Nat0

Getaround's system is built on App Engine.

Spot on. However, I would add that much of the push for 'original' designs come from many other sources beside the designer. I can not tell you how many times I have had clients request all manner of non-standard layouts and other customization to make the website look cool/unique/fresh...

Agreed, I love my S4s. They are the perfect in-ear headphones for the office and gym. Not to mention a great deal at ~$80.

I have lived in Kansas City for several years and would partially agree with your statements. I have seen most of the best people I know move elsewhere, primarily to larger cultural hubs, leaving behind a large portion of people who lack vision and tenacity. There are definitely still bright spots, they are just more difficult to find.

Reminds me of the Onion article about Saint Louis adding 4 Million jobs: http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-adds-4-million-jobs-but-...

I am very excited to see what Drchrono will do in the medical field. The industry is overdue for a smart company to come in and innovate.

I don't have any hands on experience with the app yet, but it seems to address one of the biggest hurdles to adoption, the physicians' reluctance to learn/use the cumbersome interfaces of the existing systems.

This really distills the car search information down to exactly what I want. Presented in such a way to where I get a feel for what the meta trends are, as well as the best/worst deals (or other anomalies). Very nicely presented!

Feature Requests:

- The ability to search for sub car models (Subaru Forester XT vs Subaru Forester), it looks like some higher end models might be filtered as worse deals at the moment.

- It would also be nice to have a free text field to search for other misc specific car features in the listings.

Pretty much exactly how I work as well. I have been able to set a more healthy schedule in the last couple months, but it is really hard to shut down in the evening when I feel the most alive and productive.

This handy guide should help you through GoDaddy's maze of a UI. http://blog.jeffepstein.me/post/14629857835/a-step-by-step-g...

This sounds very similar to my experience, just starting with design first and then delving into programming to gain more control over the finished product. I knew that this would be a great combination to have considering how frequently a product breaks down in the communication between programmers and designers.

However, right now I am debating which direction to go in since it has a mess trying to get anyone to take me seriously without being 100% designer or 100% programmer.

Sounds like they have a similar management style to Cerner in Kansas City.

Nice site! I was just working on a pack of background textures like this that I was going to give away. I will have to submit them to the site.

It would be really interesting to see software that would accomplish this. The tricky part is that the correct kerning changes based upon what font size the text is. Most typefaces are optimized for body copy, not headlines.

Unfortunately, at many companies you won't even meet your boss until after signing the paperwork. This leaves you to try and explain it to someone who will see your hesitance to sign and take it to mean that you are either planning on leaving the job quickly or that you will not follow authority.

Just yesterday, I had a friend get run off the road and total her car because of a careless truck driver. The driver of the semi left the scene and came back only after another truck driver stopped to help my friend and got on the radio and told the driver who caused the wreck to come back or he would make sure he lost his trucking license.

There are good and bad people regardless of the profession.

That is the case at my company, over half of the web based applications that we have to use are built exclusively for IE. It is a massive pain, but I do not see it changing any time soon.

The site had a nice look overall. The pattern in the header drop-shadow is kind of cool, but more distracting because it looks like it is being accidentally covered up and a bit busy.

I agree with what others have said regarding the color scheme being a bit too tan overall.

I also keep looking at the logo and thinking that is a bit too busy, and I don't really understand why it has the floral shapes emerging from it.

The beveling on the image frames also feels a bit heavy, especially with the dark drop shadow.

In general the imagery and the copy take a bit of analysis before getting a handle on what the company is about, and even then I am not sure why I should choose you for my vacation planning.

Design is fundamentally about solving a problem. In this case the problem was that the product was ugly, not something more serious such as the design hindering successful interactions with the product. People can deal with a certain kind of "ugly" if it makes sense to them and works. This could help explain the lack of a significant, immediate uptick in the provided metrics.

Also, even though the current design may look nicer, it may have also introduced some new issues such as confusing users with all of the detailed automotive illustrations.

I am not sure that I can fully answer what the root cause is, but most of the delays are due to the various levels of approval that take forever. In addition, they are very concerned with patient information security, and have various process to work through in regards to that.

I work at a company that implements medical IT solutions for hospitals and anything with the NHS takes 3-5 times longer than in the US and other parts of Europe.

In my opinion there is nothing more frustrating than starting working in a layout program. I usually just end up feeling like I am moving crap around on the screen until something sticks.

The best way to start is to hear how a well spoken designer will explain their client's problem, how they worked through it, and pick it apart. This will help you understand the dynamic conversation between elements that occurs in design. I would recommend reading a few books from older, well regarded designers who's work has stood the test of time. Paul Rand, Herbert Bayer, and designers from the Swiss design movement stand out as good examples of clear, well reasoned design that is easy to understand.

While doing this, I would recommend that you try taking some of their designs, and recreating them. Try making a version that looks web 2.0 like, one in black in white, etc.

This could be a big hit in the education sector. The management of everything would be very simple since the hardware is a commodity, there no worries about viruses/spyware and everything is automatically saved in the cloud.

Great advice! This is the same strategy that I have developed with my own auctions and have been able fetch top dollar every time. I would also add: *Never sell anything as a bundle, always separate it out into different auctions.

I have some friends that started a letterpress printing business and they have been able to pick up vintage machinery like this for pennies on the dollar. It is quite amazing seeing it in action.

I do not know much about RISD, but this seems to be a common problem at most art schools/departments.

I had to teach myself everything about UI design while I was working on my degree in visual communications. None of my professors thought it was different enough than print design to warrant additional attention, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know.

I am guessing that this could do some great things for helping to grow the tech community in Kansas City. Should be very interesting to see what the response will be from other cities if this helps to drive growth.

As a part-time designer I have loved having a place to refer clients that see more value in the number of different ideas that are created, not the consulting/revision process. For those types, this is the perfect solution. That is not to say that the quality of the work on 99designs is low, I have been quite surprised by the quality of some of the stuff on there.

Anything that helps get better design out there is fine by me.

I am so glad to hear that I am not the only person that does that :)

Stanford has some top quality material up for CS. I have completed cs106a and am working on cs106b and they are both top notch! http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

If you are looking at more web based stuff then David Malan (Harvard) has some great free stuff as well. http://cs50.tv/2010/fall/