You had better hope that you don’t come back tonight, because I am waiting for you.  If I catch you, I am going to introduce the back of your head to something heavy.  After you regain consciousness, you’ll find yourself tied, naked, to a tree while you wait for the cops to pick you up.

Quick observation:  the economy is all sorts of messed up.  I’ve been watching the market and doing a lot of reading over the last few weeks and it seems that the vast majority of economists who have their heads on straight seem to agree that the economy is bad.  I agree with them - not because of any financial trouble the latest drop on the Down Jones Industrial has caused me, but because of the general feeling of fear that seems to have permeated the financial world.  It seems like everyone is buckling in and holing up — preparing for a storm.  Weird times are ahead.

My job continues to be a source of both frustration and pleasure.  In an effort to bolster basketball ticket sales, we’re launching a new email campaign.  Of course, your’s truly was tasked with designing the emails.  They’re nothing special, but they get the job done.  My latest project on VirginiaSports.com has been the redesign of the Academic Affairs section.  This has yet to be launched (the old version is still active on the site as of 11/12/08), but will be a big improvement over the current page.  It’s actually fairly javascript-heavy as far as fading images, rollovers, image galleries, etc. For users that do not have javascript, it degrades very nicely.  I’m hoping to launch it by the end of the week, but it has yet to be inspected by the web commitee, so I’m sure that a good deal of changes will need to be made.

The revamped Cavalier Rowing Camp website is mostly finished, although some text still remains to be filled in by the owners.  I like that design and am planning to use something similar for the Women’s Soccer Camp site as well.

Once again, the time has come when we, the citizens of the United States of America, will select a leader.  This election has marked the first time that I have ever donated money to a political campaign.  Coincidentally, I have, for the first time in my life, given my full and absolute support to a candidate for the presidency:  Barack Obama.

We, the middle class, live in a time place society in which we are sheltered from the various travesties of the world.  Nobody in America is seriously concerned with an attack from a foreign country.  World leaders do not want another world war.  Famine? Genocide?  These things happen in small, out-of-the-way parts of the world that nobody visits anyway (read: Africa).  The news rarely touches on such matters, prefering either to numb us with injections of pop culture or to frighten us with arbitrarily changing alert scales and economic volatility indexes.  We seem to alternate between states of comfortable passivity and paralyzing fear.

Nobody knows what the hell they are supposed to do.  There are no longer any clear enemies to fight.  There is no untamed land remaining to settle (at least, none that anybody wants anyway).  As a species we seem to have done fairly well: we don’t worry daily about finding clean water or freezing to death or being mauled by lions as we sleep. [Editor's Note:  I realize that this is clearly not the case for every human on this planet.  In fact, there are a staggering number of suffering humans.  In the time that it has taken you to read this, I would guess that someone has died from starvation or at least a perfectly curable disease.  However, this post is about the middle class of the United States.] We’re now on the third (or fourth?) generation that has gone to college “just because”.  We work to get money.  We use money to pay bills that are required for us to live comfortably.  We amuse ourselves with simple distractions.

Enter Generation Y.  We’ve floated through life for awhile now.  Our parents have been there to guide us and have had the means to help us financially.  We’ve never been terribly interested in politics.  Most of us have been out of college for a bit now.  We’ve been told that we can do anything that we want, but most of us do not know what that is.  However, we desperately want something on which to focus on energy.  We want a challenge.

For the first time in American politics, the Internet has played a decisive role in a presidential campaign.  Without it, Barack Obama would not be in the lead - hell, he may not even be in the race.  The Obama campaign understand this.  Anyone can visit the official Youtube account of the Obama campaign and watch the senators’ speeches, interviews, etc.  A simple visit to Snopes.com reveals the ridiculousness of those nasty “FWD: fwd: fwd: Obama is a secret mooslim” emails that the GOP loves to distribute.  Some bloggers have even made names for themselves by providing intense coverage of election-related political events and polls (Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com).

For Obama, the real benefit of the internet has been translating online activity to on-the-ground organization.  This is where the McCain campaign has fallen behind.  From the beginning, Obama’s website has encourge group-behavior (join with your friends and see how much you’ve collectively donated, etc).  Obama’s website makes it easy to phone bank for the candidate from home.  As a whole, Obama’s website is a masterpice in visual design and browser support.  It uses a sophisticated type-setting, makes great use of white space, and it even has custom “<hr />” graphics (grey lines with the O-graphic in the center).
Contrast that with McCain’s site.  It looks as though it were thrown together in a month or so.  The main menu looks and feels cheap — like every other “knock off”, junk CSS/JS menu with a slide-down animation.  And, good God, did they pay a wandering vagrant for that main banner image?  In fact, the difference is so staggering that I’m going to take screen shots.  The results are below:

Can you tell the difference? Ignoring Obama’s logo (which is now instantly recognizable and a stroke of brilliance by some graphic designer whose services are going to be in constant demand from here on out), you can clearly see the difference in these two designs.  First, look at the treatments of the candidates images.  In the Obama graphic, we see Biden clearly positioned behind Obama.  He has been reduced in size to further this appearance (his entire head is about the size of Obama’s face).  Notice that although the photos of Obama and Biden were taken seperately, they have been joined in such a ways as to appear natural.  The gradients have helped quite a bit.  Also, notice that Obama’s head overlaps the top of the frame.  The causes his image to “pop” from the page, adding dimension, and perhaps a subtle message about breaking boundaries and borders. Additionally, the menu is clean and is easily distinguishable from the main image.

Contrast the above to McCain’s image.  The logo is nothing special, but it gets the job done.  The menu, however, is the same background color (or damn near) as the header image.  There is also no visual separator (Obama’s menu has vertical lines) between menu items.  It is a sophmoric design.  I am also baffled by the selection of headshots for the candidates.  Obama and Biden are staring outward, perhaps looking towards the promise of tomorrow?; McCain and Palin are both staring at me.  Not only that, but Palin looks a bit too large to be placed behind McCain — I mean, that shot of Palin was taken from a closer range than the shot of McCain, so it looks unnatural that the two should be reversed in distance.  McCain’s expression seems to indicate that he’s wandered into the bar looking for you, but has forgotten your name since getting out of his car.  Palin looks like she’s so excited that she’s going to push McCain out of the way. No shading or gradients appear to have been used on this.  Here are results with 10 minutes of playing around in Photoshop.  Note that I couldn’t reduce Palin’s size because I was only working with the jpg:

Obviously, it’s not perfect, but compare the original McCain image with the altered (above).  Can you spot all of my edits? Anyway, it’s obvious to my generation that the President of the United States needs to understand how the internet works and, clearly, the McCain campaign just doesn’t get it.

I’ve rambled off-course considerably since starting this post.  Essentially, though, Obama has provided a rally-point for a large number of people my age who spend large portions of their lives online.  He has given us something to believe in — someone who shares our belief that change is needed.  He speaks to us like adults.  He challenged us to volunteer and vote in the primaries and we responded.  He charged us with refuting bogus smears from the Republican party; we not only made sure that friends and family knew all of it was bogus, but we set up websites to spread the truth about the republican candidates (Vet Palin and Vet McCain, among many others).  We have phone banked, canvassed, and volunteered out time in such a large magnitude that it has overwhelmed the opposition.  We have done all of this so that when Obama steps into the White House and issues to us a new set of challenges (Healthcare Reform, Green Energy), we can respond unanimously, “Yes we can”.