Here’s a quick update on why I’ve been MIA from my blog and where I’m headed next.

First, my group won the year-long 2010 RJI / Adobe / Hearst Interaction Design Student Competition (here’s the press release). As a result, we’re receiving a paid trip to Adobe Systems headquarters in San Francisco and another paid trip to the World Expo in Shanghai, China. Very exciting news, especially considering the amount of work we put into our product. We’re under a non-disclosure agreement and the product’s development is ongoing, but I can tell you this: we designed and developed a recommendation engine for interactive consumer guides.

Our group comprises:
Allan James Vestal, platform architect and data wrangler
Esten Hurtle, UI developer and Flash-master
Justin Myers, project leader and all-around buttkicker.
Then there’s me, lead designer and jack-of-all-trades “specialist”

I’ve neglected the blog and my photo-of-the-day posts because my group has been pushing hard the last few weeks. And, it’s obviously been worth it. We’ve developed a good product and had a lot of fun doing it. These guys have been my friends for years — we worked at The Maneater campus paper together for several semesters and some of us work at the Missourian together right now. Justin taught me how to use Illustrator way back when. Esten showed me how to use a DSLR. Allan, better known as Moose, will be teaching me all his back-end coding knowledge before I’m done with him. Also, we play/played RPG dice games together. I have no doubt that, one day, we’ll launch a successful start-up and it will be the funnest years of my life.

In other news, it’s cool that I’m able to attend these trips without disrupting my internship this summer, because the good folks at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have been kind enough to push my start and end date back a couple weeks. Things are just really falling into place for me.

It’s hard to imagine that I’ll be graduating from the University of Missouri in less than two weeks. All of this hard work is starting to pay off. I sort of expected my college experience to simply fade away as I approached May 15, but now I feel differently. Winning this competition really put an exclamation point on the experience and I can’t wait to see what happens next.