Dan Ubilla

I came across this project for Good magazine in which a collection of designers and illustrators were called upon to design flags for their respective neighborhoods. Some were beautiful in their simplicity, others appeared to be the product of designers trying to show of their skills rather than fit the creative limitations.

Needless to say, I went for the more simplistic route in designing a flag for my Boston-area neighborhood, Davis Square.

Have a design for your neighborhood you want to share? Critique of mine? Share them in the comments.

Following Chris Coyier’s lead, I decided to go back and clean up some parts of the re-design I had neglected. It took some digging into pages and posts that I barely touched, and that have barely been seen, so I was glad to have the push.

Some fixes you’ll see:

• Images from the Archives: After moving my site from /blog to the root of my domain, a few image links became broken. I was fearful that I’d have to dig into the meta data of the wordpress install to designate the new image folder, but I had actually linked the images on the site absolutely, a big no-no regardless. Simple fix, and finally implemented.
• Archive, Post, and Page Layout: I wasn’t sure at the time about including the sidebar on all child pages, so I left these layouts in limbo, including the sidebar, but not doing it very well. The CSS was in place, so a bit more html markup completed the changes.
• Post Navigation: The post navigation had some float issues. Since every element in the post navigation div was floated, a clearing element needed to be introduced so that the subsequent html didn’t run right up into it. IE7 has a margin-bottom bug with floated elements, so instead of introducing a bottom margin on the post navigation, I merely threw a top margin on the post.

Have you started maintenance on your own site this month? Plan to begin in the coming weeks? Leave a comment.

As a songwriter, I’ve always been amazed at what comes out depending on what’s going on in my life.  When things were going well for me, my friend and bandmates would joke that things needed to get worse or the music would suffer.  They were more right than they might have thought.

Matt Skiba on Alkaline Trio’s new album, This Addiction:

Yeah, I was pretty angst-y and heartbroken when I wrote all of those songs. And I think that has a lot to do with the tone of the record because I hadn’t been in that sort of mind frame for a while. I think a lot of people feel angry and heartbroken about whatever it is they might be going through—politics, relationships, friendships, a cat dying—whatever the case may be. And I had some things go on in my life that just brought me back to that very drunk, very angry and sad young man that I was ten years ago. I never went completely off the deep end but I had some dark times and therefore there is some darkness. Not spooky dark, just sad and angry shit.

The rest of the interview can be found here.