Andrew, James, and I have been through a couple of Web Design/Development jobs in our careers. Here is some hilarious and sometimes irritating phrases or requests from clients that we have personally heard. If you’re a web designer or developer, you’ll immediately connect with this list because we’ve all been through it. The list is formatted with phrases one of us heard, then our comments on it. If you have any more to add to the list below, post it in the comments.

From James:

- That should only take you ## time right?
Yes. Because you know exactly how much time it takes to develop or design something because you have done it yourself. Don’t tell the designer/developer how long it’ll take. We’ll tell you.

- That should be easy to do/add.
Have you ever heard that saying “easier said than done?” Well this applies here. Let the designer/developer to you if it’s easy or hard and trust us on our word.  Because designing isn’t as easy as WordArt and developing isn’t as easy as drag-and-drop.

- It needs to be fully animated but under 25kb.
If you don’t understand the concept of filesize, don’t expect a designer/developer to stuff a bunch of animations and videos into your flash intro.

For more from me and Andrew, go past the break. (more…)

I recently received some reader mail, from “phyzical”, that I thought would be nice to answer publicly. Phyzical writes:

hello I saw how you said you wanted to design websites ever since high school, I was just wondering how you came across working for pixelated geek? did you go to college I think its called over there. im Australian btw. its just im finishing my final exams at school and have decided I want to get a career in computing but I am going to do a computer science degree in uni, and was wondering if that would lead into the field you work in, my knowledge on computers is better than most but not to the degree of programming, I know it to a degree and know most parts of computers and what not.

phyzical

To read my answer, go past the break. (more…)

Please stay safe everyone. Bring back stories and photos from your parties (Even if they are NSFW ;) ).

So, what are or were you for Halloween? Anything funny, interesting or just plain weird? Show us some links to your photos. If its good enough, I’ll get something out of our prize box for you. Oh, and before I head to Andrew’s party, can you guess what me and Jesmes15 are dressed as?

Hint: From an 80’s music video

Last Tuesday, I was looking for a new dentist. While Google searching using maps, i came upon 3 different dentist offices. The first one i researched ihad a crappy website. Done all in flash, with cheesy sound effects and bad animations. The second office had a very basic site. All HTML. No flash. I was about to make an appointment there but decided to check out the third office’s site just in case.

Immediately i was happy with this dentist. I haven’t even met him OR her, but was already happy with this office. The website was tasteful, clean, and designed very well. To top it all off, they do almost everything paperless.

So, is it wrong that I choose a Dentist based on their website? I’m sorry to those other dentist offices. Am i bad for not caring about the other dentists’ hard work at school? Or not caring about how hard they worked or what they did to open up their own office?

Well, right now I’m writing this post from the dentists office. Already did my X-Rays, now just waiting to meet this person whom i choose above all others just because they have a nice site with a database back end.

There are times while I’m at work when I’d be having a one on one meeting with my boss to go over past, present, and future projects.  Now, I don’t wanna be mean but, I always feel a little hurt inside when he uses the wrong terminology for certain things.  I know he is just trying to explain stuff to me and its not his expertise or job.  His job is to keep the ship afloat and talk business stuff to business people.

Then, I had this one moment when I was explaining some web design terms to my GF.  I called the sides of a web layout a “Gutter.”  She instantly felt a little hurt and corrected me. “It’s margins.” Whoops. I felt like a noob.  But does anyone else feel this way when they hear wrong terms used in the wrong ways?

Today at work, my co-worker Jamie walks into the office and says “Hey, Nelson.  There’s this hilarious video that I need to show you.” I replied, “Orly? What’s it about.” Before she could put her stuff down, she decided to tell me a short story about how this weird guy was singing a song and playing a keyboard.  She said this 8 year old boy’s voice sounded hilariously fake and very low.  Then she told me the name of the video.  It was Chocolate Rain.

I told her “Oh, that video is old.  The guy had a commercial with Dr. Pepper because of that video. Oh, and another thing.  That’s his real voice and hes not 8.”  I said it in a kind of condescending tone that right after I said it, I felt dumb and mean. (Jamie, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. If you’re not, then I’ll just apologize to you tomorrow.)

Does anyone else accidentally become an internet snob towards non-geeks when they talk about the web like it’s the newest thing?

I remember back when AOL was the biggest ISP on the market and online chatrooms were relatively safe, everyone typed normally.  Sure there were some mispelled words here and there, but it was ok. Everyone understood each other and hardly anyone abused the CAPS LOCK. But then, the internets started becoming mainstream.  I think by the time I turned 16 or so, other “teenie” boppers started to poke their heads into chatrooms to see what all the fuss is about. How did I know they were “teenie boppers”?  They typed LyKe DiSh.

Now, travel to present day internets and you have so many different kinds of acronyms, different kinds of “speaks” (leetspeak, lolcat, geekspeak, etc.), and emoticons.  That’s all fine and sometimes funny to read, but one thing stood the test of time. Uppercase, lowercase typing.  This is my biggest internet pet peeve of mine and I really don’t understand how it is still here.

Why do people think iSh SoOoOoOoO kEwL 2 tYpE lYkE dIsH? Damn, just typing like that made me angry. I guess it gets under my skin because when I first saw that kind of typing it was like kids stomping on my internet lawn. Call me old but, if you see a full paragraph of that, it’s hard to read and it gets annoying to me.

Does it make you look cool if you type like that? I really don’t see the point of it but I do hope to see the end of it soon.

For those of you who do not know me personally, I am in no way a small guy. Build, weight, height… all over-average. I have been told I am quite imposing, and at times, quite scary. Now, roll back to about 3 years ago…

I was working on a long, mentally taxing project at work. My mood was dark, my attitude was sharpened, and my stress was high. I needed something happy and a bit silly to break that cloud hovering over me.

The solution, J-Pop… more specifically, Perfume.

The real geeky-reveal of this was when a co-worker of mine popped my headphone cord and revealed to the rest of the crew what I had been jamming out to for the last 30 minutes -_-. Thanks.

Much to my wife’s chagrin, I constantly ponder over the typical doomsday scenarios.  My geeky transgression is Post-Apocalypse planning; how to survive in the end-of-times, so to speak.  Being a both a PC and an RPG gamer, scenarios have been bouncing around in my head since the beginning.  Zombie scenarios took the forefront after a really good read through Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide.  While fully tongue-in-cheek, this book does pose some good questions about survival.  A lot of the principles, sans-zombies, make sense in general regarding security, food etc…

What would be your favorite end-of-the-world scenario? Have you actually planned anything out… yanno, just in case. Hey, we are all friends here, no one is judging me, er I mean you…