytics services. We’ll start your account, install Google Analytics on your site, and provide analysis of the data it collects for you. We’ll also provide videos on how to interpret the data yourself.
Analytics Account Setup – Free Google Analytics account setup using the email address of your choice. We’ll email your information to you once the account is active.

• Installation – Google Analytics Javascript installation on all the pages of your site.
• Testing/Installation Verification – Basic testing to verify Analytics is properly collecting data about your visitors
• Video tutorials – Online videos, accessible anytime from any computer, explaining basic interpretation of the data in your Google Analytics Account.
• Analysis: 1 month or 200 visitors later – A free analysis and consultation based on the Google Analytics data. Find out how to make your site more effective in generating leads and turning those leads into sales.

With the arrival of our third baby on Monday, I was reminded of a t-shirt I bought in college. It’s a Brett Colley print symbolizing (and critiquing) the “get a degree, get a job, get a car, get a family…” consumerism of mainstream America. As a single college student I liked the look and was ambivalent about the message. These days, with three kids and a Chrysler Town & Country, the image (if not the critique) hits a little too close to home. Come on, doesn’t everyone’s first week with a new baby feel like this?

The shirt was one of a series that became the unofficial t-shirts of the GVSU art department that year, and you could see students in them daily. I was wearing it one day on a city bus and forgot I had it on until a young black man sitting across from me asked:

him: Is that a baby?
me: What?
him: Is that a baby, man?
me: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s a baby.
him: [pause] That’s a BIG baby, man.
me: [laughing] Yeah, it’s a big baby.

Harvest Dashboard Widget

As a web designer and overall tech geek, I love productivity tools. I love software that helps save me time, organize my files, or streamline any process I execute multiple times daily. I love browsing iusethis.com for the latest freeware software tools.

I use one tool daily that is worth every penny I pay for it. It’s an online time-tracking service called Harvest. It has great tracking/reporting tools, easy invoicing, and an intuitive interface, but the feature that makes it priceless for me every day is the OSX dashboard widget. I work on any number of projects everyday, tracking time spent on each separately, and I often have to switch from one to another.

Say I’m working on a logo design, and I get a call from a new website client. I simply pull open my dashboard and click on the plus sign in the Harvest widget. All the projects I have setup at the Harvest website are available for me to choose, it immediately starts tracking my time on the new website project, and all my times are stored online for reports or invoicing. When I get off the phone, I simply click on the logo project to start tracking that again, and I continue with what I was doing. Fantastic!

(as you can see from the screenshot, I’m blogging right now. I can get a little anal about my time tracking)