The All New Point.B Studio and #rdcHQ

I am very pleased to announce that Point.B Studio and the Rural Design Collective are moving into a new space in Port Orford, Oregon! Our new building has a rich history which we will be documenting soon. It was originally built in 1898 during the mining and logging era and is near the Port of Port Orford. This is more exciting than I can possibly express — and it involves interesting new projects and directions for my studio and mentoring program. Watch this space for details (and a new design)!

Goodbye, Aaron Swartz.

Aaron Swartz was a special person whose absence will leave a lot of broken links in people's lives. I had the privilege to collaborate with him on numerous web/design projects over the last decade, which developed into a friendship based on the fun we had creating things, great design, new ideas and striving to make the world a better place. He was very encouraging and enthusiastic about #rdcHQ and we always found reasons to work together *. He will be greatly missed by so many.

2012: The Year of <deBUG>

2012 is a big year for the Rural Design Collective, fittingly dubbed "<deBUG> TwentyTwelve." We'll be tackling the "Codes of the World" project as an ongoing track based on our work last year on t24. There is a lot of important work to be done, and we'll be honing our production process and sharing what we learn with others through our mentoring program. We'll also be debugging "Life on a Redwood Post" and have a couple of other cool surprises buzzing about at Point.B Studio.

Invest In Yourself — Learn Stuff!

2011 is shaping up to be a very exciting year! The Rural Design Collective Mentoring Program has the opportunity to work with MathML (a new W3C standard markup language), hone our illustration skills creating vector graphics for a national open source project, and learn WordPress to create a website for an inspirational area youth group. Point.B Studio just unveiled a poster tryptich entitled "What Would Luther Burbank Do?, and also released the first book under the Memory Palace Press imprint entitled "Life on a Redwood Post" in collaboration with Scott Peden. Life is good.

Design (and Art) Can Make A Difference

New projects are brewing at Point.B Studio. We are honored to work on the Law.Gov effort, and are contributing to several design initiatives that will roll out over the coming year. We are making art - continuing work on our "People of the Public Domain" series, and creating new work - details soon. And we are pleased to announce that 2011 marks the Rural Design Collective's fifth year (we consider the launch of eSPG v2.0 and the maiden voyage of the BookMobile as our pilot season :-), and we are discussing new projects and partnerships, most notably regional networked mentoring opportunities with like-minded folks who want to collaborate with us. As we like to say at #rdcHQ ... Stay Tuned!

Redesigning the Official Journals

Point.B Studio recently had the opportunity to re-imagine what the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations might look like if it was in XML. Working with Public.Resource.org on this project was a lot of fun, and gave us the opportunity to discover the state-of-the-art (and limitations) of modern technologies such as XHTML, CSS3 and PDF (and we will discuss these details soon). We also developed a color-coded wayfinding concept that introduces an enhanced navigation system (PDF). We propose that a visual icon system be developed similar to the isotypes by Otto Neurath that influenced the National Park System icons, giving new meaning to the landscape of America’s Operating System.

Give A Little, Get A Little

I am thrilled to announce that The 2009 Rural Design Collective Mentoring Program (RDC) will be part of the One Laptop Per Child Contributors Program (OLPC). Six laptops were sent to Point.B Studio by the OLPC as a matching donation to the six that were donated to the local communities near Sixes, Oregon by the RDC over the past two years. We're going to fill them with public domain books from the Internet Archive Children's Library and share them with kids!

The Rural Design Collective

I am launching my own initiative called the Rural Design Collective - RDC, for short - It is a mentoring program with a local focus designed to help motivated people begin a career on the Internet. It is just in the planning stages, and it will take awhile to flesh out because I will be doing it in tandem with my other projects (which helped shape it - more on that later), but you can watch this space for details.

The Most Useful Page on the Internet

Not long ago in my web travels, I was searching for a sheet of handwriting paper - the kind kids use to practice penmanship and cursive writing on - and to my surprise I could not find a single blank sheet to download and print-on-demand. I found a lot of practice sheets that were part of elaborate lesson plans and loads of flashy "learning" games - but all I wanted was the DIY sheet (I should have made it myself, but I was in a hurry that particular day). Lo and behold, I took five minutes out of my day today to create what might possibly be the most useful - and usable - page on the Internet. Without further ado, here it is saved as a PDF - guaranteed to work in any browser - and an open source .ai version to boot.

The Internet Archive BookMobile

It has been a great year. I have been doing meaningful work, and to top it off - I spent the past couple of months as the Internet Archive Bookmobilist. It was a fun experience which helped me become much more involved in my local community. I also published my first public domain books! Both are based on projects with my son - the first is the The Amazing Sixes Solar-Powered Pumpkin People and the second is the The Head Start Critter Construction Book. It is quite liberating to design, produce, bind and distribute your own book on location (especially when you use a gasoline-powered generator!).

Life In Interesting Times

I have been working on several interesting projects - one just went live: 24-7 - a DIY Video Summit, a conference exploring the transformation of dynamic visual media. Through this project, I discovered many contemporary video artists (which rekindled my interest in some of my long-time personal favs), and collaborated remotely with some very talented people. In other news, I am excited to be a part of Open Library, which involves another amazing group of people, and gives me an opportunity to work with the Internet Archive (which, for me, is cool beyond words). And speaking of cool beyond words, there are some new things underway at Point B Studio that are keeping me busy ... one thing is for certain: life is interesting!