I've always been against flash. To a certain point, I avoid flash-based sites. However, I've never been able to formulate clearly why. I know it's not a good solution for web. Intuitively, that is, based on countless encounters with both flash and non-flash websites. But I thought I needed an articulated explanation.

So, it's almost New Year, and all the hype is in the air. It's time to work myself to death. Yeah, I was assigned tons of tasks, all squeezed into 3 to 4 hours the responsible staff members can spare to even think about them. Mistakes can and will happen. Some cost nothing, some cost a small fortune...

As a graphic designer one needs to face the target audience time and again during their regular working day. Needless to say, a graphic designer rarely has the opportunity to make direct contact with the audience and that means one is driven by data, and data alone. This data usually comes in the form of feedback from account or brand managers. What this data usually suggest is that people from the target audience are extremely stupid...

The first sprint of portal development is finished. The home page is up in its static variant, and I'm waiting for the programmer to get to work and finish it with some nice DHTML sprites, and we'll proceed with news engine development.

After that, it's the contact page. At first, it will be a simple form for sending e-mail to a designated address, but we'll include more content there.

Yesterday (or today if you take into account the fact that I still haven't slept, and it's 2:04 am) was a particularly rough day at the job. The many conflicts I get into with different people on different levels within the corporate hierarchy is very tiring for my psyche and my body alike... And they always make me think...

The Team88 main portal is in quite a miserable state... The fact is, we were not all that busy at all. We just had... well, our own lives. But now that I'm working in Inkscape on a daily basis, and that my programmer friend has stabilized his own affairs, we are moving full speed ahead towards finishing at least the static pages on our Team portal.

Well, some thoughts that are emerging right now... Nothing worth wasting bandwidth on at the moment, but still, I thought I'd note this down.

I'm currently playing with design for a website, for my dear friend, and an excellent photographer. As with most photographers, he wanted a gallery with a few categories. So I happily obliged. But since I forgot the exact categories he wanted (which is not so important at this point), I started writing fake category names, just to see how category names could be styled. And then I noticed something. The names of the links have a huge impact on how I perceived the content of the website. I don't know if this is universal. (Will have to do some research, asking around...) Definitely a strange, new discovery...

Needless to say, things can become messy. Where I work, people seem to have a slightly loose perception of what their job is, and what it is not. In a dramatic turn of events 5 minutes ago, I was informed that the design and content of advertising material is to be decided by the editors and not by the Brand Manager's crew. Not so shocking to me, I'm afraid...