2011 - Jasongraphix

Outside Instragram

December 9, 2011 by Jason Beaird

Instagram is easily my favorite iPhone app right now and I’m certainly not alone. It’s a fun, easy way to take and share great photos and the massive community that has developed around mobile photography is what keeps us all improving. As happy as I was to read the Mashable article this morning about Instagram coming to Android, I was much more excited to see the bonus segment with interviews from 15 of the app’s most prominent photographers.

Don’t get me wrong, expanding the Instagram community beyond the iPhone is pretty big news, but what makes that bonus segment so great has little to do with the app itself. It’s about taking better, more interesting and more artistic pictures…

Education

FOWD 2011 Cliff Notes

November 7, 2011 by Jason Beaird

I tend to live tweet little snippets of the talks I attend at conferences. The problem is that, out of context, those tweets mean very little. For the 2 main conference days here at FOWD, I’m going to take a cue from Luke Wroblewski & try to give a cliff notes style overview of the talks I attend. Ready, set, go!

Fun

A Tribute to Items

August 25, 2011October 20, 2020 by Jason Beaird

I’ve been a fan of Gowalla for a very long time. I’m sure many people know the application simply as a check-in service. To me though, Gowalla has always been about the items. Over the last 2 years, I’ve taken different routes home, gone out of my way on trips and arranged swap meets with fellow Gowalla ~~users~~ nerds to collect all the items. In it’s heyday last year, Gowalla was introducing a new item every week (New-item Tuesday!) and sometimes even did surprise, real-item giveaways like a new AT&T Smartphone or a pair of TOMS Shoes. At that point in Gowalla’s history, every user was an item collector, or at least paid attention to them for the chance of winning real items. Since then, Gowalla has made lots of incremental changes to their service to appeal to a wider audience…

Rant

Bring Out Your Dead

August 18, 2011 by Jason Beaird

There’s been a lot of talk lately surrounding the future of client services since Khoi Vinh casted them as the man who didn’t want to go on the cart in his The End of Client Services post. Khoi was essentially saying that if you want to do great work, you either have to go “in-house” as he did at The New York Times or be a part of a company that owns a product. The conversation continues this week after Khoi posted a follow-up, In Defense of Client Services yesterday. In it, he essentially says, “Ok, fine. Client services will still exist. Do not want.”

Home

Here We Go Again

August 8, 2011May 21, 2018 by Jason Beaird

When Amy and I were planning our move from Florida to South Carolina in 2005, we knew that we wanted to buy. Having lived in 3 different tiny apartments during our last 2 years in Gainesville, we were fed up with renting and desperate for a place of our own. Knowing that the PhD program at USC was going to be a 5 year commitment, we forked over every penny we had toward a down payment and dove head first into home ownership.

Given our still-fresh-out-of-college budget, most of the properties we found needed work – a lot of work. I don’t think a single house we looked at was staged to sell and many of them were, well, pretty boring…