I’ve had the privilege of being asked to train at the DCTC IT Training Center in Eagan. My first class started tonight and will consist of four evening sessions at four hours each over the next couple of weeks. I’ll be introducing students to Adobe Flash, including best practices and tips on real-world usage on the web. I’m honored to have the opportunity to train for DCTC and look forward to teaching more Adobe classes in the future. If you are interested in taking IT Training classes from the DCTC you can sign up here: needcomputertraining.com. I’ll let you all know of any future classes I’ll be teaching. Cheers!

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I recently had the pleasure of working with MN Resorts as a consultant to assist in building search functionality into their site. After taking a look at what we were up against I decided to use Wordpress to develop the new site.

Now I know Wordpress is not a traditional CMS, but traditional is not my style. Right now, Wordpress operates mostly as a blogging platform. However, in the future, I think that Wordpress will begin to move more in the direction of a general CMS, which is why I thought this would be a great jump start for adding future value to the MN Resorts site.

Essentially, all of the resort listings will end up as “Posts” in Wordpress with categories and tags attached for easy search-ability. All other pages in the site will fall into Wordpress “Pages.” Once the new site is built, MN Resorts will have a very simple interface to work with to make edits as resort listings change.

This is just another creative use of technology to deliver quality and effective results to Backlit Creative clients. If you need some assistance in developing a Wordpress blog, or have other “non-traditional” way of using the software, I’d love to hear about them!

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I was in a training seminar this past weekend, and I was rather amazed by the speaker’s excitement. He has been working for the same company for 6 years and has been doing training seminars, exclusively, for several of those years. Now, I know that there are plenty of people out there who work for a company for many years, but this guy has an excitement about him that felt like he was still in his first few months of landing his dream job.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who gets this antsy feeling about 6 months into a new job and starts to lose interest and begin to think about where I should work next. I know that’s a terrible thing to say and probably sounds quite selfish, but if I’m honest, that’s usually what happens. But I found the cure. This speaker really seemed to believe in what he was teaching (crazy, I know). I wonder how rare that is in today’s world. In the design/advertising industry people move around quite a bit, it seems to be a curse of the creative mind. We constantly needs to be thinking/doing something new.

I know that I could probably go lots of places and still do design, but if I don’t truly believe in the values of the company or get excited about the projects, it’s easy for me to not put forth my best effort. So how does a designer keep his or her self excited and engaged in their work? Well, at least part of your daily life should be doing something that you truly love.

What do you really love to do?

The speaker asked us this question, and while we were all scrambling to think of an answer, he said this, “If you have a hard time answering honestly, think about what you are proud of in your life.” Another tough one. I wondered how that question would help me answer the first one. But it makes perfect sense. What are you proud of? Family? Friends? Are you a patient person? Are you a critical thinker? Are you proud of a perfect score on a gymnastics routine when you were 7? Do you feel energized when you help a child discover something new? What is it? What are you proud of? If you can answer this question, you will probably discover something that you truly love to do.

And if you can find a way to make money doing what you love, or even incorporate what you love to do into your current job, you will find real excitement in your work. Find a company that operates under values that align with yours. Find a place where other people love to do the same thing you do. There’s nothing better in the design industry that being surrounded by people who get scary-giddy about fonts or paper or cool web sites. There’s some kind of magic that happens when everyone around you shares a common “craziness” because they love what they do. Everyone is more productive and your work is much better. So if you’re like me, and you feel the antsy-ness of wanting to move on to something new, think of these questions…

What are you proud of? What do you love to do?

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