zacharyc » zacharyc

Fitness Test

zacharyc — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:31:35 +0000

I haven’t been posting for a while because I’ve been working on a project for Cheer SF State. We are administering a fitness test when the students get back from the summer break. If they pass the test they will get out of part of boot camp (a three week intensive training schedule to get them into shape for the next year).

I made a website for the test. It is the easiest way to share it with people. It does not require any log in and students can get to it from anywhere.

Here’s a screenshot (the site is still being worked on):

Here are a couple of things I’ve learned from this project:

When making a video, look at the camera (this is obvious, but I didn’t do it)
It is possible and easy to cover up the iPhone’s mic, be careful when filming
It appears background SVGs don’t work on Firefox (really?)
RGBA is your friend. The last parameter is a decimal
For some reason Arial Black looks “chunky” on my site. It works well elsewhere, I’m still investigating this
There are no real good fitness videos on youtube, or if there are, they are impossible to find

San Francisco Beach

zacharyc — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:08:29 +0000

This is a photo taken with Aaron on a photo shoot in San Francisco. This is my first time playing with my new Filter kit.

97% Human, 3% Beer

zacharyc — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:30:27 +0000

This is an older project I never posted anything about. I met some people from a web company called Uxebu. On their website they had a line “97% Human”. I once asked them, what’s the other 3%? Is it Beer? Hence the slogan 97% Human, 3% Beer. I made a mock of a tshirt design for it. Here it is:

Fav Icon Continued

zacharyc — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:22:38 +0000

I was working on setting up a favicon for this site. You can see it here:

The process was simple. I created a mock in Sketch using the Futura Font for the “Z”. I then brought the image into Icon Composer, and exported it as an ICO. I modified the functions.php for the theme to include a function for rendering the link tag in the wp_head, and that should be it. It’s not appearing for me yet, but I assuming it’s a cache issue for now.

Wildflower Triathlon

zacharyc — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:56:13 +0000

On Christmas Eve last year I made a new close friend. She asked me if I wanted to train and do a Triathlon in May. This past weekend was that Triathlon. On Friday, my creative drive was very focused on the triathlon. Here was a sketch I made:

Dr. McHotPants

zacharyc — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:31:38 +0000

One of my very good friends successfully defended her PhD yesterday in mechanical engineering (really astrophysics, but they called it mechanical engineering). The only think I could think of all day was a logo. She made the mistake of saying that I could call her Dr. anything once she graduated. Her new nickname from me is Dr. McHotPants. Here was the logo I drew for her:

New Footer, Phase 1

zacharyc — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:46:56 +0000

I’ve been working on a new footer for this site. For a while I’ve wanted a fat footer with more information. Today, you’ll see, I have one. It still needs a lot of work, but at least it’s there.

Areas for improvement:

Remove the stupid 1px border
Put in some social media icons

Cheerleader CSV Parser

zacharyc — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:29:09 +0000

The other week we decided to send out a mass email to our cheerleading team in order to get information from each cheerleader. The problem was that we didn’t want to send sizing data about other cheerleaders. This meant a custom written emails for each cheerleader. We had an excel spreadsheet, I exported it to CSV and then wrote a ruby parser to generate custom email files for each cheerleader.

There is some room for improvement:

Parameterize the inputs. Pass in the CSV, destination folder, a template file
Use a template file for emails. Instead of manually including the message

The Actual Manifesto

zacharyc — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:32:15 +0000

I’ve explained what I’m doing, but here is why:

We live in a world dominated by consumption. The fundamental model of our world is capitalism. Consumption of products created by others. Even now as I’m typing this, I’m a consumer. This machine was not built by me. The software I’m using I didn’t write. The keys I’m bombarding with my fingers have a cost associated with them. The coffee that I’m sipping on was purchased just down the street. All of these are things that were made by others and delivered to my hands usually at the cost of some currency.

I’m tired of just being a consumer. It’s simple, perhaps a bit arrogant, but I’m too smart to spend all of my time consuming others’ products. What I produce to world is created through my day job, these products are the general design of others. As such, they lack both my personal mark and label.

As someone capable of creation, I demand more from myself.

Mock Logo

zacharyc — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:46:10 +0000

This deserves a little bit of explanation. I found out that one of my friends started working for Duarte. I fell in love with their logo:

One of the creative projects I have coming up is designing a new favicon for this site. This seems like as good a start as any. I have a couple of ideas going forward, but this sketch was the start. It was made with Paper for the iPad.