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.

I must admit. When I first heard the name Startupalooza I dismissed it as a silly name that I wouldn’t be interested in. Then I started reading about who would be there and what they would be talking about. Josh Williams & Mark Frohnmayer of GarageGames. Kurt Deutscher to demo ExpressionEngine. Jason Glaspey & Matt King to demo Unthirsty. Heck, even my friends and co-founders of Jive, Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker would be talking. By the morning of Startupalooza I was driving my lady nuts with concerns about arriving on time. Despite the rain, sun and hail, we made it just fine, despite the general lack of parking in the area.

Todd and the Legion of Tech did an great job of putting the show together with the folks from Cubespace. to borrow Scott’s format, the highlights for me were:

• Listening to the Garage Games story and seeing the demo of Instant Action. It’s nice to see someone besides EA and the other giants doing something in the market. I’m amazed at what they’re doing with a web browser. The sheer possibilities are astounding. I’m also intensely curious to see how GarageGames and their developers put their player and gameplay data to use to make more engaging and fun games.


• Getting to pester Kurt about the future of Expression Engine. In particular the Forums Module. Its been in maintenance mode for a long time and I’m looking forward to seeing what they decide to do with it this year, if anything. He seemed to understand my pain and it was obvious he feels passionately about the product.


• Listening to Matt and Bill tell the Jive story to a large group. So glad to see they were using Keynote. I trained them well, though they forgot to use our new templates.


• Meeting Matt King, Scott Kveton, Rick Turoczy, Michael Richardson and more. I tend to shy away from events, getting sucked into my own projects or work at Jive. It was really great to put faces and voices to names. Its inspired me to attend Beer and Blog and other functions more often.


• Chatting with Martin about Treasurelicious. Its a killer app for a collector like myself. Hopefully I didn’t offend him when I asked if he was ready to give the site some more design love.

It’s obvious I moved to the right town. The collaborative spirit here is awesome. There is so much to take part in and everyone is eager for feedback and participation. Though it was still mostly a sausage-fest, it was good to see a number of women in the audience. I was also pleasantly surprised by the range of ages represented.

The event was quite inspiring and I’m glad we attended. I came home on fire, ready to get back to some pet projects so I can share them with others. I’m also eager to spread my design knowledge to those in need. As Rick (or perhaps Kistner) said on the Technopreneur panel, “Don’t take your knowledge for granted. Someone out there is in need of it.”

Oh and Todd, I still think the names silly. Silly, memorable and tied to a great event.