Whenever you stick a group of graduating graphic design seniors into a room, it does not take long for the conversation to steer toward the program’s shortcomings. “They didn’t teach me this!” “They wasted so much time on this!” Over the last few months of ceaseless discussion about these problems, I have actually come to terms with what the program has offered.

When talking to a few friends about how much I help people with web development, it always comes up that this must be a major specific thing. “That would never happen in __________, everyone is out for themselves” they say. Their logic is that I’m crazy for helping so many people that I am in direct competition with in the graphic design world.

To them, I say: Screw it.

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Over the last week I’ve been in charge of creating a door sign for the new Pedal Brain office. This ended up being much more of an ordeal than I originally intended it to be, but I’m proud of how it turned out.

To begin, I had to model the entire Pedal Brain logo in 3D. Well, actually, I had to learn how to model anything in 3D before slapping together the 3D version. I ended up using Modo to model it after SketchUp produced some less than ideal results. Although modeling the logo in Modo took considerably longer than SketchUp, it produced a much better logo and convinced me to try more things in 3D.

From there, my recently modeled logo headed to our 3D printer. This printer is primarily used for printing out prototypes of our iPhone mount, but I thought it would be great to use it for creating a door sign. The printing process took nearly three hours, but turned out much better than I could have anticipated.

Once printed, I had to stock up on some painting supplies to apply the official Pedal Brain Orange. After a few coats of white the logo was almost ready to go. Applying the orange around the outer edge put my lackluster painting skills to the test, but ended up being fairly easy.

Finally, we spent about 25 minutes trying to remove the door from the hinge with no success. From the stripped screws you could tell the previous renters also tried to get the door off, and quit at the same point. After some careful measuring, it was time for what I referred to as a round of high stakes kerning.

Several hours of work, one menacing bottle of super glue.

Hey man, look. I’m glad you’re trying out the whole blogging thing, really.

You began a huge campaign over the last week wherein you’re letting the world in on 40 snippets of mostly great design advice. I’m enjoying it, truly. But hey – quick note: Consolidate! You’ve got your personal brand all over the place and it’s become really, really confusing to handle. It’s the internet equivalent of repeatedly moving your primetime TV show to a different time slot on different networks.

Lets get down to it: for the love of god, stop using Cargo Collective as your blogging platform. It is not one. Pick a (real) blogging platform and stick with it. As of this writing you’ve got the “Lent Marathon” running on a Tumblr blog, iframe’d into an increasingly long Cargo Collective entry.

While this is a little bit deceptive (who uses iframes anymore, anyway), its mostly just confusing. I’ve got your feed coming in through my Tumblr dashboard, and that seems to work alright. I also subscribe to your old & busted RSS feed, which you seem to be migrating your posts back to. I mentioned this to you a while back, but your posts are still coming through in my RSS reader as enormous walls of text.

I realize that this may be a small use case (RSS readers and all), but I’m trying to look out for you, man. Down the road, when you want to show your kids your 32 totally hilarious blog posts about design ideas, wouldn’t it be great if they were in some sort of reasonable format?

With love, your friend, Paul.