Much has been said about the recent announcement by Portland Online to “crowdsource” the refresh of their website. Silicon Florist and Pop Art have some interesting discussion going on. While I am not completely up-to-date on the project, I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

At first glance this sort of thing can seem like a great idea. It can be a boon to both young designers just starting their career and small businesses who might not be able to afford the services of a more established designer or agency. This helps designers quickly generate depth in their portfolios and provides a great service to small businesses.

Unfortunately in this case its hardly a good option. Given the size and complexity of a site that generates “over 2 million page views a month” it would take the talent and time of an agency or individual who can bring to bear the necessary experience and talent to complete such a project. This isn’t something that can be decided upon a few sexy proofs. For a successful launch, Portland Online would need to consider UI design, site architecture and hierarchy, the mechanics and logistics of content creation and organization, search engine optimization, and extensive project management.

Some have argued that Portland Online should be more responsible, but I don’t think its fair to wag our fingers at them. Their primary responsibility is to their organization, not to the design community. I think they should be given the benefit of the doubt and given the opportunity understand why a contest would be a bad choice. The design community should approach them with a spirit of open dialogue. We can help educate and inform them of other options and best practices. This is a great opportunity for us to educate others about the design process.

That said, the opportunity for dialogue has to be there for anyone to learn. I hope that the people at Portland Online can see past the communities somewhat knee jerk reaction and identify the well meaning and good intentions of designers. I would hope that they would take it into consideration and appraise wether their approach could be altered to better serve both themselves and the design community at large.

As I understand it, the Portland chapter of the AIGA is holding a meeting today to engage in just such a dialogue. I’m very interested to see what comes of it.

I was quite sad to hear that DB Clay will be shutting down. They have some of the damned nicest, prettiest, most interesting wallets I’ve ever come across. They are a design icon in Portland and it’s unfortunate to see them going away. I’ve been talking with some friends about a possible save DB Clay movement. Whatever happens I wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors. I’ll keep rocking Dark Bark as my guilty pleasure, no matter how ugly my wife thinks it is.

Tonight we had our first Refresh Portland event. It’s a monthly meetup and presentation where we bring designers and others interested in design together. We hope to teach them something they didn’t know and give them something to use in the real world. We packed the house with somewhere between 50-60 people. We just barely had enough chairs for the space that Jive graciously lended to us.

First off, Tyler’s presentation was awesome. I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting Tyler before and I was honestly a little nervous about someone I didn’t know doing the first presentation. Humongous props to Tyler for putting all my fears to ease and more. He kept things simple, relevant and to the point. The key message I brought home was to remember to, “Stop designing websites and start designing experiences.”

Of course we’re still working out the kinks. The elevator broke down. We almost didn’t get ustream working. I accidentally stole John’s Refresh introduction. In general I felt like we were running around like chickens with our heads cutoff. It was a great time and I look forward to improving it. Next time I hope to get free access to the elevator and side door for everyone during the Refresh time. I’ll also try and do a better job greeting people and making them feel welcome.

I’m really thankful for the support of everyone who came. I can’t wait to convert more visitors to presenters in the future. Someone in our audience has something really interesting to say that I know we’ll all want to hear.

You can catch the recording here. Ignore the first 4 minutes of my nervous rambling and just jump to Tyler being a badass.

I should also thank the team for helping set this all up. Thanks John, Carlos, Josh, and Bram!

In preparation for my presentation at Beer and Blog I hastily put together this list of useful design resources. I hope people find them helpful. I’m also quite positive I’ve left off quite a few things that are obvious. Please feel free to leave suggestions.

Pixel Pushers

Pixelmator (OSX) - http://www.pixelmator.com/
Great low cost image editor for the mac. Very much like photoshop though in its infancy.

Paint.NET (PC) - http://www.getpaint.net/
Free image editor for the PC. Been seeing it garner traction lately. An undergraduate project that’s grown up a bit. Source code available too.

Picturesque (OSX) - http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque/
A very quick small, focused image editor for the mac. Easier to make rounded corners and reflections with it than photoshop. Batch processing can be quite useful.

The GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/
Completely free and works on anything. Started its life on Linux I believe. I’ve never been a huge fan but some people LOVE it. Of course they also tend to love writing their own drivers and other scary linuxy things.

Screenshots Galore

Snipping Tool (Vista) - http://snurl.com/25025
Great article on Life Hacker on how to use the new built in screenshot tool for Vista. Glad Windows finally built in something better than Print Screen.

