I’ve been an NPR listener since my college days at Philadelphia College of Art.

It’d been a long afternoon and Steven Tarental, our design instructor, begged our class to listen to something besides Talking Heads and Debbie Harry. I’m sure we gave him some sort of snotty art student approval. He rolled the knob to WHYY in Philadelphia and introduced us to Terry Gross, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered. I was hooked.

Then I moved to Atlanta. Those were the dark years. No real NPR for me… just alot of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, Jon Bon Jovi… and Budweiser.

A move to DC brought me joy as I had 3 stations to choose from; WAMU, WETA and WBJC if the wind was right. Truly wonderful stuff.

I then moved to Fairbanks and knew in an instant that all was good in the world when I met KUAC. I listen to that station all day long. It’s on in my home. It’s on in our office. It’s on in my truck. I love what NPR/PBS brings to my day.

So, when Tammy Tragis-McCook, the Marketing & Community Relations Manager at KUAC asked me to take a seat at the microphone for the KUAC radio fund drive, how could I say no?

So, I make my radio debut tomorrow night on World Cafe, a show I listened to locally in college. We’ll be on air, 7-9pm, October 19th.

The evening will be fun, and silly and intriguing because I finally get to peek behind the “curtain,” and see what I’ve been listening to for so many years.

I will also be hosting Car Talk on Saturday morning, October 20th at 9-10am, with my good friend, Julie Estey. We’ll add our own pearls of wisdom to the recommendations of Click and Clack, the Tappit brothers, the stars of Car Talk.

When you call in – have your wallet ready. I want all of you to support the best Public Radio station that I’ve sampled from east coast to north coast.

So, don’t touch that radio dial!

But do call and pledge while I’m on air!

This is a beautiful website about designing beautiful website.

 http://www.alistapart.com

Our instructor, Chris Lott, is very supportive and patient and does his best to make our Web Design/Dreamweaver class enjoyable.

… again. But at least I think I have finalized a project that’s been hanging around my neck for awhile.

The Yukon Quest Pin/Patch/T-shirt design.

It’s been one of those jobs that I just couldn’t “find time for.” Which is a real delay tactic in my creative itinerary. Painful procrastination. Most time I can crash into the perfect answer… but this one just wasn’t coming.

Weeks ago, I started with a silly bunch of concepts and offered this to the client.

Needless to say, they didn’t go for it.

Tonight, I was able to concentrate and have sent this off to the client. We’ll see….

I’m off home. My own dogs need caring for.

I find it hard to order food in a restaurant from a poorly designed menu.

Therefore, identifying a bad website was easy – so many to choose from. I finally picked Paperrad. At least, I think that’s the name of this site. I’m not sure what it’s attempting to “promote” but, you can see why it makes my teeth hurt.

WARNING: manic blinking, unreadable type, and over-stimulating color.

Less is More
Overall, the moving and blinking should be eliminated. It gives me a headache.

Location. Location. Location.
The central format seems interesting, but I can’t tell from the crazy layout what the site is promoting. If it about books, animation or music, it should be obvious to the visitor at first glance. Since I don’t know what Paperrad means, perhaps the use of a tagline would be good here? “We offer the best Midgets on the planet!” Then move on from there.

Color is a Tool – Not a Weapon
The use of color for this site MUST be revisited. My God! It’s like a Jimi Hendrix Experience without the music. [Thank god, it doesn't have music!] Considerate use of color can be used to divide and organize the content. A blue header with a blue box, a red header jumps to a red box, etc.. In addition, color helps set the “mood.” If this site is selling music, bright colors are helpful, but we don’t need all of them at once.

Can you Read Me Now?
Designers are blessed with some wonderful fonts. From serif to san serif, cursive to woodcut. Fonts give “voice” to a page, but given that, the text must be readable. Otherwise, the message is lost and your visitor goes away. Most of this site is unreadable, copy is squeezed up to images, set against unreadable colored backgrounds or set in a illegible point sizes. I was never so glad to see plain black Helvetica as I was in some of the text blocks in this site. It was my only relief.

Know Your Audience
Last, this site might be attempting an “edgy” feel with it’s brightly colored retro pixelated images, the dancing background, it all seems like someone with a new toy. If this was a nod to Pac Man, or some old bartop computer game, then I would expect to see more content skewed to that age range; 35-40 years. What audience was this web designer trying to attract?

You only get one chance to make a good first impression. This web site is so visually aggravating that it lost me at “hello.”

Remember, use your HTML powers for good, not evil.

I stumbled onto Showtime’s, Weeds. From the beginning credits I fell in love with the graphics, the theme song and finally the characters. We meet unlikely criminals, experience suburban dysfunction and sniff around the edges of the marijuana drug trade. The theme song, Little Boxes, was originally performed by Malivina Reynolds and later Pete Seeger. With the popularity of Weeds, the song has been covered by current artists, making it quite trendy. Taking it one step further, Showtime started a “homegrown” video competition for the best rendition of Little Boxes by viewers. I’ve included a very unusual version.

Real Time. I love this program.

http://gardenfork.tv/

I stumbled over this great site while poking around iTunes. It’s a video podcast of a simple guy who has 2 great dogs, a wife who seems to be the voice behind the hand-held camera, and horse.

He likes to cook and be handy around the house. His recipes and tips in the kitchen are really fun to watch. It’s Bob Villa meets Martha Stewart.

Oliver was a wonderful Corgi who loved his Mom and Dad very much. Although he was only 12 years old, he died from a very aggressive form of lymphoma. He was a wonderful companion.

Here’s to Oliver.