Mark Whitcher

Well, I have to say that this little experiment sure has gotten the creative juices flowing. Today I gave myself 25 minutes to execute an idea I had, though I worked it a little bit differently by reading the design brief last night before I went to be.

I guess I felt too comfortable with the 25 minutes (previously I had only allowed myself between 6 and 13 minutes). So when I went to see how much time I had left, I had only 1 left, and I still hadn’t colored it yet.

So I threw some colors on and tried to submit, but I MISSED IT! It was kind of an adrenaline rush though. Pretty cool.

I took 5 more minutes and colored it properly. I have posted the results of my work in the portfolio, but here they are to see.

I liked the idea too much to just let it go, so I sent the client a private message with a link to my blog so she could at least see it. I might end up getting kicked off the site, but it was still fun!

I have set up a new album in the portfolio section for my submissions to 99designs contests. I want to show them off, but I don’t want a blog post for each of them.

This is another logo I did for my little experiment. Unfortunately, this logo was too complicated to finish in time. I guess that is why I am posting it here; so my little exercise doesn’t just get tossed. I am not totally happy with this, but I think the idea is sound and it would have been a good logo with some refinement added.

Here is an example of a logo I did for the experiment I mentioned a couple days ago.

I looked at the contest first thing in the morning, noticed it was ending at 10am and decided to to it. The company I did the logo for offers services to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for the first stages of a startup.

The problem I had with this entry is that I forgot about it completely until 12 minutes before the entry deadline. I tackled it anyway.

I came up with the idea while I was getting the dogs from outside. By the time I got sat down to work on it, I only had 6 minutes left. So I threw the idea together and uploaded it. Just in time. By the time the screen had redrawn the contest was ended. My logo was the last one done. —Cool.

The version you see here was a rework of what I originally submitted. I just couldn’t leave it in the state it was in. If the contest owner contacts me about it, I will direct them to the rework.

I found a site this morning that is similar to other freelance job sites but with one major difference, with 99designs.com you do the work before you know you have the job.

The site approaches it in a somewhat novel way; they treat all jobs as contests, and the payment as the prize money for the contest winner.

I have a couple problems with this as a way to get work, and also from the flip side, as a way to find someone to do work. The obvious problem for freelancers is that you have to invest time into something without anything even close to a guarantee of payment. The problem for the people who have work to do is that the designs are going to be completed with as little effort as possible. Not many will spend time researching the problem and the solution when it is only for a chance at getting money.

However, an idea struck me today, and I am going to try it as an experiment. One thing about doing freelance work, at least starting out when work is more scarce than plentiful, is that it is easy to let design skills and thoughts stagnate. So I have decided that for the next couple weeks I am going to choose a contest on 99designs to spend about 30 minutes a day working on. I am going to choose a contest that has only about that amount of time left and challenge myself to come up with something great in that short of time frame.

The pressure of the short time to work on it, and the chance at getting some money from it should be invigorating and get the creative juices flowing. We’ll see what happens.

Ok, the ads that are featuring a certain singer whose name is the last four letters of my last name is driving me crazy. I don’t have a single bit of information about her anywhere on this site. I am not even mentioning her name here because I don’t want to make the situation worse.

It will be nice when google lets you block ads from your site based on keywords rather than just url.

Rails is what I know. You could say that I grew up on it. Not grew up in the literal sense, but when the time came several years back for me to pick what web programming language I wanted to learn, I chose ruby on rails.

So here I am, several years later, making my way through life as a free-lance web developer and designer. Lately, most of the work that I have been doing is actually sub-contracted to me by other design firms.

The problem I have now is that rails is not suited at all for smaller jobs or quick set ups on someone else’s servers. I went through several setups before I ended up with my current configuration (nginx in front of a cluster of mongrels), and I can’t really make my self a pain by asking for special setups on someone else’s servers. I need to work too badly to do that.

The obvious choice for quick back-end programming jobs would be PHP, but I haven’t really had the time nor the inclination to learn a new language. I started shopping around for a smaller ruby framework. I looked at camping, but when I found that it uses activerecord, I decided against it. I wanted something that was a little more drop-in-and-go.

So I decided to create my own web framework for ruby called (tentatively) mira. It runs as a CGI script and the only requirement is ruby itself. No gems, no active[insert whatever here], no nothing except standard ruby libraries.

I am going to be releasing mira as an open-source project. So whoever wants it can download it, use it, fix it, or change it. I will be setting up another section of this site soon to go over all things mira. If you have any questions in the meantime, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you.