Up the Tree

Intrigued with the prospect of a new Liz Phair album coming out _(June 24)_, I decided to pop my ass over to the “Capitol Records”:http://capitolrecords.com/ website to see if they had any samples. You know, to wet the appetite as it were.

*Boy did they.*

3 tracks later, I sat in front of my computer, mouth open, disbelieving my own ears. Is this the woman I had a crush on back in junior-High? Was this the woman whose lyrics were so overtly dirty it made your 15 year old cheeks blush? Yes they were. Unfortunately, the record industry has gotten ahold Liz and turned her into a perfectly recorded, highly polished, and utterly uninteresting “female vocalist.” Yes you heard me right, Liz Phair has officially sold herself out to the suits.

*Hello Avril, I would like you to meet your clone.*

It wasn’t so bad when it was Jewel, I didn’t like her music anyway, she became pop without much work, but leave Liz out of this. What happened to the “Blow Job Queen?” Well she’s gotten older, had a baby and somewhere along the line she allowed a “producer” to produce her album and let record execs tell her that they “undersand the kids.” They have moved her from the Alternative to Pop.

*Angry is in.*

On _Whitechocolatespaceegg_ it looked like Liz had left the angry music behind, that she had grown up, and in a sense moved past that time in her life. It was a relief for me, because I had also moved past that angry time in my life. Now she’s back being bitter and angry accept now she’s 36 and I, for one, would like to see Liz get her life together. She’s singing songs that could come out of an 18 year old and could easily have been recorded by Avril Lavigne. Liz’s songs sound like they were written for her, not by her.

BREAKUP SONGS LIZ!!?

bq. I’m sorry Liz, this relationship is unhealthy for both of us, I think it is better we not see each other anymore and I would appreciate you not write a song about it. Thanks.
_-Funtime Ben_

*I am no longer a fan.*

*WARNING: This entry is extremely dorky, please be careful.*
Well, after reading “Designing with Web Standards”:http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/ by “Jeffery Zeldman,”:http://www.zeldman.com/ I have finally updated my HTML(Hyper Text Markup Language) and Stylesheet to be fully compliant with the “World Wide Web Consortium.”:http://www.w3.org/ To the untechnical this is the equivalent to assembling an IKEA table, finding out you have one screw left and even though completely sturdy, you disassemble the table, just in case it wasn’t extra.

I first updated my HTML (while listening to an episode of “This American Life”:http://www.thislife.org/ about “Camp”:http://www.thislife.org/ra/109.ram)… After a few tweaks it validated. Much easier than I thought… Although, I thought it was _valid_ when I wrote it, but that’s my problem.

Because of my fantastic ability to follow direction and conform, I got a chunk of code to prove to the world that I am a conformist.

This equals this…

So, being the conformist I am, I decided to snap my CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) into being valid as well. This, to the non-technical, is equivalent to removing the wallpaper to see if it is securely fastened and then sticking it back up. Sounds easy right? In the technical world it is.

*Cha-Ching!*

Now that I had tasted the pleasure of _validation,_ I needed to post yet another little image saying so.

So, where’s the point of this story, you might be asking yourself, well here it is. This organization that prides itself on *standards* and rating my ability to follow them, well their code that they gave me to post on my site…

Is NOT valid under their specifications. It’s kind of like building an IKEA table and a technician from IKEA comes over to your house and takes apart that table and walks out with the screw.

*Well it isn’t really, but who’s counting.*

The correct code would look more like this:

See that little

/>

at the end of the Image tag? It makes all the difference in the world. _Wait until Zeldman hears about this._

On “Ultramicroscopic,”:http://www.ultramicroscopic.com/ one of my new favorite weblogs concerning design, a recent entry has sparked a fuse in my aging brain and I thought I would use the comment I left on this site as a springboard for a more technical entry today.

bq. late last year zeldman did a public redesign of his site. visible changes happened daily. some minor some major, some even seemingly contradictory to changes made the previous week or sometimes day. At SxSW in the spring he talked about the redesign. his main reason for doing it publicly was to share the redesign process and the thoughts in action with his readers (largely made up of web developers). his was not the first to transform before his users eyes, but definitely the first high profile site of some one regarded as a direction setter in the industry.

i am a great fan of zeldman, but this irritated me greatly. it seems like a whimpy way out. as a visual designer, i take a stand right or wrong with my designs. the potential for failure has always been an accepted risk. as a visual designer i am presenting a specific identity or persona to my users. I only want them to see the finished product, i do not want them peeking behind the curtain.

Zeldman, from “Zeldman.com”:http://www.zeldman.com/ is a leader in standards web design, by publicly updating his site he was, in a sense, teaching and inviting critique of his code from other designers and developers. Standards design is still woefully inadequate in ease of use and applicability, so by showing us his readership his process, it opened the door, both for help and discussion.

As a graphic designer, newly thrown into the field of standards based web design, I found the redesign an eye-opener. I also feel that graphic design is a process, and web design doubly so, because of it’s nature it is open to collaboration, review, and update. I agree that a designer should stick to his ideals of design and personal convictions, I also agree that too many chefs ruin the pot _(or whatever the colloquialism is),_ but I believe above all else that collaboration makes for the best design. The more ideas that get tossed around the better.

*I think this holds true for most things.*

When a site redesigns itself, often all that happens is new sidding gets thrown up and an additional bathroom gets added to the back. When the Gugenheim built the addition _(which makes the building look like a toilet),_ They made a huge hoopla about the event, but it really wasn’t all that impressive because it’s still the same building. Often designers will take a site offline to tell you that a new redesign is in store.

Basically all that happens is they loose audience by going offline. Your readers don’t care what you are doing behind the scenes, or if they do they wouldn’t trade a blank _”redesign comming soon”_ page for some stories about your grandpa and his two watches.*

*My grandpa wears two watches.

I don’t think this is what Run D.M.C. had in mind when they wore their huge gold chains. I feel like crap and no amount of chicken soup is going to make me feel better. I’m sick. Red nosed, stuffy headed, and temperature running sick.

*This is what I get.*

I stand out in the rain taking pictures of the wet streets and I get wet… I get a cold… and it gets beautiful out and all I got to show for it is a pile of snotty tissues each more revolting than the last. Now everybody’s out enjoying the sun and I’m stuck going home and cuddling _Pepper._

It’s not fair damn it!
It’s not fair.

(Good news is I’m heading back over to California on the 25^th… So EXCITED!)

Sometimes, when you see a waitress trying to remove a giant dragonfly from her broom by scraping the dragonfly across the pavement, you have to step in and take the insect across the street to Union Square Park for release.

_(I actually stepped in when a cute little old man suggested removing the dragonfly from the broom by grabbing it’s wings.)_