I had the pleasure of talking to the San Francisco WordPress Beginners Meetup yesterday about Content and Information Architecture. It was great and I loved the whole Q&A portion of the talk.
Thank you for having me!
Here’s the video of it (my portion starts at 23:35):
Check out the slides on Speaker Deck 
or, how silkscreening changed my creative life
I was always a creative kid growing up. The first time my mother realized this was when I started dancing with my fingers on every piano-looking surface I could find. She soon signed me up for music school. I was five. At that young age I was learning music theory, playing a real piano and singing in the school coir.
Looking back, those early years in my development really shaped many aspects of my life. I went through several experiences throughout my teenage years and 20’s, including playing other instruments, being a tattoo artist, dance teacher, graphics designer, and DJ – all of them making part of the whole I’ve become.
Today is my 30th Birthday and I decided to give it up for charity.
A few months ago, on my Matt’s 28th birthday, I found out about Charity:Water, an awesome charity foundation that is all about building sustainable means to get clean water to places that need it in Africa. Matt was able to raise over $28.000 in donations on his birthday, and went on with a team to build a well in Ethiopia!
Shortly after his Birthday, I came across the following interview to Scott Harrison – the founder of Charity:Water – and I was incredibly inspired by it. I strongly recommend watching the whole thing, it’s a fantastic story.
So, this year for my 30th birthday I decided to give it up to Charity:Water and start a campaign to raise $3.000 (it would be lovely if I got $30.000, but I’m no Matt Mullenweg and they suggest we have a “realistic” goal – 100 people donating $30 seems reasonable)
So check out my page $30 for my 30th on Charity:Water – and donate $30 or more.
100% of all donations go directly toward water projects. And about 18 months after this campaign ends, charity: water will show us where and how every dollar we raised ended up helping in the field. We’ll see GPS coordinates, photos and more details about the communities we’ve impacted.
If we reach $5.000 I get my name on a well – that would make me super proud.
Thank you and if you get inspired, you too can pledge your birthday!
WordPress 3.4 was released today and this is a very exciting release for me as it was the first one I actually appeared in the Core Contributor list for a props I got on a ticket (for helping out with some UX sketches on the theme selector page). Before I was featured as a translation moderator on the Portuguese translation, but this time this has a special feel to it. I’m incredibly proud to be a part of that list!!
I was also super excited when I saw the 3.4 announcement video, produced by the always brilliant Michael Pick, where he used one of my personal art project as a Custom Headers example in the theme customizer!!
Here’s the full video:
Because of this exposure and also because it is Pride month, I thought this was a good opportunity to give away my art piece as a desktop background. This piece is part of a color and lines exploration phase I’m going through in my art. This one is intended to be part of a series, but this is just my first exploration. The final pieces are probably gonna be printed in a large format. But until then, get a high-def desktop background from it here! Also, here’s a preview of what you’ll get:
This, as most of what I do, gets a Creative Commons license:
Color Explorations v0.1 by Hugo Baeta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
We often load ourselves up when we travel, because we want to be prepared for various situations. This burden of being prepared leaves us with our arms full, unable to receive whatever is there when we arrive.
It leaves us tired from carrying, so that we are not happy when we meet someone new on our travels.
What if we traveled with empty hands, ready to embrace new experiences, receive new foods, touch new people?
(…)
A short film that tells the story behind the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster. Its origins at the beginning of WWII and its rediscovery in a bookshop in England in 2000, becoming one of the iconic images of the 21st century.
If you feel like it's a chore to keep up with all your favorite blogs, you can now read posts from all the blogs you follow (even the ones that aren't on WordPress.com!) in one convenient place on the WordPress.com home page:
Your reader displays all the posts across all the blogs you follow in the order they were published, with the most recent content appearing at the top.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
This past week I’ve been in Kailua, Oahu island, in Hawaii on a team meetup (Team Social FTW!). This has been a pretty perfect meetup so far: we have an amazing house right on the beach, the balance of work/fun has been spot on and I’ve had the oportunity of doing some funny creative stuff.
Today, after some days of thinking about this and some teasing from my team-mates to get this done, I’ve built a post-it/pixel version of the WordPress logo! It is based on the 16px WordPress icon version created by Ben Dunkle – I zoomed on it and basically made it so the color of the post-its I had matched loosely the icon. It took me a bit of tweaking and adjusting (thanks J-trip for the help, and Scott “3 part” Berkun for the awesome colorful post-its!), and going back and forth to the beach to look at it from a distance, but I’m super happy with the result!! This was the perfect opportunity to try out some time-lapse recording! Check out the short video I did:
Even thought I’m posting this technically on the 12th, the fact that this was made on the 11th matches perfectly with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg 28th birthday! Happy Birthday Matt!
