My Design

When I first created this blog, it was mainly centered around the fact that my life is filled with pixels (hence the title, for anyone not keeping up). I've posted about my photography and also my video game column, but that does exclude the one other part of my life that I actually get paid for, which is my design work. It's still using pixels, so it counts!

I'm going to try and bring that element of my life into this blog as well, sharing with the eight of you who actually pay attention to me some of the work that I have either done in the past that I am particularly proud of, or recent stuff that I have done. Just giving you all a well-rounded look at me, which is I know what you clamor for.



First up is a report I recently finished for my organization, CFED. For the past year I have been working with my colleagues on a series of reports detailing the financial security of 11 cities across the country. It's amazing work, very detailed in its focus on what areas a city is succeeding (and, sometimes, failing) at when it comes to the economic security of its residents. We've been finding that municipalities are more and more becoming the epicenter for economic solutions for low- and middle-income residents, and so in doing this work we are trying to highlight some of the best and brightest innovations that are succeeding there and can be replicated in other cities.

After we finished with the individual city reports (which you can find here), we combined a lot of that research and made one huge report out of it all. It's not going to win any design awards I know, but it was a labor of love and I'm glad to see it finally come to publication. So check it out if you wish (or if you know someone who cares about the economic status of NYC, Newark, Savannah, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, San Antonio, Miami, Hawaii or Providence. It's good stuff.

My Work, Realized

I've been working on this project for more than a year. Among the hundreds of pieces of designed work I do and the conferences and everything else, one project for CFED has been on my plate since December of 2008. And that is the redesign of our website.

Finally, at 9:30 p.m. Friday, we launched the new site.

I cannot tell you how exciting it is to see this finally go live and now become a living site that we can work with. When I first came to CFED three years ago, during my interview I said that redesigning the website would be a project I could see worthy of my attention. This was because, in researching for the interview, I had no freaking clue what CFED did. I couldn't understand a damn thing that was published on their old site (the old front page is at right).

The navigation sucked. The pages were running wild with words that had no organization and little meaning to the untrained eye. When my coworker Kristin ran a test on the site, it was determined that the site was only worthy of those with an advanced degree or more. Or more?? Shit, most websites (at least those that want to attract people to them that are not porn or gambling) try to aim a tad lower than that in order to make sure people can understand what the hell it is you have on there. The site also lacked any visual aids whatsoever. Seriously, you see that front page? Those were about the only photos or graphics on the WHOLE DAMN site. It also had no bells and whistles. And I'm not talking about pop-up ads and other schmaltz. It just lacked feeling, emotion and connectivity. And those are things a nonprofit's website should be doing first. At least we had depth down. Ohh did we. Like abyss levels of depth.

Anyway, a team of four have been working on this ever since. There were ups and downs, and there were some months when I didn't know if my hard work was ever going to see the light of day. But in November the hammer got put down. We were going to bust our asses and get this new site launched by the end of the year. You would have thought we were putting man on the moon for the first time. Coworkers were freaking out and there were times when I wanted to break things regularly because, when you come from a newspaper mentality where deadlines are strict and often, it's sometimes a tough adaptation to a new sector where speed and timeliness give way to collaboration and hand-holding. I'm not judging, just sayin.

We missed our end-of-year deadline, but not by much. The four of us took a well-deserved break over the holidays and came back with renewed vigor. And in five days we had the thing ready to go. We were set to launch in the afternoon until I made a colossal screwup in moving our DNS to another company because our IT director and I read the web hosting company's site incorrectly. So we were delayed for about four hours while we solved that little hiccup. But we solved it as any good tech people do: with time spent on customer service calls, some htaccess redirects (yeah, you know what they are!) and a bottle of Jim Beam (not Kentucky's finest, but it was free, in-house and bourbon, so I was happy).

So now it's launched, and I hope you will take time to browse through it and check out all the great information and links we have in there. It's full of excellent background on all the work we do and you get a real understanding of how we are working to make real change, both in the policy world and on the ground, in the lives of low-income families across the country. It's certainly not a perfect 100% site. We'll probably find and fix a broken image or link, maybe even catch a misplaced comma or misspelled word. Happens all the time with brand-new websites, so I'm not expecting the world. I hope you'll take the time to check it out. It's been a part of my life for 13 months now, and it's wonderful to see it working and hearing people's reactions to it.

Equanimity, Part 4

I have not been able to follow up soon enough to the earlier series of posts on equanimity, but you can find them earlier this month. What it came down to was a weeklong series of events that were just crazy in the amount of hours I was working and the elation of getting to celebrate my organization's 30th anniversary and also take in other things.

On the evening of Oct. 30, CFED held its 30th anniversary gala at the National Building Museum. Gloria Steinem was our honorary host, and I'm summing all of this up too quickly but it was an amazing event and such a culmination of a lot of hard work. Kristin busted her ass and put together a wonderful video that tells three stories highlighting the kind of work we do. Take 10 minutes and check it out.


