Jeff Wagner Interactive

Archive for March, 2010

Emerging Print and Web Designers

March 12th, 2010 - by Jeff Wagner

Recently I attended an AIGA meeting (The Professional Association for Design) that was focused on tools for “Emerging Designers” to help them with their portfolios and web presence. The meeting was held at Mono, a very well known and renown agency in Minneapolis, MN.

The AIGA provided three very creative and very informative speakers
Carl Schultze, Evan Stremke, and Aaron Shekey. Each speaker talked about a few tools that they use on a regular basis that helps promote some of their work.





Carl Schultze, an extremely talented print and web designer, shared with everyone a tool he uses for his own personal online portfolio called Cargo Collective. Cargo Collective is a very simple web publishing (CMS) platform that allows designers to upload their work to the web and use a variety of different templates to display their creativity. Cargo allows for some customization as well if you’re handy in HTML and CSS. I thought it was a great tool for those you aren’t too comfortable creating their own personal portfolio and to upload a new project takes literally seconds (I timed Carl and he did it in 52.8 seconds).





Evan Stremke, our second speaker, is a huge fan of Cargo as well and uses it regularly. He also talked about a very slick print publishing tool called Issuu. Issuu will take your print designs (pdf’s) and publish them in a very nice interactive flip magazine online. You can then embed the code for your publications on to your website or your Cargo Collective account. Evan also mentioned that he was a fan of Tumblr, a very easy to use service for blogging.





Aaron Shekey, the final speaker, a young and very creative web designer talked about his love with WordPress. Yet another CMS (Content Management System) that is very popular as a blogging tool but is very exandable and can be used as a complete website management tool. WordPress has such a following of developers that create so many different templates and plugins that you can use. It’s really, I feel, the best option as a free CMS. Aaron also shared a very cool plugin called Flutter. Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the admin by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized (radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc).

After the presenters were done AIGA provided pizza and refreshments for everyone and gave us time to mingle with the speakers, Mono staff and other designers that were attending. If you’re a member of the AIGA you really should be taking advantage of these meetings. Even if you aren’t a member, like me, you’re more than welcome to join at a very small fee (this one was $15). I had a great time and I look forward to attending future AIGA meetings.

For more information on upcoming events sponsored by the AIGA checkout their website at: http://minnesota.aiga.org/events

Tags: Cargo Collective, flutter, friendfeed, Issuu, Tumblr, Wordpress
Posted in Events, Print Design, Web Design | No Comments »

Ignite Minneapolis Recap

March 5th, 2010 - by Jeff Wagner

The Ignite Minneapolis event last night at Bedlam Theatre was a blast. The speakers were great and the free beer tickets were pretty solid as well. I was able to take a few pictures of the peeps and some of the speakers during the night, try not to criticize because the photos were with my iphone. Click on any of the pics for a larger view.















The entire event, like last year, was a crowd pleaser. There were lots of laughs and I have to say my favorite speaker on the night was Julie Kucinski giving us a lesson on why “Chicks are the New Dicks.” Hilarious.

If I had one suggestion for Ignite Minneapolis is that they should go bigger on their venues. From the amount of people that were wanting tickets and all the others that were tuning in online there seems to be a high demand to attend. Even if you charged $5 a ticket you could easily sell out a venue that would hold 300-500. Just a thought.

Well done Ignite!

Tags: Bedlam Theatre, Events, Ignite Minneapolis
Posted in Community, Events, Social Media | 2 Comments »