A Cameron Apart
Today an article that I wrote was published on A List Apart. I can’t explain just how much that means to me, but to say the least, it makes me very proud.
When I started out making things for the web, the ALA articles were an invaluable source of both education and inspiration for me. The site itself was even more important. I spent numerous hours looking it over and trying to understand all the decisions that made it what it was. I believe that even today, it remains one of the best site designs on the web. If there was such a thing as a gold standard for web design, ALA would be it.
And then there’s the illustrations. Oh, the glorious illustrations of Kevin Cornell. How does he do that every issue? It is entirely possible that my favorite part of being published on ALA is the fact that I got a badass illustration created for my article. Thanks Kevin.
As far as the subject matter of the article is concerned, I got really lucky. The idea of orbital content is one that is very important to me and is at the heart of the work we’ve been doing on Gimme Bar. Some of the concepts are pretty out there and may be a bit controversial, but I think they are very much worth reading. I hope the article will shed light on some of the ideas behind our app and generate some discussion that will push us to be better.
A final note is all about the thank yous. Thank you to Carolyn Wood who encouraged me to submit this article to ALA and gave me an early round of much needed feedback. Thank you to Mandy Brown for her spectacular editing. She once tweeted: “If I do my job as editor, you shouldn’t be able to see I was there. It should just be the best thing you’ve ever done.” This was my experience working with Mandy. Lastly, thank you to Chris Shiflett, Sean Coates, Evan Haas, Bedrich Rios, Frank Battaglia, Ed Finkler, and Tyler Mincey for reading the early versions of the article and telling me how bad they were.
