Sarah Parmenter, a web and UI designer.

It’s that time of year, when employers/clients are squeezing every last ounce of creativity from us, deadlines seem to get shorter and our days get longer. We’re probably not at our best to be conversing with others. Just yesterday, I snapped at my Dad who called and asked a very simple question about eBay just because I was dealing with some work stresses. I then spent the next 3 hours feeling terrible and texting him to apologise. We’re certainly not at our most patient.

Twitter has been rife with snarkiness and generally an underlying tone of unfriendliness recently, uncommon in our industry but sadly becoming more so. This has come at a time when I’m trying to encourage two very bright, young and wonderful individuals into our industry, both of whom follow closely what has been happening on Twitter, and I can’t help but wonder if Rachel Andrew is right in her most recent blog post – Be Kind to one another. Should I warn them that they need thick skins and sometimes need to be a little aggressive in order to succeed and be heard? As Rachel says, I sincerely hope not, however from my personal experiences over the years, I’ve most certainly had to toughen up.

Going backwards slightly, I remember our industry pre-twitter. When your only access to the community was through those who wrote for blogs, books or magazines. I vividly remember flicking through the pages of .net magazine in early 2003, and Googling those who had written tutorials, then bookmarking their sites and visiting regularly. As I got more experienced I didn’t always agree with some of the things I read, and the discussions that took place in the comments were actually helpful, and normally, an alternative method to that which the author originally posted – everyone would learn something. Of course, there have always been haters, people happy to sit behind a keyboard and remain anonymous and faceless, but I strongly believe social media has bought out a dark side of us, as a community, that needs to be buried, and fast.

The influx of the community onto Twitter was a wonderful thing, suddenly being able to converse, in real-time with someone over the other side of the world who wrote one of your favourite books, or who’s work you find inspiring, was a truly magical time. A group of “webbies” (myself included) were very early adopters of Twitter, naturally, and so as others from the community joined these users appeared to already have a large following, and became exponentially, more popular. It was like a catalyst. A lot of the snark on twitter seems to be directed at “popular” webbies who, through no fault of their own, in a way, found themselves at the spearhead of the community on Twitter.

If you spent time with any of these popular “web celebs” (FYI – I hate that term) – you’ll be surprised to find little to no ego’s at all, just a bunch of creative people who enjoy what they do and haven’t been afraid to tell people about it, but all of whom sadly have war stories about their negative experiences of the community, or a select group of people, on Twitter. Within a group, we all laugh and joke and brush them off, but behind closed doors, I know deep down, we’re not laughing. Even worse, the same names of individuals causing problems and bad feeling appear to crop up again and again.

Have we all become so used to sharing that we feel it’s perfectly acceptable to throw etiquette out of the window and direct nasty comments at one another? I’ve never seen this happen at a web conference, so why be a keyboard warrior and let it happen online? Maybe it’s easy to forget these are real people behind the avatars. I don’t know. Perhaps we’ve been spoilt with the speed at which we can now chime in on anything that we read, rather than taking a considered approach to what we say?

It slightly crosses with a theory I’ve had for a while that we’re going to reach an “over-sharing peak” – we’ll start to see value in pulling back the amount of people we share with, and resort to close-knit friendship groups. It’s a theory I’m trialing myself with the new app Path. Instead of sharing with every person that adds me, I’m keeping it exclusively for people I know, trust, and have a real-life friendship with. These people could tell me what I like, dislike, what upsets me, and know all the little nuances of my personality, so I don’t need to watch whether what I say could be misinterpreted. I’m quite enjoying it and have found real value to me, in keeping it that way. I sincerely hope as a community though, that we don’t feel the need to revoke sharing from a wider audience, simply because resistance against what we put out there, is getting less friendly.

I’d love for us as an industry to be more tolerant, to encourage others and get rid of that underlying tone, that has crept in recently, of one-upmanship. I don’t expect everyone to get on, or even share the same opinion, but before making a snarky comment, ask yourself what real value it’s adding to the community? Personally, snarky comments on twitter remind me of one of a saying…

“Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength”.

When I first got the email from the guys at United Pixelworkers asking me to do a t-shirt, I was over the moon, having seen friends design for them, and most recently acquiring the beautiful t-shirt by Meagan Fisher myself, it was certainly a challenge I wanted to accept.

I’ve never designed a t-shirt before, so the whole process was quite alien to me, including not realising about the constraints of screen printing. So, I started on paper, as I always do – sketching from the sofa. It started life very differently…

The brief from Pixelworkers was that it had to look like it had come from me, you’ll see all of the other t-shirts are engrained with the personality of the designer. I originally wanted to go along the lines of an old vintage advert – given that I love everything from that era. I spent ages on this sketch, only to dislike it the very next day. The concept wasn’t strong enough and it felt like it didn’t really have a heart, apart from me liking vintage looking stuff.

So I emailed Jay and said I was doing a complete 180 degree switch on everything I had told him I would be doing, and that I wanted to do a vintage looking school crest instead. I came up with this idea a while back but didn’t have an outlet for it – it seemed the perfect pairing. The first sketch to come out of my brainstorm was the one you see below.

I originally wanted the tag line underneath to read “We Weareth Plaid” – poking fun at the well known fact that most of us wear plaid shirts at conferences – ironically, as I write this blog post, I’m wearing one myself.

I bounced back and forth some ideas with Jay who came up with, “In Zeldman Speramus” – “In Zeldman We Trust”. I still wanted to get the plaid in there somewhere, so it ended up in the final digitised design, but doesn’t appear in any pencil sketches.

My third round of sketches are much closer to what you see in the digitised version.

Then came the challenge of digitising – which actually wasn’t too bad considering it’s something I do rarely – I’m a Photoshop girl mainly, but I learnt so many new tricks from sitting in Illustrator for hours over the past week. The only thing I made a complete schoolgirl error of, was not realising the constraints on ink. I literally went mad, without thought – and the design on the right that you see below, was my 6 ink version – which I’m told is very costly to produce. So I got a lengthy email explaining how it all works (which I’m very thankful for) and managed to bring it down to three colours only.

So there we have it, pretty much my whole process start to finish.

If you would like to buy it, you only have 20 days – and then the shirt is retired and will no longer be for sale. Thank you to those who sent tweets last night saying how much you love the shirt, it made all the nights in illustrator worthwhile.

Voted for by the public and then judged by a panel of industry experts, the .net awards have become a highlight in the geek calendar. I was thrilled to have just been nominated, then ecstatic to make the final 3 – to win, well – it means more to me than any of you could realise.

By nature I’m not a particularly confident person, always second guessing myself and reading too much into things. Having this little confidence booster on my desk will hopefully abolish some of my demons and help me to continue doing great work.

Thank you to everyone who voted and the judges who picked me – it really means a heck of a lot to me.

Today I started work needing some avatars to add to some Photoshop comps I am working on. There didn’t appear to be a pack of avatars available for download that people had consented to be a part of, so I set about making one.

I collated it throughout the day, and it’s now available for you to download. Everyone within the pack has consented, within reason i.e. please be sensible, realise you are using the face of a real person (of course!) and don’t use them on anything controversial, or anything that will cause distress or defamation to their character.

If someone wants to reduce the file sizes for me, that would be fabulous. I’ve simply batch processed everything, entirely usable but I’m sure could be smaller.

Enjoy!
Downloadable pack of Twitter Avatars for Mock-ups and PSD Comps

This is a bit of an out-of-the-ordinary blog post for me, but apparently, our industry loves whisky? I posted on Twitter last night about some rare whisky (or Whiskey if you’re American) that my Dad is in possession of and my feed lit up.

Some history…my Dad and my Grandad started an off-licence/liquor store, 30 years ago. What they both don’t know about Wines & Spirits isn’t worth knowing. Since Grandad (Pops) passed away and my Dad, as some of you know, had an accident last year, he’s is shutting up shop, and retiring early.

My Dad did some canny buying a while back and purchased some of the rarest whisky in the world. He’s now offering them online to all those who appreciate a good 36 year old Murray McDavid. All of them are brand new, never opened, still in their boxes.

The reserve prices are the lowest market value, all ranging from £150 – £300.

So here’s a list of everything currently on ebay – click on the image to take you to that auction.

The rarest is the Murray McDavid Glenrothes 1968
bottle 177 of only 300!

Murray McDavid – Macallan 1969
Bottle 792 of 900

Due to a fault with ebay, which is an entirely different story, this is the only one that doesn’t have worldwide postage on the listing, however we will post worldwide.

Murray McDavid Caperdonich 1968
Bottle 467 of 500

Murray McDavid Islay Trilogy 1969
bottle 586 of 1200