jcksn

Wordpress 2.6 was released last week. It’s definitely my favorite release thus far. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about it, but I won’t waste my breathe - the Automatticians already have in this awesome recap video:

But, the coolest feature, and the one I’m proud to have spent a lot of time and hard work on, is the Press This bookmarklet:

With my wedding just a week and three days away, I decided to show off the hard work we put into our letterpressed wedding invitations. You can check out the writeup and pictures over here at eight6.

I wrote this a month or so ago, and never published it.

We live in amazing times. Just amazing.

The internet has blessed us all with the power to communicate with each other. It took a while, but we finally realized that the internet doesn’t have to be all about cats and animated gifs. Even though, those are still two very popular topics.

Not just geeks are on the net anymore, either. I just learned, Kanye West has a blog… and it’s probably actually HIM blogging on it! Not to mention he has a Vimeo account (”suck on that Flickr,” says Vimeo founder j/k)! BTW, Kottke, who I rubbed the wrong way many years back, alerted me to all this, on his unimaginably popular blog.

After watching this video, how can you not love the internet?

We’ve finally learned that there is more to life than “me” and that the “we” is what makes the world go round.

The internet does have a heart. It enables us to do some really amazing things.

Recently, along with Coudal Partners, 37Signals, Metafilter, Happy Cog, Iconfactory, Core77, Daring Fireball, Emma, Business Brickyard, and skinnyCorp, I got to help kids benefit from your filthy gambling habit. My design studio eight6 donated $1000 to buy some books for kids, by matching your donations.

I’ve always been unnaturally excited to help others. Being able to do that through my work, is gratifying. eight6 is heavily focused on helping the world and it will always be a core part of who I am and what my company represents. It sounds “deep,” and kind of corny. But it’s pretty simple. We build and design things (usually websites), using design to clarify communication and in return, help make good things happen.

In the next few months I’m going to be launching a program to help loving geeks help the world become a better place, just by doing what they do. Sounds interesting? I think it is. It will be an experiment, but an interesting and, hopefully, a fruitful one.

Captioning Sucks! is a microsite about captioning, and why it sucks!

Joe Clark approached me to design and build the site. His request: “garish and vulgar.” So, eight6 went to town.

It was an odd request, and an awkwardly challenging one. Aside from wrangling with Comic Sans and coming out victorious, I got to play around with some alpha-transparency and I think the result is pretty interesting. This site was one of my favorites to design… It’s not every day you get to do this kind of work! And now, I can finally say, “I got a client to use Comic Sans!”

I want to point out, that this is the kind of stuff I really enjoy and one of the main reasons I started eight6. We don’t just want to design, we want to move the world forward through design. (Yeah, it sounds corny.) Captioning Sucks! is a perfect example of balancing graphical conventions and implementing contextual design. It’s vulgar appearance helps emphasize the importance of the project’s goals.

Go find out why Captioning Sucks!

My company, eight6 is going to match up to $1000 worth of bets, to buy a ton of books for underprivileged kids.

I love good causes. And, this one is fun! Get on over to the Making Book page and place your bets. Skip the casino, and gamble to buy books for kids!

From coudal:

Each bet costs $10 and all the money bet will go to First Book, “a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.”

I just got some new cards printed up for eight6.

They’re kind of tiny, only 2×2 5/8 inches. The precious-ness, makes them fun to hand out. And the less-is-more, yet not too much less, metaphor seems to stick. I like ‘em a lot.

If you see me at WDN there’s no doubt you’ll end up with one. If you aren’t lucky enough to go to WDN (I’m so excited I have time to go), I can still send you some. Just email me!