On the Board

With a little arm twisting I'm happy to announce that I've begun volunteering for my alma mater, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design by becoming a member of The MCAD Alumni Association Board of Directors.

Classes have just begun for the current students, and we recently adjourned our very first meeting for this 2011/2012 school year.

It's exciting to be asked to have a hand in what could prove to be a huge blossoming of Alumni Student relations at MCAD this year. But it's really only the beginning. There's so much work to be done, and now seems to be "the perfect storm" of volunteers, board members and MCAD administrators to make some sweeping change and build something new at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for Alumni and Students alike.

If you're a former MCAD grad don't hesitate to contact me or MCAD directly.  We need your thoughts, skills and expertise.  

I'll be working hard in the coming months to assist other volunteers in building consistent and meaningful communications between MCAD and its former students along with pulling together all new guide packets for graduating students full of resources to aid in the transition from student to professional.

It feels good to be rolling up my sleeves for the arts community here in Minneapolis.

A Clean Install of Lion

I think it started with a post I read recently on how to create an install dvd / USB drive from the Lion Installer that is now delivered via the Mac App Store as a 3+ gigabyte app download.  Once I realized that under the new wrapper Lion was essentially just like any of the previous major OS X updates, I decided that I could pretty easily start my 2009 MacBook Pro (Identifier 5,2) from scratch with a clean install of Lion.  In the process, I could also offload the size of the installer to the USB drive for safe keeping, recovery, or another fresh install in the future.  

This time around the focus wasn’t so much on a clean system per se.  In the past I’ve fiddled with my personal Mac at home a lot, trying out different applications, configurations, and customizations...  but it’s something as time has marched on, that I’ve slowly grown out of.  I think over the years of fiddling a few things have always been the same.  

1. That the customizations and new applications (for the most part) didn’t increase my creativity or my productivity, nor did they boost the performance of my Mac.

2. The more I customized and fiddled, the less stable and reliable my Mac became.

In the past this lead to system “reboots” every six months, where I was installing the operating system clean from scratch then manually copying my data, reinstalling my software, and configuring all my settings.  I did this because I liked to, and it helped me get to know my machine, and my data.  It made me reassess the applications I used and why I chose to use them at least a couple times each year which are all good things (even if time consuming.)

But because I’d very recently done this type of “reboot” with Snow Leopard, it seemed an unnecessary step with the release of Lion… That is until I started to look at my data the way I’d always assessed my system, settings, and applications.

Backups:

My backup regimen is by no means complete or bulletproof, but I like to think I’m doing a little more than the average joe is to protect my most important data.  For me thats almost entirely design work, digital art, and photos.  Those three things represent the “irreplaceable if lost” portion of my data, and I always have at least two copies of that data on external drives.  I also usually maintain a bootable clone (or two) of my previous system setup (until I deem a new setup complete). 

Point being that I always try to give myself solid peace of mind when starting from scratch on a computer I use and rely on daily… You should too, whatever your backup system or strategy is.  

My Data:

So with all of my data and system info. in at least a couple of places I decided that this time instead of copying all of my own personal data over to the clean install of Lion I’d assess everything before I let it back onto my MacBook Pro.

This includes things like several gigabytes of music, largely unorganized, ripped from cd’s without metadata or album art.  Vast folders of high resolution desktop wallpaper images I’ve downloaded over the years trying them out for ten seconds only to never look at them again.  Libraries of replacement icon sets for system and applications.  Student work from college.  Many many attempts at text file based journals configured twenty different ways saved in random places... and on and on really.

I’m thinking about things that I want to keep, but that I don’t need access to every single day.  One great example of this is my moderately sized iTunes music library.  I’ve had it and maintained it (albeit poorly) for years…  and the majority of it hasn’t really changed much, or been listened to all that often either.  Most of my daily music intake comes from Pandora, and now Spotify, which require no storage commitment on my part.  I’m also doing a great deal more of this streaming and listening from my iOS devices simply because the experience is more streamlined and immediate, whether I’m at my desk, or on the road.

A Work in Progress:

Right now all this means that my MacBook Pro feels lighter, faster and more capable.  It also means that I’m regularly looking at what’s in my backup drives, and moving things over a little at a time. I’m building new libraries instead of copying and linking to old ones. I’m excited about the promise of iCloud and iOS 5 and what that’ll bring to the mix as I focus on rethinking my most important data – hopefully in ways that better serve me and my daily pursuits.  

I’m sure I’ll be talking more about this especially as iCloud and iOS 5 are released into the wild sometime later this fall, but before that I’ll let you know what I think of Apple’s newest operating system in OS X Lion.  It’s a big update… 

“there are a lotta ins and outs and what-have-you’s” to go over.

JustinClifton.com is Live.

Welcome to my new website.  It's been awhile since I've maintained my own personal website and showed off my work in such a way.  I'm sure it'll grow and change as we all do.  The focus for me here will be as it always has been – more so on production and it's process than the products of that ongoing labor.  

In utilizing the latest and greatest in online tools I hope to be better at keeping this site alive and up to date.

If you'd like to take a look at some of my previous work please visit my portfolio, and I encourage you to check back often as I hope to be adding design tutorials, inspiration, and general thoughts on such things.