Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. ~R. Buckminster Fuller

I am always amazed when I see how little we as a society are using the technologies so readily available to make our lives easier and more productive. I am a firm believer in using technology to leverage the things in our lives and society that are most important to ensure the maximum amount of impact.

Personally, I couldn’t think of a better area to utilize technology to get that maximum impact then our educational system. A system which has swirled with controversy over the past few years with everyone scratching their head looking for solutions on what to do about low test scores, budget problems and class sizes.

Being a person who doesn’t have any children I really hadn’t given it much thought. That is not until a few conversations with my fellow 40 Under Forty nominee Lyzetth Rios who is an english teacher at Golden Valley High School here in the Santa Clarita Valley. This fall Lyzetth will be teaching all the freshmen honors english classes and was looking for a way to both encourage her students and keep in touch with parents. At that juncture, I told her about the company my girlfriend Deanna has been working for edRover, which is a location based check-in mobile application similar to foursquare, however instead of just checking in to let the world know you made it to coffee shop and are moments from a latte, edRover works with Classwish.org to help raise money for education and defray some of the cost teachers pay out of pocket just to do their job. Many people don’t know that teachers pay upwards for $1200 a year for supplies.

After our chat, I volunteered to help put together a website that would help Lyzetth do things differently and help catapult her freshmen into high school on the right track. Personally, I believe teachers are the heroes in our society and we should do what we can to help them. If you have a chance stop by Missrios.com and drop Lyzetth an encouraging word or maybe got to her classwish profile and buy her some post its.

Miss Rios' Website

The City Web Team aka Drake and I, finally got the Library Website launched just in time for the library grand re-openings that happen today.
The library website was built using my illustrator comps,and Drupal with Openpublic’s CMS system. Openpublic was so happy with my design that they plan on adding it as a third theme for other government bodies to use. Openpublic also interviewed Ryan Drake about the Santa Clarita Library Website

View Openpublic Interview

I worked many sleepless nights this week to get this video done in time for the memorial service tomorrow.

This weekend, I worked with Sgt. Harris aka Law Dog, on collateral and marketing campaign for a poker fundraiser for the baseball team he coaches. The team got an invite to a Cooperstown tournament and they needed to raise some cash. If you are into poker, like to have fun and have $100 you wanted to get rid of this is the tournament for you.

This was the project that never ended. I actually started working on this in January 2010 to help out my friend Sgt. Harris who was put in charge of this huge project. He thinks big and didn’t want to leave anyone or anything out so this book grew from an initial estimate of 40 pages to almost 80! This book went through endless rounds of editing from Sgt Harris, to Aleks, all the way up the command lines to the head quarters of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department. I won’t bore anyone with the details… but its August and we hope that it will finally get printed!

This project was to create 18 compositions putting Jenny Holzer‘s famous truism into images. My goal with this project was to use as little photoshop as possible! Â I really wanted setup and compose my compositions prior to post work. We were required to do 18, which I felt was a little overboard given the time and effort to this project right.

A few highlights of this project were the ice sculpture which is real and took weeks to get right. I accidently broke the stupid thing after 4 shots! So I had to run with what I had. Â The other highlight was the composition created from earth worms! Yes they also are real. Here my favorites

My First project this last semester was to create an branding identity and style guide for myself. After a few weeks of playing around with various ideas this was the design and look I settled on.

My final Project for Graphic Design 2 was to come up with a Promotional Campaign for Helvetica Neue Font Family.

This was the booklet I designed

Posters Can be viewed Here

Most of this semester I have been struggling in Geography. I have fought my way back to “A” territory, hopefully I can pull it off, but we had an assignment where we had to pick a Geography subject and make a poster along with a paper. I picked my “POWER ANIMAL” PENGUINS and took the opportunity to showcase some of my design skills and made this poster then it printed at kinkos, which costs a small fortune! But I really liked how it turned out! It was a big hit with the class, got lots of comments because the teacher set them up and had people write down what they thought of it.

Here is one of my managers talking about Vote Santa Clarita.

Here is another article that the Signal did about VoteSantaClarita.com http://www.the-signal.com/news/article/21239/