February’s Refresh: How Do You Run a Creative Services Business?
by Kevin Lawver on January 27, 2012
We have a speaker for February! Erik Reagan from Focus Lab is going to share some of the secrets he’s discovered in the three years his been running his company with Bill Kenney. I think this is a perfect compliment to last month’s presentation and anyone who’s considering starting their own creative business should come! And if you’re not thinking about starting your own creative business, why not?
Here’s Erik’s description:
I like to learn and to share with others. Over the past three years, I have learned countless lessons as a business owner – both good and bad – and wanted to share part of the Focus Lab story and detail some of those lessons. Keep in mind this will be told through the eyes of a designer and developer, neither myself or my business partner Bill Kenney considered ourselves “businessmen” when we started. Since we entered this venture with numerous blind spots, we now want to shine some light on what we have learned to help others who are going through the process. I’ll talk about things I’ve learned about running a creative services business and hope to learn something from you as well.
We’ll be at ThincSavannah at 6PM on 2/21. I hope to see you all there!
Oh, and if you’re already a part of a creative business in Savannah, check out Made in Savannah and add your company to the list!
Startup 101: The Slides
by Kevin Lawver on January 18, 2012
Thank you to everyone who came out last night to hear Marcus speak, and especially Marcus for speaking! Marcus sent me his slides, and has said we can share them, so go get ‘em (minus the videos)! We’ll be keeping an eye on SquidBid! And special thanks to Brady Cannon from TAG Savannah for hooking Marcus up with us!
As I said last night, we don’t have a speaker for February yet, so if you’re interested in speaking, please come forward! If you’ve already agreed to speak in February, and I’ve forgotten, please remind me (and thank you).
And I also asked you guys what you wanted to hear in 2012, so, here’s a poll you can do to tell me (you can choose up to 3):
I’ll hopefully be back in a couple weeks to tell you what’s coming up in February. Stay tuned…
Startup 101: January’s Refresh
by Kevin Lawver on January 5, 2012
Happy New Year! Refresh this month will be a doozy. Brady Cannon from TAG got us a speaker all the way from Atlanta! Marcus Crockett, the CEO of Squidbid is going to give a presentation called Startup 101: 10 Important Lessons for Startups. If you’re thinking of starting your own company or are in a startup, you should come check this one out.
We’re back in our normal location: ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St (3rd floor) on Tuesday, 1/17 at 6PM. I hope to see you all there!
I’m also thinking of doing a Tech Book Trade-In this month too. I’ve got a bunch of geeky programming books I’m not using and don’t see myself needing anytime soon. It feels like an insult to the authors to let all this knowledge gather dust on the shelf, so I was thinking I could bring them to Refresh and you guys could help me find good homes for them all! What do you think?
I hope to see you all there!
Discussion: What Makes a Connected City?
by Kevin Lawver on December 21, 2011
Thank you to everyone who came out to Refresh last night! The turnout was more than we could have hoped for and I loved how everyone participated. I thought the discussion was really great and we came up with some really good ideas and paths to recommend the city go down in the process of finding the new “CTO” for Savannah.
The point of this post is to continue the discussion and open it up for folks who weren’t able to attend last night. We said we’d:
- post the list of the three things the Creative Coast is delivering to the city
- and the big list of ideas you guys came up with.
You guys (the Refresh Community) are supposed to:
- Share this post with your respective communities (the Savannah community on Reddit was mentioned, for example).
- Add links in the comments to cool things happening in other cities.
- Add comments adding new ideas or fleshing out ideas from the list.
And that’s it! Let’s keep this discussion going! It would be a shame if the energy and passion expressed last night fizzled and doesn’t end up helping to change anything for the better.
A Special December Refresh: What Makes a Technology-Enabled City?
by Kevin Lawver on December 6, 2011
We didn’t have Refresh last month, but we’re going to do something special this month on the 20th! The Creative Coast is helping the City of Savannah figure out what we need to do to become a real tech powerhouse in the region. Here’s their description for the meeting:
The Creative Coast wishes to gather some insightful feedback from the Savannah community on what truly makes a city connected and technology-enabled. As our city grows we want to make certain our city’s technology infrastructure advances with innovative systems and approaches. Well here is your chance. Come along, bring your ideas however wild and crazy and we will capture them and present them to the city who has patiently offered to listen.
And instead of our usual location, we’re going to do this one at The Creative Coast’s office at 15 W York St, at 6 on 12/20! So, come along and bring some crazy ideas about what we can do as a community to enable innovation! I hope to see you there!
No Refresh This Month
by Kevin Lawver on November 14, 2011
Due to a bunch of different things, we’re not doing Refresh this month, but, we are going to have a meeting early in December. It’s going to be epic so don’t miss it. As soon as I have the date and location nailed down, I’ll post something.
Geekend’s Hackathon – Still Looking for Teams!
by Kevin Lawver on October 31, 2011
I just got word from Jake that there are still a few spots open for teams for the Geekend Hackathon. What’s a hackathon? Well, if you’d shown up for October’s Refresh, you’d know (not that I’m bitter about it or anything). Basically, it’s a 24 hour coding competition where you come in with nothing but an idea and leave with a (hopefully) working prototype. They’re a lot of fun and a great excuse to play with new technology and wildly hack on new stuff.
And as a special bonus, Jake is ready and waiting to sponsor some local teams of 1-3 people! So, if you were on the fence, now there’s absolutely no risk! If you’re interested, ping Jake for the details: jake@thecreativecoast.org.
I hope to see you there!
