The November meeting will be on the 17th and we will discuss the following topics:

• Flutter for WordPress – talk given by Tammy Hart
• Git for version control – talk by a yet unnamed Common Thread‘er
• Layout 101 – more below
• Site to review: Bushnell’s Hunting Site – save your comments for the meeting
• Tool review – bring your ideas to the meeting ’cause I don’t have one

How To Build A Website

One of the things I like about this group is the potential for stealing “skillz”, uh, I mean, “learning” from other web peeps. I want to start a new topic for each meeting – creating a site from scratch with a real life client, but here’s the catch – if you’re reading this, you’re the client. This new site will probably never go live, but I want to walk through each part of building a new site for this group (Web Design Lunch), one part at a time at each meeting. This will give each of us the chance to talk about how we build a site and at the same time learn from others. The first process we will undertake will be wireframing the layout. Arguably, this is a few steps down the road in the design process, but hopefully we’re each familiar enough with the WDL “product” and “business” to skip some of the earlier fact-finding steps.

No RSVP required this time.

Logistics: at ShiftWorkspace, 11:30AM – 1PM

Bring your lunch, or don’t. I don’t care.

• Topic
• Website Review
• Software Tool Review

Presented by Chris Elliott and Jeremy Flint.

Download Presentation Slides

• Chris’ Presentation Slides (PDF, ~5.7MB)
• Jeremy’s Presentation Slides (PDF, ~156KB)

If you are interested in this group, please leave a comment below and let me know what you think would be the best use of a group like this. If you’re not interested, please let us know that, too.

• File Folders: This may be the easiest and most obvious tool. It’s also the most self explanatory, so I won’t go into brain numbing detail. Caveman -> Caveman Save Image on Computer -> Caveman put image in folder -> Caveman beat chest in joy.
• Flickr: Patrick Haney was the one who brought this to my attention in a post titled, “Archiving Inspiration“. There is a nice group of inspirational images in the Flickr Set associated with the article.
• Evernote: If you haven’t heard of Evernote, you should seriously consider wasting more time on the web. It’s an amazing tool and they have an app for the PC, Mac and iPhone. Once you create your account, you can access it from any of those sources and all of your images are accessible and stay synced, wherever you go. Presently, this is the tool that I use for cataloging. It works great and they have a free version. You can also share your notebooks with the world, as I have done with my inspiration notebook. Evernote also has a slick FireFox extension called Evernote Web Clipper.
• ImageSpark: I didn’t know about this one until today, so I don’t really know much about it.
• LittleSnapper: I also hadn’t heard of this one until today, but so far it looks amazing. When combined with EmberApp or Flickr it seems to be a very useful tool for catalog and sharing images.

Tools for Grabbing Images

• Browser (FireFox, of course)
  • Delicio.us: this works well when you’re just tagging a URL (my inspiration set on delicious)
• OS X
  • Capture Screen Segment (Cmd + Shift + 4): saves PNG image to the desktop
  • Capture Entire Window (Cmd + Shift + 4, space bar): saves PNG image to the desktop
  • Paparazzi!: will capture an entire web page (scrolling and all).
  • LittleSnapper: new to me. I haven’t used it, but maybe you have. It must be good. It’s from the UK and they spell organize with an “s” (organise).
• PC
  • Print screen, duh! This method is lacking for the PC in comparison with the Mac. That’s where the next tool in my list steps in.
  • SnagIt: This is one of the best tools I’ve used for screen capturing, period, but it’s a little bloated and pricey just for capturing images. They do have a trial version you can try out before you decide to break the piggy bank.

I put this post out, not to convince you to use one of the tools listed, but to spark a conversation about how you catalog your inspiration. Please post a comment below and let me know what tools and processes you use.

Topic: Basic Web Design Principles

Speaker: Chris Elliott

Date: September 8, 2009

Location: Shift Workspace

One of the most difficult skills to develop in the web design world is that of “design”. That word can be used in so many ways and mean so many different things, it’s often difficult to grasp exactly what you need to learn/do to be good at it. Chris Elliott is a local, well known designer that will share some of his experiences that helped mold him into the designer he is today. His work speaks for itself.

We will announce more specifics about this meeting as the time approaches, but rest assured if you attend you will come away with something that will help you build better looking web sites.

We will also use Photoshop CS4 throughout the presentation and that will serve as our software review. I realize that a lot of you out there don’t work in Photoshop for various reasons, but the principles discussed will apply to most other graphics applications.

Due to overwhelming demand at the last meeting, please RSVP using the EventBrite link below.

UPDATE: Jeremy Flint will also speak on @font-face and TypeKit.

UPDATE: Due to the large amount of content for this meeting, we are going to start at 11:30. You can mingle on Twitter during the Chris’ presentation.

UPDATE: The video for this meeting is now posted: http://www.webdesignlunch.com/announcements/video-web-design-basics-and-font-tools/

It’s time to talk about the next meeting. Please answer each of the poll questions below so we can a feel for the next meeting. Please vote ASAP as the polls close tomorrow (8/7/2009) at 5PM.

In order for this group to maintain relationships and interaction, I suggest meeting more frequently than once a month, but I know how tight everyone’s schedule is. Based on your response,  I will send out another poll for the date.

Chris Elliot and I had a good conversation today about this group and what we might could do to bring in some more interaction. We talked about creating a fictional company with a need for a new website. Each meeting we can talk about a specific part of the site (ex. layout, colors, navigation, etc.) and explore how it needs to be applied to the client’s site. To add some spice to it, I would like to see one person play the role of the client and bark out some of the weird things we’ve all heard clients say.

Hopefully everyone enjoyed having the different segments of the meeting and not just one large presentation. If not, let me know.

What do you want to discuss for the next meeting? If you have another suggestion, please leave it in the comments below. If you see something in the comments you would rather discuss at the next meeting, don’t vote in this poll and just speak up in the comments.