Category: General

When Adobe introduced Linked Smart Objects in Photoshop it had an immediate impact on my design processby allowing me to save various reusable components in a separate file and place a linked instance of those components wherever they were needed. It sounds convoluted, but let me use an example to put it in context.

Let’s say I’m designing a site and use a separate PSD for each page: Home, About, and Contact. In my example, I want the same header and footer to appear on every page. That’s what I’m calling reusable components. Before Linked Smart Objects, I’d probably design the header on the Home page and drag it to every additional page. If the header needed an update, I would have to make those changes on a single page and drag the new copy to the other pages. Pretty tedious stuff.

With Linked Smart Objects, I save my reusable components (in this case, the header and footer) as their own files. Then I place a linked instance of the component on every page. If I need to revise something now, I just open the original component file, make my updates, and when I save, every linked instance of that component gets updated.

Here’s a quick intro:

By the way, if you like the template design in the video, it’s available as a WordPress theme at Creative Market.

When people ask how business is going, I think about how my dad — an elevator man — responds to the same question: “sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down.” It’s a lighthearted response, but a realistic perspective in running a business. If the ups outweigh the downs, something must be going right.

2013 Highlights

Batman News

Batman News kicked the year off in style for us and still remains one of my favorite projects. There will be a few additions to the site in the near future, so keep a look out for those.

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In his essay “Paint and Blood,” songwriter Tom Russell writes, “Picasso said the muses will descend, but they must find you working.”

Work before inspiration. In that order, we can create our own muse.

Enter process. Process is the means by which scary ideas lose their intimidation. Process is about dividing a project into manageable chunks. “If the process is sound,” says writer and editor William Zinsser, “the product will take care of itself.”

Every project is different, but it has to have a tangible starting place. Sometimes that’s a sketch on paper, sometimes the exploration begins on the computer. The point is to get started. The water may be cold, but acclimation comes through assimilation. We like to dive in.

Through the process of work and elimination a form takes shape and along the way something happens; call it a spark. That’s the inspiration or the muse and because we will have put in the work we’ll know what to do when it strikes. Work before inspiration.

More times than not, the end result is vastly different than the original idea. But the product is also better and the path to that end is work. So yeah, we’re big on work.

This is the first in a series of brief posts we plan to publish about some of the things we believe. The intent is to eventually use these as a manifesto of sorts.

Happy 2013, folks! With a new year comes new plans and new goals, but we’re not quite done with 2012 — not without mentioning a couple of clients and projects that kept us busy ’til the drop of the ball.

Morton Golf

We began work with Morton Golf in August to redesign several sites for a family of golf properties in Sacramento, CA: Haggin Oaks, Bing Maloney, Bartley Cavanaugh, William Land. Our primary goals in the redesign included: migrate to WordPress to allow for easier management, improve integration of social media and various third-party resources, and simplify the navigation and site architecture. Whew.

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One of the goals we attempt to achieve in the work we do here at Blazer Six is to make sure our solutions are easy to use. It’s not just about getting the job done and launching a website that looks good to visitors — it’s also about giving clients the ability to publish and manage their content. Poorly implemented features will lead to more support requests, frustration — which doesn’t reflect well on us or WordPress — and at worst, it could waste valuable time and money. Quite simply, we’ve found that if it’s not easy, then the feature most likely won’t be used.

Managing media outside of the built-in workflows has always been a particular pain point and our solutions over the years have evolved to help address some of the shortcomings, but to an extent, they always felt less than ideal. Usually, they involved leveraging the Thickbox media popup, adding data attributes to media elements, and polling the iframe to attach events and update text that couldn’t be filtered when necessary. They could be far from elegant from an implementation perspective, but they made working with media easier from a management standpoint.

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In the time since last writing here I experienced a watershed moment — I bought a $40 cowboy ribeye from the butcher. It was everything a $40 steak should be and more.

I also hit 30 years of age; an appropriate time for reflection.

Some people write insightful songs upon the passing of their youth. I write platitudes. At the same time, the following cliches are also my truths, things I have learned and take to heart. I hope you can glean some nugget of worth.
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We’ve been working on a WordPress theme for a few months here at Blazer Six. When completed it’ll be part of a larger project that we’ve teamed up with several other designers and developers to build. The project isn’t ready for prime time yet, but the theme is for musicians, and as such I needed several media icons that matched our design.

I originally created a limited set with the intention of turning them into an icon font; the initial icons can be seen on Dribbble. My goal was to maintain one line width and make sure everything aligned to the pixel grid at 16px. Any multiple of that should align as well and look just as crisp.

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My niece, who will turn a year old in a month, just discovered her tongue. It’s been there the whole time; darting in and out at the sight of an approaching spoon, but it wasn’t something she was cognizant of. Her mom recently posted a picture on Facebook of her sitting in a highchair directing it at the camera. Obviously, something clicked. I don’t mention that to embarrass my niece, or her mom, but to draw a parallel to starting a business. Six years ago Brady and I ventured into self-employment after our previous employer was acquired, and for a while it felt like we were just discovering our own tongues.

Now that we’re six (what is that in business years?) I’d like to think we have a few more synapses firing. We have a better idea of who we are and where we want to go. Of course that could change in the next six years, but we wanted a logo that reflected our growth and ideals; our character.

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Update: This is an old post and the information and ideas presented may no longer be relevant.

After launching the redesign of this website a couple of weeks ago, we’ve gotten a few questions about how we configured WordPress to make the site work the way it does. This blog gives me the perfect opportunity to answer those questions and perhaps contribute a little back to the community.

The Need For a CMS

A little background: We launched our first site rather hastily last year with the intentions of updating it as time went on. Unfortunately, it was fairly static and I was the only one able to update it. Considering how busy I was, the site became stagnant and outdated. During the redesign process, we decided that a CMS would be beneficial to keep the site from reaching that point again. I looked into multiple open source solutions, but found most of them were overkill for our needs. We decided to stick with something that we were familiar with: WordPress.

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