(there’s a chance I’ll be out of the country, but I’m going to do my best to be there to do my job as a mentor & judge)
October’s Refresh: Hackathon 101
by Kevin Lawver on September 22, 2011
Geekend is coming up in November, and this year, they’ve added the Hackathon! Having participated in my fair share of these things before, I thought it would be fun to do a Hackathon Bootcamp in October to give the locals a leg up on the competition. We’ll cover all the fun stuff about coding competitions; I’ll try to share all the tips I can remember and I might even share some code (I’m hoping to have an open source skeleton you can use to start your projects with, but we’ll see how much time I have). By the end of Refresh, you should be all set and ready to go hack on some stuff.
As part of it, I’m hoping to actually build something – so I need your help! What kind of mashup should we build? Flickr? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Something else? Whatever it is, it needs to have an API we can play with and it signing up for a developer key should be a turnkey process (meaning I shouldn’t have to wait to be able to play with it).
Refresh is always the 3rd Tuesday of the month at 6PM over at ThincSavannah. For October, that means it’s on 10/18. I hope to see you there!
Update – This is mostly for me, but I’m going to be adding links to this post of APIs that I find that folks might find interesting/fun/useful (and which may make it into the demo – I still need suggestions because I’m not sure what I’m going to build). Here they are:
And the slides from tonight’s presentation are already up on Speakerdeck.
What others should I add? Which ones are you interested in seeing mashed up?
September’s Refresh… Unmatched!!
by Kevin Lawver on September 1, 2011
I’ve got something special lined up for September – design stuff! I know how much you guys like the design stuff (historically, you guys have packed the house for design stuff). The guys from Unmatchedstyle are coming down from Columbia, SC to see us and share a couple of groovy-sounding design talks. What are they? Well, I’ll let them describe them:
Symbolic Imagery in Interface Design
Giovanni DiFeterici will discuss the inherent symbolic nature of UI elements, how people interact with them in relation to their real world analogs and how to build a description of an element’s function into its visual presentation. Understanding how people think about the interactive visuals that we build can help us design more cleanly and to speak more clearly to our users.
Sign Up UX Design
Your web app’s sign up experience or the call-to-action on your website better be top-notch. People have short attention spans and take no mercy when shopping or passing judgement on your service or products. We’ll be looking at some best practices and review great examples that help demonstrate what goes into a solid sign up/call to action user experience: we’ll get into some psychology, patterns & design reviews. Gene Crawford will be delivering this one.
Wait, you want more info about these guys? They happened to give me that stuff too!
Gene Crawford (@genecrawford)
Gene is a designer with over a decade of experience in the industry with a degree in Graphic Design. In 1994, Gene met the Internet and has been honing his skills in information architecture and usable interface design ever since. He has overseen the design and architecture of hundreds of web sites and applications. An active member in the design community, he’s the editor & producer of unmatchedstyle.com, organizer of refreshcolumbia.org and the ConvergeSE.com conference.
Giovianni DiFeterici (@giodif)
Giovanni has a BFA in fine art and a BA in Graphic Design. After earning his BFA, he taught in public schools for a couple of years but found that he really wanted to work on projects with other creative people in the web design industry and hasn’t looked back. Giovanni is also an editor for unmatchedstyle.com and co-organizer for the ConvergeSE.com conference.
And now I’m guessing that you’ll want some details on when and where. Well, those don’t change much, but here you go:
- When: Tuesday, September 20th at 6PM
- Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor
And now, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve got a small favor to ask – please help me spread the word! I’m not a designer, and not a marketer, so I need help getting the word out to the local design community. Anything you can do to get people there would be much appreciated!
Let’s Get Learning!
by Kevin Lawver on August 20, 2011
It’s already clear that most jobs now require some computer skills and that employers are already having a hard time filling those positions, and in the future they’ll probably require at least basic programming skills (even if that means being able to write a formula in Excel). If you’ve got access to the web, you’ve got tons of free resources out there to learn everything from the very basics to how to build complex web applications.
Today, I just want to cover things to help you get started. If you’ve never programmed anything more complex than a microwave, this list is for you. I tried most of these out on my oldest, so they’re kid-approved (which means they should work OK for curious adults too).
Web Tools and Tutorials
- Codecademy – A free website packed with lessons and exercises from the very basic to the very complex. It’s all online and looks pretty awesome (this is one I haven’t used but was recommended by a friend).
- Don’t Fear the Internet – A series of video tutorials from well-respected web designers and developers that should teach you the basics of building web pages.
- Computer Science 1 – Programming Methodology – From Stanford University, this is a series of lectures that make up their introductory computer science course. I’d start with Codecademy and if you really like it and want to learn more about “serious” development, check out the videos.
- Rails for Zombies: Ruby on Rails is a great framework for building web apps, and even better, a skillset that’s in great demand right now. This is a fun way to jump in and learn it without all the formality of a book (one without zombies at least).
Downloadable Apps
- Hackety Hack – You’ll need to download this app to use it, but it’s a great little tool and has tons of lessons that will teach you the basics of programming.
- Scratch – Another downloaded one. There’s no code at all in Scratch, just drag and drop. This is the tool my son has stuck with the longest (almost five years now) and has built everything from interactive fiction to a complex first-person shooter video game with it. It’s a fun way to introduce control structures, but if you’re a grownup, I’d start with Hackety Hack or Codecademy.
- Blue Griffon – Not really a way to teach you to program, but it’s a free web page editor that feels more like a word processor than a scary text editor.
Books
- Learn to Program – This is the book I gave my son when he wanted to learn what I do all day. It’s a fantastic introduction to programming. If you’re better with a book, this is the one to get.
I hope this is helpful. If you’ve got other resources, please share!