Building a Tri-County Tech Community

I wrote a guest post on the Miami Herald’s Starting Gate blog about some of the challenges that entrepreneurs not living in Miami face. Thank you to the other Broward and Palm Beach based entrepreneurs that commented on the article. View the original post here.

View from a Road Warrior: Building a tri-county tech community

Tech entrepreneurs scattered throughout Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties face challenges to establish and expand support services outside of the metropolitan Miami locale. I have firsthand experience as an involved participant in the tech community, while living in central Palm Beach County. This post explores the genesis of the tri-county tech support system presently emerging outside of Miami.

There is considerable momentum in the tri-county S FL tech scene, including updates about new accelerators/incubators, constant news about Florida tech companies on this blog, and events such as the recent “Great Debate”. The subject of location percolates at each event and meeting, focusing on the one thing that is theoretically essential to a growing tech community: Is there a central location for South Florida tech?

One Single Hub?

Most discussions identify Miami as the purported central hub; however, the Miami organizations and events are likewise scattered throughout the greater Miami area (Downtown, Midtown, Grove, etc.). The variety of scattered locations throughout Miami-Dade is more diffused than in Palm Beach and Broward. A variety of locations have sprung up in Palm Beach and Broward, such as the FAU Campus area, which houses the Enterprise Development Corporation, and upcoming Caffeine Spaces, proving that we are far from designating a central tech hub in South Florida.

The geographic layout of South Florida simply does not emulate the high concentration of tech companies and services that exist in San Francisco, Boston or Seattle. Tech entrepreneurs and  professionals will benefit by a realistic and honest solution that results in successful events and necessary introductions. Stonly Baptiste of IndependenceIT agrees, saying that “Miami has the best shot at being a major tech hub than most of the other areas of South Florida. Those of us in Fort Lauderdale can benefit from that growth and focus our energies in helping a growing community instead of the uphill battle of firing up a Fort Lauderdale tech hub.” (more…)

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Font Discovery Services for Designers

As web and graphic designers, fonts play an increasingly bigger role in our work. Sometimes, a client gives us a logo that’s really just a 200 pixel wide jpeg image rather than a true vector based logo. The task of figuring out what font is used in that logo used to be tricky, if not impossible.

Thankfully, the surge of web based design tools benefits this situation, and there are a few font discovery services available online that can save hours of work looking for a specific font.

 

First, let’s talk about how these sites work. Usually a file of with your font is uploaded (or linked via a url) to the site, then scanned to find glyphs that match a font. This only works with letters with spacing, so sometimes a bit of Photoshop work needs to be done to separate letters that have been kerned and tracked very closely together. (more…)

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Showcase of Artist Websites

As someone who keeps myself regularly updated with artists within the art scene (lowbrow/underground/pop surrealism) I find it very hard to find artists with websites that match their work. It is so surprising to see a group of such highly creative people have such sub=par web presences.

I guess part of this goes back to the “my work is so good, that my website doesn’t need to be” mentality that many artists have, but whatever the reason is there are simply too many great artists with sites that don’t match their talent. So I began a search for some of the better (there‘s too many artists out there to call this a best of list) artist websites out there and here’s a sampling of what I found:

Artist: Friends With You

The FriendsWithYou website is one of the few sites I found that’s actually designed…..really well. The typography is clean, the 3d navigation buttons are a great touch, and the use of mouse-interactivity in the flash header is a simple tie-in to FWY’s world of smiley faced silliness. Images in blog posts are greyscaled until hover, and they’re big and splashy. A site that’s very easy on the eyes, as well as easy to navigate. (more…)

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