zastica — a sometimes blog about photography, programming, web design, & usability

A couple months ago I finished up a website design for Lessa Lamb, a friend of mine who was looking for a website to publicize her artist modeling business. The site is a one page layout with some examples of art that other people have created about her, with a lightbox to display larger images. The design uses a bookmark effect for the navigation as well as headings. It also has subtle text effects to make it feel a little more engaging.

According to Lesa,

Working with Dave was an incredibly positive experience for me. He listened to my input about what I liked and didn’t like visually, and ultimately I think what we came up with is visually attractive, easily navigable, and contains all the information it needs to have… except for the information I haven’t given him yet.

I would recommend working with Dave to anyone who needs an expert eye, a knowledge of possibilities, and someone who can stay on target, even when your time and energy are else-where.

Here’s a couple screenshots of the site:

And just for fun, here’s a couple of concepts that didn’t get used:

Overall, the project was very interesting to work on, as well as challenging. Lessa wanted a simple, elegant design, but she still needed it to be a little trendy and attractive to engage and encourage visitors that they should hire her to model for their art sessions. The final version of the site sets a standard for what other artist model sites can look like.

See the site: LessaLamb.com

This past Tuesday, I had the chance to go and talk to PLU’s senior Computer Science Class. I was given the chance to talk about “anything technical”, so I wanted to talk about what it’s like in the programming world after graduation. Bjarne Stroustrup’s recent column on What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why? was an interesting read and provided a starting point to talk about the transition from college to the “Industry”.

I introduced Dave’s 1st Law of Programming — “A technically perfect system that doesn’t work is no good.”, as well as 5 “Rules” for post-graduate work:

• Everything you know is wrong
• You’re always responsible
• Normalize until it’s right, then optimize until it works
• All of programming is design
• To better understand software, you must understand people

I also talked about some things that we can from those rules

• Be smart
• Be faster, better, & stronger
• Your code sucks, but that’s ok
• Evaluate, explore, and test other people’s code and applications

I also introduced Dave’s 2nd Law of Programming — “Make it foolproof, and someone will make a better fool.”

View the entire presentation (with jQuery slide/presentation goodness)

I want to give a special thank you to Drs Wolff and Hauser for allowing me to come and talk to their students.

I recently went on a little vacation with my girlfriend up north to Orcas Island. The first night and morning we were there, a huge storm blew in. The interior bay of Orcas is big enough to be able to create its own weather patterns. By the time weather gets to Eastsound, it can be much worse than it would have been on the exterior of the island.

This photo was taken on the morning of the big storm, looking out from Eastsound to the big bay. The weather was still a little rough at this time.

This one is on the road up Mt. Constitution, early in the morning. It was a little foggy, so there were sun breaks through the fog and clouds.

Prints are available at $10 for 8×10, or $20 for 11×14. Email Me to learn more or order.