Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

And Now…This

It’s inter­est­ing to note that, though an indi­vid­ual might spend 18 hours a day tied to a com­puter screen, they can neglect to spend a few min­utes writ­ing some­thing intel­li­gent (or not) to post to their pub­lic, some­what oft-viewed weblog. As I finally read all the emails I’ve been get­ting from loyal read­ers ask­ing if I’m alive (or in a coma, or other vari­a­tions on that theme), I come to real­ize the impor­tance of spend­ing the time to write some­thing on a reg­u­lar basis, so my read­ers do not lose inter­est and never come back.

The truth is, I have been work­ing 18 hour days (week­ends too) for more than a month now (so has Alex), and while there is a lot of excit­ing news on the hori­zon, and poten­tial work in the near future, my sched­ule of late has been exhaust­ing to say the least; frus­trat­ing at times, often exhil­a­rat­ing, and always inter­est­ing (for bet­ter or worse).

I’ve been hint­ing over the last few months at a new direc­tion in the works for Web­graph, and there’s been less time to work on our new com­pany than we had hoped (yes, that’s cor­rect: we will soon be co-launching a new com­pany, a new brand, with new peo­ple), but I can at least make a par­tial announce­ment: Web­graph is join­ing forces (we’ve already co-produced a num­ber of projects) with Didier Hil­horst (aka Nun­droo), a fan­tas­tic designer and xHTML/CSS guru from the Nether­lands. If you are a fan of the CSS Zen Gar­den, you have seen his bril­liant con­tri­bu­tion Release One, the most-copied design to date of all the sub­mis­sions to the Garden.

Nun­droo and Web­graph are form­ing a new, inter­na­tional agency, and we are build­ing a net­work of free­lancers and other small firms to expand our team on a project-by-project basis. This will allow us to work with other top-notch indi­vid­u­als, such as Dan Ben­jamin (and his dyna­mite team at Auto­mat­i­cLabs), Dave Shea, and oth­ers yet to be approached, on what will hope­fully be larger, more involved projects, so we can con­tinue to expand our global reach (sorry, I couldn’t help myself — the idea of world dom­i­na­tion is too good to pass up ;-)

Our focus will not be on web/interactive design alone: brand­ing, print (and per­haps other medi­ums), usabil­ity, UI con­sult­ing, user test­ing — it’s a list that is yet to be set in stone, but it will surely encom­pass more areas than we have thus far.

A few projects are cur­rently in-progress, with the fruits of our labor ripen­ing around mid-January (and over the next few months). Other prospects are always being dis­cussed, and we’re also look­ing for­ward to work­ing as design part­ners with tech­nol­ogy firms, and tech­nol­ogy part­ners with design firms (so if you’re in need of an expanded team, drop us a line).

On the Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter front, that redesign I men­tioned a few months ago is slowly work­ing its way up the to-do list, and will hope­fully be unveiled some­time in Jan­u­ary. The Pho­to­shop work is fin­ished, so it’s just a mat­ter of com­plet­ing the con­ver­sion to a work­ing lay­out, and then adding the Mov­able­Type hooks.

Also on the to-do list are a few arti­cles, the most-requested of which will focus on how to pro­duce a web site from start to fin­ish on an insanely short sched­ule and small bud­get. I would have writ­ten about the pros and cons of fixed-width lay­outs (ver­sion 1.0 of this site used a fluid lay­out, while the cur­rent ver­sion 2.0 has always been fixed), but some more impor­tant folks recently beat me to the punch. There are a few oth­ers, which will be writ­ten as time per­mits (not the most confidence-inspiring phrase based on my recent track record).

And finally, just to change the pace a bit (which has, admit­tedly, been slower-than-a-snail’s of late), Didier will be post­ing to SB now and then, adding a dif­fer­ent point of view, and hope­fully a more reg­u­lar post­ing sched­ule on aver­age. His first post is in the works, and should make its debut here soon.

Thanks for check­ing in, and stay­ing faith­ful — time for a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion regard­ing blog posting…

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Thursday, December 18th, 2003.

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• Life

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