Shameless self promotion
Yours truly in the latest Adobe Success Story
I’m happy to announce that some of the work my team and I have been doing is featured in the latest Adobe Customer Success Story for CS5 that went live yesterday. Click here to watch the video now.
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The visual resume
I have continued to tinker with my idea of creating a new format for designer’s resume that leaves boring Word files behind for more color and visual layout. I recently updated the visual version of my resume with a new more compact and informative layout that lays out my whole career on one page. If you have any thoughts let me hear then and if your have your own version I would love to see it.
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Digital office hours – Ask me anything…
The one thing I have wanted this blog to become more than anything since I started writing it in this form over four years ago was a catalyst for conversation. I say that because I am someone who loves hearing different viewpoints, learning new things and having my ideas challenged. Looking at the numbers of comments over the years it is obvious that goal still alludes me for reasons I don’t completely understand. I do get a lot of emails with questions about design or how to have a career in advertising which I am happy to answer but I have always wanted to be able to share the answers publicly so they could help more than just the one person who emailed me.
So in my on-going effort to try and make this more of a conversation I am going to try something new. I am going to shamelessly borrow/steal an idea from my friend Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance.com, who recently started having digital ‘office hours’ on Formsrping.me where people can ask him anything they want. I love it because it is a conversation right out in the open for everyone to learn from and contribute to. So here is your chance to help me make this more than just a one way channel for my endless rants. Click here to ask me anything you want about design, advertising, your career, my career or anything else and I’ll answer you as quickly as I can.
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I Need 5 Minutes For A Reader Survey
So as I head into my tenth year of writing this blog I’m asking the small favor of five minutes of your time in exchange for all the blood, sweat and tears that I pour into this blog for free. Please take five minutes to fill out my first reader survey so I can get some feedback that will help shape the future direction and content of this blog so you will get more of the content and insights you want to read. The survey is completely anonymously so you won’t be getting any emails from advertisers and you can feel free to be as honest as you want to. Thanks and here is the link to survey.
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The Ego Is Still Blogging Nine Years Later
I recently got nostalgic did some research through my archives and realized that I have had my dates wrong for a long time and I been writing and sending my rants, opinions and advice out into cyber space in one form or another for nine years today. All of this started before I even knew what a blog was and I create the ‘Rants’ section of my old portfolio site that was named as an homage to Dennis Milller’s HBO TV show. That section of my site made a five year run before it became this blog which has been published for four years today. After nine years I look back at the first post and I still love it for it’s introspective tone and that right from the start I questioned what it takes to embark on something so completely self serving. The title of the piece is still as true as ever - The Ego is Blogging.
So as we head into year ten I can only hope some or all of this has made a difference to someone. As with the last few birthdays my only request remains the same – make a damn comment once and a while. Let me know what you think about all of this good or bad because there is nothing worse for a creative than talking to yourself.
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One of the 2009 MediaPost Online All-Stars
I found out last night that I have been chosen by the editors of MediaPost and OMMA magazine as one of their Online All-Stars for 2009. There are nine total recipients broken into groups of threes for Media, Creative and Marketing. It is a true honor to be included in the company of current winners like Colleen DeCourcy the Chief Digital Officer of TBWA and Simon Waterfall the Co-Founder / Creative Director of Poke as well as previous winners like Michael Lebowitz Found / CEO of Big Spaceship, Nick Law the EVP / Chief Creative Officer or RGA and Jeff Benjamin the Interactive Creative Director at Crispin Porter. The award will be presented at a luncheon on September 22nd during the OMMA Global Conference here in New York and inn keeping with my belief that God has a dark sense of humor I will, of course, be out of the country that week and unable to attend this event. Non the less and you can still see my goofy mug in the October issue of OMMA magazine.
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Making a change – New platform, design, URL, Atom feed and mobile version
First, I want to apologize for the lack of new content on the site over the past few weeks. It has partial ben due to the fact that I have been up to my eye balls in work but mainly because I reached the end of my rope with my constant problems with Blogger. I have been using Blogger as the backend platform for my blog for 4 1/2 years and lately I have been spending way too much time going back in to fix my site ever time they make a change in the code base that screws up my layout, keeps me from posting photos or content or both. So I have know for a while that I needed to make a change and those problems pushed me over the edge and I bite the bullet.
New URL
I have wanted to change the URL for the blog for a while and this seems like as good as any time to do it. The original URL of www.stephengates.com/blog will still work but it will be a redirect to blog.stephengates.com. I think less typing and no slash in the address is always a good thing.
Same great content now with that new design smell
With the URl and hosting squared away I took some time to test drive some new blog platforms and settled on WordPress. Right now I have migrated the 4 1/2 years and 700+ postings over to the new site but some of them still need some love to get them looking their best. The new design keeps with my recent design look which is an upgrade from the more basic and slightly dated look I had on the old blog.
RSS and Atom Feeds
The only change that may effect you is that with the change of URL and backend platform the old Atom and RSS feeds that were being pulled directly from my from my server without going through Feedburner are going to need to be changed. If you are reading this through your RSS reader or email then you don’t need to do anything because the Feedburner feed was already updated with the new RSS and you are good to go. If you are reading this on my site then make sure that you RSS or Atom reader is pointed to blog.stephengates.com/feed/ or just pull up the home page and re-subscribe.
Mobile/iPhone
I think the best addition is that I have added mobile and iPhone specific versions of my blog so it is easier to read on the go. All you have to do is go to blog.stephengates.com and the site automatically detect the mobile device and serve up the appropriate version. If you are looking to create your own mobile version with not a lot of work check out MoFuse.com. It is what I used and it has a good amount of customization and analytics to get the look you want and see how it is performing.
This is still a work in progress to get it back up and running 100% the way I want it but I think in the end it will be worth the work and sorry again for the delays and any changes that needed to be made on your end.
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City of Champions Redux
If you have every spent any time around with me you know that I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, which I am very proud of, and I am a die hard Steelers and Penguins fan. So the blog will be taking a few days off to celebrate the return of the City of Champions thanks to our Steelers and now the Penguins!
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CoolHomePages.com Site of the Week
I wanted to say thank you to the good folks over at CoolHomePages.com for picking my new portfolio site as one of six sites that got their Site of the Week award with the write up of “Stephen Gates’ online portfolio is a great example of how clean design, flash, and animation can all work together to create one phenomenal homepage.”.
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Sheraton does G.O.O.D. tomorrow in Central Park and around the world
Sheraton recently launched a new initiative called The Link which is a new communication and business hub created with Microsoft that will roll out to the brands 408 hotels across 75 countries. About a year ago I was asked to attend a brainstorm to figure out how we could do to promote the launch and I came up with the concept of Global Out of Office Day (G.O.O.D.) which is a one day event that recolonizes that successful people can work outside of the office and be productive from anywhere when they are able to use The Link. That concept of being productive anywhere will be brought to life tomorrow as Starwood’s corporate offices along with Pepsi and Microsoft here in New York will be doing business from a giant pop-up Link at Mineral Springs in Central Park. To kick off the day we will have the first ever ‘out of the office’ remote ringing of the New York Stock Exchange opening bell and will continue with speakers like Seth Godin and Mike Gamson from LinkedIn. G.O.O.D. will then move globally to also take place in Lisbon, Shanghai and Sydney. I am excited abut it all because I have never had one of my concepts come to life in such a large and global way so if you are in the area tomorrow stop by and see us.
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