Adam Luptak

No, this isn’t my graduation day – in fact, that was over a week ago.

However, this is initially a recognition of my graduation – yes, I have graduated from RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) with a BFA from the New Media Design & Imaging program. I’ve got a job lined up at Struck Creative in Salt Lake City, and I’m moving down there tomorrow (or tonight, depending on your position on whether midnight constitutes ‘tomorrow’).

However, this is also a mission statement, a looking-into-the-future statement, a goal list. What you will be seeing on this blog in the months to come, as I get this whole “real life” thing figured out.

• I will be posting! I know, it’s crazy… but I actually want to spend some time talking – maybe I can share some interesting things with friends, maybe it’s just good to practice writing and getting my thoughts on any given topic in order…
• The blog will get a makeover (but not before the makeover I’m working on for Poorer Than You – a fantastic personal finance blog that I think anyone that, you know, spends money, should be reading.
• It’ll be moving locations, from its current location onto my own space, adamluptak.com. (Yeah, I have my own domain name – it’s a trip).
• Writing and sharing on a number of topics – I know that this mis-mash isn’t the recipe for “successful, professional blogging” – but for now, this is what I want to do. Share with friends, and anyone else who will listen, things that I’ve got on my mind. Maybe it’ll grow into something more focused down the road, who knows. In no particular order:
  • New Media experiments and sketches, just to grow
  • Professional and personal work
  • Random life news
  • Recipes or cooking misadventures as I try to expand my food horizons
  • Discussion of global poverty
  • Discussion of slums
  • Discussion of development (talking here about improving conditions in impoverished countries)
  • Discussion of sustainability
  • General soapboxing on any number of things.

So yeah. All of that to come soon. I don’t know if anyone is reading, but if you are – watch this space.

It’s my birthday, and I woke up this morning to a CNN headline, “Kenyan death toll reaches 1,000.”

Great news to start out my day, but in perspective, it’s worse news for the people who live there.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that folks reading this (if there is, after all, anyone reading this) don’t have a real good grip on the situation, or, you know, what’s going on at all. I’ve been following it, so I’ll do my best to write about it briefly.

The Kenyan election was held in December. Sitting President Mwai Kibaki was up for reelection, running against opposition leader Raila Odinga. Kibaki took over 5 years ago from President Daniel Arap Moi, an unquestionably corrupt leader who ruled the country for 24 years thanks to a lack of term limits (a deficiency that was remedied in 1992). Kibaki previously campaigned as a reformer, but some argue that he hasn’t done enough (it’s been estimated that $1 billion was lost to graft between 2002 and 2005 [source]). Seems to me that he’s playing with a pretty big handicap, and everyone I talked to about politics there were Kibaki supporters, but I was only there for three weeks – I can’t claim to have anything close to expertise here.

Anyway, Kibaki was announced as the winner, but it appears that the vote was rigged – there may have even been rigging on both sides. What started as protests, and then rioting, over the election results took on ethnic overtones – Kibaki is Kikuyu, the most populous ethnic group, Odinga is Luo, and support often runs along ethnic divides. It seems that it began with incidents of Luo targeting Kikuyu, and then Kikuyu mobs started to form in reprisal… feeding the ethnic divides is a historic sense of disenfranchisement – valuable land taken from other ethnic groups by British colonists was given predmoninatly to Kikuyus upon independence. Some have posed the point: “Wasn’t this, you know, a while ago? Why can’t they just get along?” While I don’t deny the logic there – land, political power, business connections – these things can be and probably are the difference between success and poverty. Working your way up or struggling/failing to feed your family. So it’s kind of a big deal.

Anyway, death toll just reached 1,000. Truth is, in terms of past and current conflicts, this is (and it kills me to say this) pretty small. Civil war in Chad, humanitarian violations in Sudan going on for years… this still pales in comparison. For me, it’s because I’ve been there – fallen in love with the country, and I’m worried sick about the people that I met there. On a larger scale, Kenya has been an oasis of peace and an economic leader in the area. It’s a trade hub for the area and a strong U.S. ally [source]. This conflict threatens business, internally and for the region, and it will likely have catastrophic effects on tourism, which is a huge part of the country’s economy.

So I’m just waiting and watching. Hoping this was informative.

Further reading:
Country profile: Kenya
Kenya: In Diplomatic Intensive Care
Kenyan death toll reaches 1,000
‘Hard’ Kenya crisis talks resume
Gang rape spirals in violent Kenya
Fragile path of Kenya peacemaking

The modern banner ad is generally, in a word, annoying.

There have been some interesting developments in the past few years, primarily the use of banners that require user interaction. These tend to be in the form of ads promising free stuff in return for “winning” a tiny game. The attempt here is to engage the viewer, and I must admit that it occasionally works on me – I will sit and play a little banner game for a minute. However, I immediately close any page that the ad then directs me to, so I don’t know how successful that strategy is.

From a design standpoint, these ads tend to be quite ugly – they are dominated by garishly bright colors, and often include text of illustrative elements which are simply of poor quality.

The most visually pleasing ads, rare though they are, are the ads that have been designed specifically for the page they are on. These tend to be found on webcomics, where some artists will draw up an ad so that it doesn’t clash with the site, though it still looks very much like an ad, so that it is not confused with the site itself.

However, from the standpoint of a web surfer who doesn’t want to be bothered by flashing graphics, ugly colors, or, God forbid, ads with audio, the most successful ads are the text-based Google ads that some sites use. They are clearly labeled as ads, but are skinned using CSS to match the scheme of the page. These ads actually present links to content that might interest the user, judging by the content of the page they are currently on. This is a far superior advertising technique to simply shouting a random message at anyone who happens to come by the page.

So where are ads going? The trend of interactive ads is at very least intriguing, so perhaps it will continue. However, I hope that the quality of these ads will increase. The Google ads illustrate a trend towards matching ads to markets that would actually be interested in them which would be good to see emulated throughout the web. As a designer, I hope to see (but not make) ads that are more visually refined, silent, elegant, but still easily identifiable as advertising. (As the folks at Google say, “don’t be evil.”)