Level Orange

Recently, after purchasing and installing the new iPod touch 2.0 update, I ran into a serious roadblock in trying to get a stable wi-fi signal with my home network. At first, everything seemed fine. I immediately downloaded the apps for AIM, Facebook and Twitter and they all worked as expected, but within a day or so, everything went dead. Safari couldn’t access web sites. Twitter couldn’t load new tweets. Nothing had changed in my router, nothing had changed in my iPod’s settings. I couldn’t figure it out.

After doing some searching and reading through Apple’s own support discussion forums, the problem started to reveal itself. My Linksys BEFW11S4 was a trusty old 802.11b router had served me well for the last several years. I bought it way back when Wireless-B was still relatively new and figured it would always be good enough for my purposes.

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Sometime in the last week, the site for PiQ Magazine, piqmag.com, went missing. And not missing in the “we’ll be back soon” meaning, but missing in the way that so many sites go missing when there’s no one left to keep them alive—someone just decided to pull the plug.

I can’t say it saddens me a great deal because I had expected it to happen eventually. In fact, I’m more surprised that it happened so soon. Granted, it wasn’t a huge loss, but it was largely made up of content that didn’t make it’s way into the pages of the magazine itself, and since the magazine closed back in June, I’ve been watching the site in hopes that it would stick around and be a small, lasting tribute to what we tried to do with PiQ Magazine.

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One of the biggest concerns a graphic designer can ever be confronted with is cribbing from someone else’s work. Sometimes it happens unknowingly, sometimes it’s completely intentional, and whether or not a viewer makes that distinction usually doesn’t matter. It’s the responsibility of the designer to make sure he’s keeping his vision and work original and fresh.

Most people would say that technically nothing is original or new anymore, and in some ways, that’s absolutely true, but that doesn’t give a designer the freedom to knowingly copy another’s work. Aside from outright plagiarism, there’s nothing necessarily illegal about doing it, but it’s one of those unwritten moral codes that artists (or any creative person, for that matter) must live by.

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WordPress, that is. I’ve been going back and forth on whether to continue using Movable Type (which I’ve been using for the most part of the last, oh, seven years) or try and keep things moving smoothly with Drupal (which I love, but at times also hate) OR to try something different after some excellent time I’ve spent with WordPress over the last couple of years. Last week, I made my decision and now you see this spankin’ new site! I’ve got some bigger ideas in store design-wise, so this is only the first phase of what’s to come.