Print Scr (PC)
For those without Vista, you can also take screenshots by tapping Print Screen on your keyboard. This will capture the screenshot onto you clipboard. No mouse point though. Pressing Alt + Print Screen will capture JUST the active window. Great for sharing screenshots of how badly your website is broken in IE6.

Shift + Command + 3 (OSX)
This will automatically capture a screenshot of the current screen onto your OSX desktop. If that’s too awkward of a key combination, you can always go to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. There you can see all kinds of helpful shortcut and change them to your hearts content. I also highly reccomend "Alt + Shift + Command + 4". Then you can copy a selectable (click and drag a box on what you want) picture of the screen to the clipboard. Even better, before you click, press the Spacebar. Your mouse will turn into a little camera and you can click any open window to get a screenshot of just it, window shadow and all.

Skitch (OSX) - http://skitch.com/
My current face. They just make it far too easy to take a screenshot, mark all over it, upload it and share it. Useful for spreading ideas quickly. Too bad that its mac only. Their file organization and page layout could use some work though.

Screengrab! (Firefox Extension) - http://www.screengrab.org/
Another great tool, this time specifically for Firefox. Great for grabbing a screenshot of the entire contents of the page, not just what you see on screen. Can copy straight to clipboard or save out to a file.

Paparazzi (OSX) - http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/
What I used to use for grabbing screenshots of pages on the mac. You input the url and I believe it uses Webkit/Safari to generate the screenshot. Nice part is that it lets you specify exact width.

SnagIt (PC) - http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp
Probably the better known screen capturing utility for Windows. Paul Biggs swears by it, though I haven’t messed with it much myself.

Screen/Video Capture and Video Hosting

Screen Flow (OSX) - http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/
A great new app for capturing video of your screen, mouse and mouse clicks, camera, mic, system sounds. It has some pretty simple built in editing too so that you don’t have to open up iMovie. (Why did you have to ruin iMovie, Apple!? Why!?!)

Camtasia (PC) - http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
Also from TechSmith, the same people that make SnagIt. I’ve used it once and it was pretty adequate for my needs at the time. Again, I think the PC users are missing out on some really good, simple apps. This one is a bit more of a heavyweight.

Vimeo - http://www.vimeo.com
Need a place to host video that has higher quality content and feedback? Vimeo has to be one of my favorite sites on the net. Really great atmosphere, excellent web design and even the option to upload High Def video. Hard to beat. Great for hosting video-blogs, short vidcasts and your own homegrown videos. Not the place to host your marketing materials.

Blip.TV - http://blip.tv/
Now this is the place where you can host your marketing materials. Or you developer videos. Or anything you want really. Really great for hosting say your own online product reviews or something of that nature. Anything episodic in nature works well with their interface.

Image and Design Resources

Flickr - http://flickr.com/photos/chibbell/
The goto resource for hosting your photos online. Also a great place for me to host all my screenshots and keep them organized. Also a great resource for free photography if you pay attention to what license the photographer is using. Surprising amount of people are ok with you using their photos. Also a good resource for finding random objects, textures and effects that you could manipulate or cutout and make your own imagery with.

stock.xhang - http://www.sxc.hu/
Great resource for free stock photography. Not quite as nice as flickr but a lot more of your typical stock photos can be found here. If you’re on a budget or just need something simple, this is the place to check. Site can be a bit on the slow side at times.

iconBase - http://iconbase.com/
Great free icons from the people of Yellow Icon.

Silk Icons - http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
A set of 1,000 16x16 icons from Mark James. Realy great stuff. Heck, we use some of it in Clearspace.

Designer’s Toolbox - http://www.designerstoolbox.com/designresources/
Recently found by my colleague, John Lascurettes. A really great collection of resources for design. Everything from PSD’s of form elements from every modern browser to templates for CD labels. Never forget the dimensions of a A10 envelope again!

Open Source

Open Source Living - http://osliving.com/
Hands down one of the best designed and organized resources I’ve seen for open source software. A lot of potentially great apps in there that I’ve yet to try. Gotta thank Chris Kalani for this one. 

I woke up to another Twitteriffic morning. It wasn’t a month ago that I thought Twitter was a useless waste of time. Now I find it to be just as important to my daily activities as IM, email and Clearspace. I’ve made some very interesting and valuable connections through it. It gives me a certain sense of connection to the community. I love how brain-dead simple it is. That little 140 character box has forced me to become much more succinct and focused. Alas, it’s another giant time-sink that I find can be distracting. Like anything else, sometimes you just need to turn it off.