houseofdixon.com

OK, so it looks like an excel formula, and you would be right. Why, you may ask, am I writing about this? I love simple solutions to things, techniques that make long laborious tasks much more manageable. Recently, I was given a spreadsheet at work and charged with the task of putting a couple of columns together and adding some text to form a filename that would be used for a whole list of web images (in the end, more than 8000 items). The filenames in the spreadsheet had to match the real files or else things would start breaking. Rather than spend the next 4 weeks typing each name up and matching it to the image file I decided to make use of a formula that has recently become indispensable in my virtual toolkit…”=concatenate”. Simply this formula allows you to take both cell values and text strings and put them together in a new cell.

Here’s my example…nerdy as it may look.

you have 3 columns of information that needs to be combined into a filename with each piece separated with and “_” and the “.jpg” file extension at the end. Here’s how to do it. The formula looks like this: =CONCATENATE(A2,”_”,B2,”_”,C2,”.jpg”)

Enough of that nerdiness…for now…

Pretty much every year there is a new group of freshmen at BGSU who have a desire to further their involvement with Young Life, whether they were involved in high school or have just heard about it since arriving at college. This group, at least around here, is called FYF or First Year Fellowship, and it is a combination Bible study and Young Life leader training group. The groups usually finish sometime during the first part of the spring semester with decisions whether they want to continue their involvement by becoming a young life leader. This invitation is for a celebration in honor of those who made that decision and have been interviewed and placed at a high school as an official Young Life Leader. Here it is…

Invitation Front

Invitation Inside

Invitation Back

Recently I drew up a map for a wedding to take place at the Toledo Zoo that included markers for the hotels recommended by the couple and basic markers/indicators for getting from the hotels and all other directions to the zoo. I’m not so much a cartographer, so I struggled a bit deciding what was important to show (highways, exit numbers, major roads, secondary roads, etc.) All of you who live in or know the Toledo, OH area can draw your own conclusions if I represented this area in a way that would allow anyone to find the proper location. In the end I came up with something that is (i think) both simple and easy to read, as well as kinda interesting to look at. No more explanation, here it is:

As a visual communicator, I’m not so much a graphic designer, photographer,videographer, writer or web designer, but I try to stay on top of the latest in all media/content fields to help me in my quest for solving communication problems. I also don’t like getting stuck using a particular tool (illustrator, photoshop, dreamweaver, etc.) when trying to solve said problems in visual media. My goal is to continuously improve and learn the new tools and techniques available.

All of this is to say that I plan on posting some of my work on this blog. This is a new category for me, though my work in these areas, both professional and other, is another part of my life that deserves a mention. These works will most definitely take different forms as I try not to pigeon hole myself into any one media format. There are two posts forthcoming in this category, so get ready…