Josh Sager Media: Creative Technologies Blog

Last night I attended my first Refresh Pittsburgh meeting at the Kiva Han coffee shop in Oakland. Despite the hot and muggy weather it was quite refreshing.

Refresh Pittsburgh is all about bringing creative types together in all things design and technology. Last night I met mostly developer hybrids. People that were good with design but for some reason or another spend a lot of time coding. Be it HTML, Actionscript, or .NET

Jason Head and Pat Collins are the two guys heading up the organization. In Jason’s opening address he said that he wanted Refresh Pittsburgh to be an opportunity to share ideas from setting up your first RSS feed to accounting for freelancers. Basically all of the things you wouldn’t have really learned in school but deal with on a regular basis. He went on to say that he does not want this group to be a happy hour like so many other organizations in Pittsburgh.

I immediately identified with Jason a Pats vision and I was sold. More and more Pittsburghers are doing positive things around the city. It’s almost like a creative revolution if you will.

Since Podcamp Pittsburgh last November I have seen a tremendous amount of change in the mindset of the 20 and 30 somethings around town. More of us are communicating, reaching out, and most importantly doing something positive. Some of the negativity still looms but the momentum and enthusiasm of the creative scene is really infectious.

Get out there do something refreshing. Join a user group like the Flash Users Group, get involved with Refresh Pittsburgh, or the Creative Treehouse. There are young people out there in our city making a really big difference. And you can be one of them.

I miss weezer. I would love to see them rock out at least one more time during my lifetime. Preferably in a small venue, like my wedding Or Mr. Smalls would be cool too. Long live Pinkerton!!!

Jack Nack’s Blog outlines the details of the decision behind Adobe’s decision to cease development for FreeHand.

Your options are to upgrade and also to upgrade. If those options don’t work for you then there’s always upgrading.

Although I started using FreeHand many years after I was already an Illustrator user, I have really grown to respect what it can do. I used to think it was just a diet Illustrator if you will, but there were a few small projects that requried some multi page design and FreeHand handled it like a champ. I know you might be thinking why didn’t you use Quark or InDesign? Well to be honest I had at my disposal was FreeHand and outside of being slow I was able to get the projects done just fine.

So thank you FreeHand we only went out a few times, but its been fun. I wish you a possible nomination in the underground software hall of fame some day. You’ve served me well.

(ps thanks Jesse from the creativetreehouse for the tip : )

The Coz came to Pittsburgh this past weekend to give the commencement address at CMU. Where he was also awarded an honorary doctorate. Way to go Coz!

This is a survey that Jesse from the Creative Treehouse sent over in my direction. Basically the purpose of the study/survey is to try and capture data about Web Design professionals because there really isn’t that much information about us as professionals out there. There are lots of tutorials and snippets of code, but little official data about the age, typically education level, years experience, ect. of people in our industry. I’m sure we all have our ideas but I’m really interested to see the results of the study.

Web Design Survery

8 minutes.

Thats roughly how long it takes to listen to 2 songs.
It will get me halfway to work.
It’s approximately the time it takes to make a new pot of coffee for the office
All I need to check up on gmail, tiwtter, myspace, google reader, and hotmail

8 minutes.
Also the amount of time it took from blog post to prize giveaway. Congratulations sirpsychosexy! You are officially the first ever winner of swag on Star Dot Star Comics.

Thanks to everyone who participated and thank you for reading. Be on the lookout for more fun games in the future.

Good morning all you bloggers out there. I’ve got a tasty prize for the 1st twitter message, blog comment, or gtalk response I get regarding this fine piece of hat wear.

This hat was given to me from the Pittsburgh Flash Users Group and now it can be yours!

Let the games begin!

Sylvester Stallone was in the news recently and it got me thinking about a bunch of caricatures that I’ve been meaning to post online. So in light of Sly making the news here is a caricature I drew a while back.

While setting this up it got me thinking about doing more celebrity caricatures and cartoons. Every time I check my web stats “Tom Cruise” and “Britney Spears” always seem to float around the top of my keywords simply because of the cartoons I made for them in the past. So I might start doing more topical cartoons just for fun.

I’ve been wrestling with joshandrachelwedding.com for far too long. And by wrestle I mean fighting with the domain to resolve on my web server. I honestly don’t know what the bid deal was, nonetheless it is a good feeling to have the domain up!

Stop everything your doing and go and check this out! Outsmart OS3D Demo

The next generation of Flash and Flex is upon us.