Blogger, Business Owner & Lover of Coffee
The weekend before last, we all loaded up into our car and drove down to Scerni, Italy.
The six hour drive took us back to a place where we lived for 4-years and it had been about a year since we had been back.
It was a great trip.
Me and the Mrs. enjoyed it.
The kids enjoyed it.
And their grandparents enjoyed it.
Here are some of the photos I snagged and shared on my Instagram:
Since the beginning of the month, my life has been nothing but crazy.
Between starting a new job, recovering from being sick, landing a few new projects, and a quick weekend trip with the family, my human bandwidth has been maxed-out.
I’ve known there to be limits, but have never really experienced it like this before.
I am still in a little “shock and awe” of modern video gaming since being away from it for several years.
Even as I finally play through the Half Life episodes, I am regularly impressed with the visuals, storytelling, and overall immersed experience.
It really is tons of fun. 
So when I see what video game graphic guys are doing with the very cutting edge, I am a little dumbfounded…
A few years ago I had shut down my old blog.
Thankfully, I saved the posts and have slowly been resurrecting some of them.
I’ve published the posts worth keeping on ChurchMag and here as well. Some I’ve rewritten, others have been copy and paste, but this one needs to be set into context and left unedited.
After living in Italy for over five years now, it’s an interesting retrospect for me:
Clients and vendors, vendors and clients.
I’ve been on both sides numerous times.
As a client, you know what you want, you communicate what you want, and wait for the vendor to deliver. If you’ve picked the right place, you’ll not only get what you asked for, but they’ll throw in some extra ideas and insights—like icing on the cake.
As a vendor, you hear what they want, you communicate what you think is best, and you hope the client is happy with what you deliver. If you have communicated well, you not only make your client happy, but they will also trust you like a great advisor.
Design. Creativity. Edge.
I love it.
There are some days I am so happy with what I create, and then there are days it seems like a 3-year old with a copy of The Print Shop could do better.
Design is a language and it’s important to my generation.
If online communities were drawn out like a map of the world, what would it look like?
I found these a few years back.
Comparing these fictitious maps of the Internet from 2007 and 2010, you see how much the topography of the web has changed in just a few years:
Whenever you are communicating with a client, superior or sometimes co-worker, be mindful of TMI – Too Much Information. We’re not talking about the High School kind of TMI or birth story TMI, we’re talking about information overload.
Your client or company has hired you to do something that:
When I turned five years old my Grandma and Grandpa mailed me a personalized birthday song.
It was Captain Zoom, the song came on a vinyl record and it went something like this (replace “Big Guy” with your own name):