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This is my second year playing softball at NASA Ames in Mountain View. The NASA Ames Softball League is an organized league play of co-ed, slow-pitch softball. Games are played over the summer from June to September.

I have enjoyed playing in the league as a Dreg very much. There are no playoffs or officially-recognized champions, all the games are played for fun! With lots of beer drinking and hot dog grilling goodness.

Each year a tshirt is made to give to every player on the league. Many players on the league have worked at NASA for a long time and play every year. During games I see players with a variety of different tshirt design over the years. I was interested in finding out who is in charge of ordering these tshirts and how I could get involved in the design.

Doing so turned out to be really easy. I spoke with the President of the softball club, told him that I was a graphic designer with experience in tshirt design and that I wanted to design some tshirt options for him. He agreed and seem optimistic about the project seeing that most of the tshirt design concepts in the past came from himself.

Most years they try and incorporate an important NASA related event into the design. This year the design would showcase the last shuttle launch. So my tshirt design mission was established, a softball and a shuttle launch design. I got to work and after a couple of meetings with the president and some iterations, the process has resulted in a design I’m very happy with.

I have a final meeting with the president and after a press check at the printers, this tee should be ready to print and wear! I’m excited to see the entire league sport my design. I will share the final print in the future.

One of the current projects I am working on is the BAER Institute website. I was super excited to work on yet another website. My website experience level is moving on up!

This time around I get to work along side a developer, which will take the place of a whole lot of google searching on my part. A developer is also handy because this site needs to be built as a CMS. I prefer WordPress for its end-user friendliness, however Drupal was chosen for this site. Now that I have worked with it a little my main concern is having to train users on how to add and edit content, as I have had trouble doing so myself. I still have quite a bit of content that I need to collect, so hopefully I can master Drupal’s platform in time to start training others to use it.

Although getting to see first hand how the developer integrates my designs (HTML and CSS) into a CMS wouldn’t be the best way to use my time, I would really like to see exactly how it is done. Since almost every website these days is using some kind of content management system, it’s something I want to better understand and eventually be able to do myself.

The website will include some group photos taken but yours truly and I’m looking forward for this BAER group to have a much more easily managed news and events page to share it’s latest.

Check out my dribbble page, where I share shots of the progress of this and other projects.

I’m about to upgrade my Dropbox for the second time and I want to tell you all, if you’re not using the file syncing tool you’re missing out on a great service.

Dropbox allows you to store files and folders across all of your computers and mobile devices. It is so great to not have to carry around my external hard drive everywhere. When I’m working on a file I can save the file on my work computer, then go home and open it on my laptop. An internet connection is all you need to sync and you install a dropbox file right in your Finder.

I would have loved to have a dropbox in college, would have been so much easier than organizing files on different USB drives.

You can get 2GB of Dropbox for free, so check out the features and start using a tool you’ll never know how you lived without.

I’m a fan of Stefan Sagmeister. If you have never heard of him, he has some good TED talks, check them out. I have not visited sagmeister.com in a while and when I visited the site today I was pleasantly surprised it was a new site. The old site was everything but the norm. A flash site with an “interesting” choice of seizures inducing colors.

On their new site people can watch, in real time, the agency team working at Sagmeister Inc.

Super innovative with menu buttons that were installed on the floor of the agency. Here is what he said about the new site, “People started to complain about our old flash based site and it was those complaints that prompted us to rethink. We wanted the new site to feature content in a fast and clean manner, and at the same time utilize a somewhat exciting interface. Our original plan was to paint the buttons on the building opposite our studio on 23rd street in Manhattan and than point a camera at it from our office, so a viewer going through the site would have the same view as we do. When we could not get the permits for painting the buttons on that building we painted them on our own floor. And we all wound up in the interface.”

The all now live in a giant website.

Check out this button installation video in true fast motion Sagmeister style.