“Aaron Weiche of Five [Technology] wanted a home for the great web design work close to home here in Minnesota.”

There are only 14 designers listed in their directory, so, I encourage all of you to add yourselves and those designers whose work you love, same for blogs².

1. I’m hoping this isn’t just part of their heavy SEO campaign visible on the fivetechnology.com site, e.g. linking the phrase ‘Minneapolis, Minnesota area web design’ to yourself….yeah, um, could you at least link it to Websota. kthxbye.

2. Cullect – one of my projects – has an number of reading lists aggregating Minnesota-based blogs in a number of categories. Minnesota Design, MN Local, Twin Cities are just a few.

Contact Jonathan Dahl for more information.

Judah Frangipane has worked in the web industry for the last 12 years. During that time he worked at Roxio and Parsons and is currently employed at Yellow Book. He’s been using and teaching Flash for the last five years. Judah’s worked on some Flash projects that you can see here http://www.drumbeatinsight.com

Saviz Artang has worked in technology for about 12 years. The first five
years were at Intel Corp. in CA and the rest at Thomson Corp in Eagan, MN
where he is currently holding a technology manager position. Saviz has been involved with Flash for the past two years making a toddler PC game. You can see his work at: http://artangco.com

Saviz and Judah are hoping to draw some big numbers for their first meeting as leaders on Wednesday, April 18th. They’re going to have Dustin Tauer from Easel Training demonstrating some of the exciting new features in CS3 including new features of Flash CS3, Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 and After Effects CS3. He’ll focus on work flows between applications within the new Creative Suite.

After the presentation they’ll have a copy of CS3 for people to play around with.

(Note: there will be armed guards protecting the CS3 cds.)

As always, free pizza, beer and pop will be provided.

Also, They are taking requests for demonstration of any features or products. Feel free to post you requests to the FlashMN Yahoo Group.

If you managed to miss this somehow:

http://www.adobe.com/creativelicense/

Go ahead and Preorder today, but I don’t think they’ve made any promises about when it will actually arrive yet. I’d hope it will show up before Flashbelt.

They have gone as far as telling me my plan to upgrade a copy of Flash 5 that I bought off a guy for $40 on Craigslist and planned to upgrade to Flash CS3 will not work.

Personally I’m most intrigued by a new flash feature that attempts to make the designer to developer workflow easier by allowing us to export tweened animation in Flash as Actionscript code…

However:
High-energy branding/design firm seeks a talented, creative Web designer proficient in Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop and other Web design programs. Kamper is a fun, dynamic and growing company with a lot of opportunities for hard working designers. Must enjoy working to a variety of music genres, including 80’s rock. Please send hard copies of portfolios. No e-mail applications accepted. No phone calls.

Some how this shocks me, how do you expect a web focused designer to “wow” you with their flash skills if you can’t go online to view it.

But, I’m now a Strib reader more often than not. The Strib just redesigned as well, and has created an online redesign guide for Strib readers.

Granted, the redesign guide is a crappy flash site with the hallmark “let’s confine the actual content of the page into a cheesy, small, scrolling box”. That said, the content is nice. The redesign looks promising. I’m especially excited about the expanded world news section. Another nicety is the claim that they’ll offer more stores that *don’t* continue on another page. About time. The entire aesthetic of the redesign also has a very modern vibe to it. The Pioneer Press has some catching up to do…

As for the new website, for starters, congrats on doing a simultaneous redesign. The new site is clearly better in terms of organizing the navigation. The old site, like a lot of long-lived content-rich sites was suffering from years of patchwork upgrades which created a navigation system that never failed to confuse me. The site is laid out with CSS-P–a very nice improvement.

The fly-out navigation isn’t the best, but they did make it accessible by allowing for non-javascript users to still navigate the site.

The home page is much more inviting. In addition to the simplified navigation, there’s not nearly the amount of ads as there were before.

There’s still bugs…many of the articles linked to non-existent pages and it seems that some links randomly launch in pop-up windows, but, overall, a very nice move forward.

At the time of this writing, you could criticize a number of things: the lack of a background color on the website, that all the website entries are shown as static screenshots, that an entry’s thumbnail does not link to the entry’s details.

To their credit all the work on the site was volunteer and this is the second year of the Exhibit A experiment. The event’s goal of focusing on the performance of interactive work and solving a client’s design problem rather than “oooohhhh it looks cool” is a big shift for the American Institute of Graphic Artists. Perhaps Exhibit A will inspire other communities and events and bring some evidence that:

…the AIGA is finally truly turning the boat, and moving toward a more integrated and complex design future, even if that means losing some of its legacy members….

More info at: AIGA-MN Exhibit A 2005

Yesterday, while doing some testing on Jen’s computer, I hit Amazon and to my surprise, I saw the new, more text-based header. Back on my machine, still the old header full of tabs.

My sister said she gets the simplified interface after signing-in.

About a year ago, I heard a rumor Amazon was experimenting with a more CSS and text-based header. I’m happy to see it out in the world – if only on a trial basis.