Are you listening?
03 months ago
So being a severe podcast and audio book junkie, I spend a lot of time with one or two of my earbuds in. Sometimes I’m listening to business books and sometimes its just fun stuff. Either way I seem to get myself into a bit of a jam by not choosing the best times to emerse myself in this other world.
This scene was based on actual events, but was not the specific conversation we had yesterday…really. My wife would say, however, that’s is a recurring theme for me. I might argue that consistency is a good thing, but I think I’ve dug my hole deep enough here. Love you honey!
Web Design Warfare
06 months ago
This Veterans Day we would like to thank all the heroes in the United States Armed Forces who truly put their lives on the line to protect us and keep our country secure.
Obviously what we do here isn’t as life threatening as some jobs, but it can get pretty crazy. We are constantly under attack…from the controlled chaos of projects to the relentless quest to stay up with our ever changing industry. I you’ve seen action in this neck of the woods, you know what I’m talking about…and you have the scars to prove it.
So this week, when you’re up to your ass in it, just stop and put things in perspective.
SPECIAL NOTE: Along with myself, Missy Mans and Lauren Hallett, this weeks comic features Kraig Lutz. Kraig is a programmer here at Zipline Interactive and one cool dude.
Professional Development
06 months ago
Big thanks to Spokane Marcom for the great events…and the bacon. If you are not familiar with this group, check out their really sweet website. http://spokanemarcom.com/
Responsive Design Grid-Lock
07 months ago
We thought we would start off this rainy week with a little humor. This particular cartoon is a little technical for our mainstream audience but it will be appreciated by all of the web developers out there.
To explain the cartoon for those of you who aren’t web developers, when we design responsive website we used a column based structure. As the site gets smaller for mobile devices columns are merged to force information to stack vertically as opposed to horizontally. Although Peter may look dashing in a smaller shirt, I hope we will never find out.
Happy 7th Birthday Zipline Interactive!
01 year ago
Well we made it this far…7 years in business. Whew! Time really flies when you’re as busy as we’ve been. Ryan and I have been blessed with some great employees, clients and most of all very supportive families. Here’s to all who have made this possible and to looking forward to the next 7 years! Cheers!
I couldn’t ask for a better partner and friend than Ryan Stemkoski. Congrats buddy…it’s been fun. I’m ready for the next chapter.
Museum of Flight – Illustrations v1
01 year ago
by Shawn Davis
in illustration
Last week we took a trip to Seattle for spring break and visited the Museum of Flight. I am a nut for airplanes, especially from WWII, so you can imagine how excited I was to go. I took tons of photo, including a lot of up close detail shots and interesting angles. This should be great source material for an illustration project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
I haven’t settled on a specific style yet, but I’m going to create a series of airplane illustrations. The focus will be on vintage aircraft. I love all the details, rivets, exposed engines, landing gear, basically all the mechanical parts that make up these flying pieces of art. These first two test sketches are of WWII fighter planes from the excellent exhibit at the Museum. They were done with colored pencil on Strathmore sketch paper.
I’ll be testing out a few different styles so keep checking back to see my progress.
Tech Support
01 year ago
Working in web design, we get a lot of technology related support calls. Some of them are related to the products we produce, many of them are not. Handling these tech support calls can be fun, challenging, and sometimes just plain fatiguing depending on the technological capabilities of the caller. We always do our best to help our clients arrive at the desired solution but on some occasions the path to that solution can be a long and windy one.
This cartoon depicts a 2+ hour long tech support call that I recently had with one of our clients. She had good humor throughout the call and actually suggested this topic for the comic strip. I hope anyone who has ever been lucky enough to be on either side of one of these long, tech support calls, can appreciate this cartoon.
Wildlife Protection
01 year ago
In the past few weeks we have learned something about the hosted e-commerce providers out there. We learned that they kinda suck when it comes to keeping up with the really important parts of running an online business. I’m talking specifically about their inability to deal with destination based sales tax.
Ok, yes it is a pretty geeky thing to get all worked up about, but here’s something to think about. 35 states and the District of Columbia all require retailers to collect tax based on the destination of the item they ship. For now this is only for instate items, but not for long. There are rumblings that this will go nation wide, and that a retailer may be required to collect the tax specific to ALL of the zones, throughout the country.
Oh, what’s the big deal you say. There’s got to be an easy service you can just link into and it will work. Guess again…there is not. Moreover, most of the shopping cart systems (including one that rhymes with Big Commerce) require the site owner to add in each zone individually…by hand. There is no mass upload, there are no API’s. There’s nothing. And the worst part about it is that they seem perfectly content with this bag of horse $#!&.
Well, enough of my rant. I’m just letting off a little steam for our friend Carlos Rivera. Carlos has been in tax entry hell for a few days now…along with Heather DeCamp and Cameron Spear. As a little thank you to Carlos, I finally got his character finished.