The video was a hit, Steinem made some great jokes and a wonderful set of speeches, and the night was capped off by an awards ceremony and then a moving speech by Bob Friedman, our founder. I cannot do justice to Bob in saying how motivating and caring Bob is about CFED and the people we help. He's an amazing leader, and paired with Andrea our president, they make an amazing duo of leadership that makes me proud to go to work every day.

We got to have a champagne toast at the end of the evening, and of course, you can tell by the photo at the top that my friends and I looked damn fine, if I do say so myself. I decided to go with the Johnny Cash look for the event, black suit, black shirt, black tie. I created a flash slideshow of the evening in pictures, so go check that out as well.

Equanimity, Part 3

So last Thursday was a real doozy of a day. Started early with CFED's first Innovation Summit. We put on this daylong conference that was very nontraditional, at least as conferences go. We had a comedian open things up, who was pretty damn funny. She's won Best College Comic in DC by the DC Improv and City Paper the last two years, and since she is the friend of our president's daughter, we got her to do a 10-minute bit to liven up the crowd. Problem is, sometimes nonprofits and their partners are serious people who don't quite get that a comic is supposed to challenge your perceptions and make you sometimes laugh at things you may not think are that funny. Well, whatever, screm em, she was funny even if half the room didn't get the jokes (of course, maybe throwing a comic out on stage at 9 a.m. was maybe a bit jarring for people also).

Wow, that went on for a bit. Maybe I should take a few moments to compose myself.

OK, back to the Summit. Like I said, it was nontraditional. Beyond the comic, there were lots of video presentations and instead of everyone having hour-long meetings in crappy hotel conference spaces, we held the event at Sidney Harman Hall, which is this swanky theater space. So all the meetings were held at stations around the Hall, and everyone really seemed to dig it. Made the proceedings much more interactive and free-flowing. I hope you all will take a few minutes to watch our introductory video, which highlighted our Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Champions. The image at the top goes to the video.

We got a lot of positive feedback from the event and I think we will be incorporating elements of this event into our future convenings. I didn't get to stay at the Summit for the whole thing, though, because I was busy helping Kristin get everything ready for that evening's 30th Anniversary Gala. Oh yeah, we started early and we went late into the night.

Equanimity, Part 2

So the beginning of my equanimities began on Wednesday last week. At CFED, we take our board of directors meetings very seriously. I guess all nonprofits do, maybe, but since this is the only one I have ever worked for, it was wild when I first noticed how crazy everyone got with these meetings. Some people just want us to look as professional and legit as possible, others go into massive ass-kissing mode and suck up to everyone in the room.

I got to hang out during a couple sessions of the board meeting (normally not open to general staff like myself), and I very much enjoyed it. It's amazing to sit and listen to a bunch of super-smart people (some who are pictured at right and a few that are even close to my age, which makes me feel like a total moron) discuss the strategies and potential for my organization. Luckily none of it involved getting rid of their lone graphic designer. But getting to be in that room definitely made me feel just that much more connected to the future of our work and with the people and organizations we help.

My whole reason for getting to be in the room was because I was the photo bitch for the day. Turns out people like my little hobby and think I'm decent at it enough to warrant getting to take photos of nearly everything we do, which does allow me the chance to leave the office now and then (not normal for a designer). After the board meeting was over, the fun didn't end because I was tasked to take photos during the VIP dinner we hosted in the office. It was a late night of schmoozing, eating and a few drinks, though not as many as I would have liked. We got a cool preview of the next day's festivities, which I will inform you about in the next post. But I didn't get home until uber-late having to clean up and get the office back to normal, and then it was up early for a really long day ...

Equanimity, Part 1

Main Entry: equa·nim·i·ty
Pronunciation: \ˌē-kwə-ˈni-mə-tē, ˌe-kwə-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural equa·nim·i·ties
Etymology: Latin aequanimitas, from aequo animo with even mind
Date: circa 1616
1 : evenness of mind especially under stress
2 : right disposition : balance

Among the jobs I do at CFED besides graphic design, I also run the bi-weekly staff meetings (my soothing, radio-like voice brings comfort to the masses when we discuss work). To add some goofiness to the proceedings, my friends Kristin and Leigh give me a particularly odd word that I must work into the meeting at some point. Monday, after a crazy and uber-busy week, during a recap of a lot of CFED events, the word I had to use was equanimity. I used it to describe Kristin during all of last week, but for my purposes I am going to apply it to myself as well.

Last week I got a ton of shit done. And most of it was a culmination of months and months of tribulation and hard work by myself and a whole crew of people at CFED. The main events started last Wednesday and finished off on Friday. Upcoming will be my tales of those days and nights and how it drove us all crazy, but in the end our collective equanimity ruled the day.