BackSpaceStudios Blog

The end of the Blabber!

WE WILL BE SHUTTING DOWN THE BLABBER AT END OF APRIL 2009! THIS BLOG WILL MOVING TO http://www.dropthedigibomb.com, FIND OUT WHY BELOW.

Back in 2007 BackSpaceStudios launched the Blabber!, the official BackSpaceStudios blog. Over the past few years the Blabber! has successfully launched many new projects, promoted open source collaboration’s, showcased student and professional work, posted tutorials, promoted festivals and contests, and much more. The Blabber! community has steadily grown and we would like to thank all those individuals who have contributed over the years.

We have been busy over the past few months re-branding, re-building, and developing new partners in order to launch drop the digi bomb, a complete re-invention of the Blabber! We are also very happy to announce that the launch of drop the digibomb will coincide with the launch of  a new partnership and collaboration with a Seattle based digital marketing firm, New Marketing Direct, and the re-birth of BackSpaceStudios as new social marketing and open source design agency digibomb inc.

We will officially lauch this new partnership and digibomb inc. after April 15th 2009!

A bit of history:
The Blabber! was originally designed by Brendan Sera-Shriar BackSpaceStudios. Originally the Blabber! was the personal and professional blog of Brendan Sera-Shriar it served as a public blog where staff members of BackSpaceStudios posted their design ideas, tutorials, and talked about modern web design trends. The Blabber! also functioned as space for Brendan’s students, Seneca College design stundents, to get more involved outside the class room and contribute to various open source projects and communities.

The original Blabber!

The new and imporived drop the digibomb!

Our new mission is to develop a community where we can explore all things Open Source and Social in an effort to create an interactive, engaging, accessible, and intuitive experience for every community.

ColdFusion is alive! And it’s Open Source…

Last night PHUG hosted another FREE workshop, Railo - Open Source ColdFusion, presented by Rick Mason, Technical Director for FITC.

…and yes, I said last night, normally we hold all FREE PHUG workshops on Tuesday nights, but Rick was unavailable so we changed the date to Monday,  which would account for the poor turnout ;(

However, those who did manage to remember and make their way out had the fortunate opportunity to learn about Railo and get some extra one on one time with the master.

Most of us, especially anyone involved in open source, doesn’t really know about or pay attention to CF. In fact, even those outside the open source community just assume it’s dead! Well, according to Rick and the many passionate CFer’s, the community is still here and growing! It’s always exciting to see another commercial project going open source. Hopefully, and from what I took in last night, Railo should attract many open sourcer’s to its realm. Open Source CFML offers tons of potential to the community at large, a few simple tags (which are basically HTML style with simple if statements) , you create on the fly pdf’s, out put and track video, embed AS and JQuery, and there is an Eclipse debugger as well, just to name a few.

Recently PHUG has recruited a few journalism students from Seneca to become bloggers and last they had the opportunity to sit down with Rick after the workshop and interview him on camera, they also recorded a good chunk of the workshop as well. The vudeo should be posted on PHUG soon, and i will make sure to cross post it here.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop > http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=08F13F85-D0AE-2914-9E21-F7C7C94B2818

And the winner is…

Congratulations to Aaron Jackson who is the winner of the BackSpaceStudios/Seneca Logo Design Contest!

BackSpaceStudios/Seneca Logo Design Contest

ONLY 5 MORE DAYS LEFT TO VOTE! CONTEST ENDS DECEMBER 12 !

Some if you already know that I am a part-time teacher at Seneca College in various different new media programs. This semester I have been teaching a class in Design Fundamentals for the MFD (Media Fundamentals) program. In our last class the students had to create a logo design for 1 of 3 fictitious companies; sporting wear, cosmetic, and travel. They where giving roughly 3hours to complete this assignment using only Adobe Illustrator.

Just for fun, I made a last minute decision to run a contest for the best logo design.

We received almost 60 entries from 2 classes! Below are the finalists (Chosen by PHUG board members). The winner will receive a cash prize and books.

The vote is in your hands!

Open Source Design Presentation at FSOSS 2008

The good and the bad…This morning I woke up with the flu, how nice on the day of our big presentation. It was a bit of struggle getting through but we did, and successfully to a full house!

BackSpaceStudios presented “Open Source Design” - Exploring the world of Open Source Design, looking at what designers are doing with open source tools like gimp, inkscape, and blender3d. We also look at how designers get creative with interface design using various designer friendly open source languages like CSS, PHP, JS, and more.

We also had the opportunity to sit down with members of Mozilla, Linux, IBM, and other leaders from the Open Source Community to discuss how PHUG is making an impact online and offline. Everyone was really exited about our FREE Workshops, DEV Days, and WordCamp Toronto 2008. This will be a good year for PHUG!

We have uploaded our presentation here!

Some pics of our presentation: