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It’s been a crazy and hard few weeks. Between work, film projects, family coming into town (and crashing on our floor) and the passing of my Grandmother, my mentor and my closest friend, I’ve hardly been keeping my head above water. But this week ushers in an event we have all been looking forward to all year. Yes, it’s that time again. An Event Apart 2008, sails in to San Francisco Monday.

This years line up is chalked full of interesting topics and top notch speakers. In particular, I’m looking forward to Better User Experience Through Microformats, by Tantek Çelik, who is one of the founders of microformats.org. Tantek will discuss “proper use of microformats (in addition to those Elements of Meaningful HTML that you know by heart) [and how this] can improve the usability of several common interactive design scenarios.”

In addition, there is an entire arsenal of compelling sessions, including presentations by Luke Wroblewski, Jeff Veen and Kelly Goto.

I look forward to seeing everyone there.

It’s not too late, you can still get tickets.

It’s the end of a long day, but a gratifying one none-the-less. If there ever was an excuse for neglecting one’s blog, this is most definitely it. For the past weeks (maybe even months) I’ve been working on redesigning the Object Adjective website. After many hours, many delays and many other responsibilities, I am very happy to say we have finally launched the new site.

I’ll keep this brief, as I am obligated to go celebrate, but I did feel this monumental (or so it feels) moment could not go without mention.

I am understandably exhausted, as today was the big day. Forgive me if I’ve overlooked anything. We are sure to tighten up any loose ends in the days to come.

If you are interested, I went into some detail about the how and why decisions that went into this redesign, so feel free to continue reading.

Content, moreover getting content, is a constant struggle of the web designer. I think you would be hard pressed to find a designer who would say otherwise. However, getting content isn’t enough. It should be good content, well written, well thought out and friendly to its platform.

Over the years, I’ve learned to take greater liberties in copy writing, along side my web designing. It is not an area I particularly want to get into, but I see it as necessarily married to design itself. I make no claim to be expert in the art of writing, but I have some experience and think I can find my way around.

The inclination to become more liberal in my offerings of copywriting, as part of the design process, stemmed from the idea that words, like design, follow a cadence. The thinking is that these inflections should work in tandem together (i.e. Harmony Good. Dissonance Bad.).

In practice, I don’t sell myself as a copywriter, but rather introduce copywriting into my design. There has been a long standing discussion amongst designers, around the use of Loren Ipsum filler, in place of actual content, during the design phase. The school of thinking behind this, is the minimization of distraction in the design review process. Of course, the notion of inaugurating meaningless text into design, as filler, is problematic. For one, written text ushers in the notion of meaning, whether meaningless or meaningful. In the same sense, design ushers in the same notion, even more so when the design is for interactive websites.

So over the years, I’ve been in the practice of reclaiming this part of design, in the form of the written word. The tempo, language and, for lack of a better word, mood of the written content of a website, has a much to do with design and user experience, as does the subtle gradient or drop shadow used to offset a focal point on a page.

There is a lot of writing on the web at present, skirting around this topic, one way or another, but I haven’t seen anyone take this particular stance. Personally, I think the web would benefit greatly, if more designers would don the attire of the copywriter (at least a visor, now and then).