Matthew Carlson

Matthew Carlson

I have mad Photo Booth skills.

I spent my childhood building forts in the woods and playing late night games of tag in a small town in Pennsylvania. I lived in Columbus, Ohio a few years before moving to Peoria, Illinois where I attended high school and college.

I returned to Columbus after graduation and spent a few years living on my own in a one-bedroom apartment across from a beautiful park. I worked in publication design during the day and spent my nights in the local music scene.

In 2000, I packed my bags and moved to Chicago with my girlfriend at the time, Dawn. We spent two amazing years there among great friends, great food and great public transportation. In 2001, our first son, Jacob, was born and a year later we were back in Columbus.

Fast forward and I've been married for over five years, have two wonderful sons (Miles was born in 2005), and still live in Columbus where I spend too much time on the computer and not enough time in the local music scene.

Professionally

I am currently the art director for a small advertising agency based in Columbus, Ohio where I oversee all of the visual communication, manage one print designer and personally do the web design and development.

In the past I've held other grand titles such as graphic designer, art director, freelancer, newspaper boy and bagger (Yes. There were once people who bagged your groceries for you at the store.). I've worked on newspaper and magazine layout, healthcare and educational marketing, technical publication layout and distribution, print advertising, branding, the web, etc.

Elsewhere

You can also find me at the following places:

SimplePixels.com

SimplePixels is the weblog of Matthew Carlson, a web and graphic designer based in Columbus, Ohio.

While this is the first public version of SimplePixels.com, this is actually about the fifth (or eighth) version that I have designed and developed. The name SimplePixels originated in 2003 when I was looking to name a website that I was creating to focus on design for mobile devices. That turned out to be a passing fancy, but over the years, I've used SimplePixels.com to hone my coding skills, test new ideas, make mistakes and learn how to fix them. At heart, it's still just a little fort in the big woods of the internet.

The Technical Stuff

SimplePixels.com is designed and coded using Photoshop, Textmate, Transmit, and more recently, Coda. The site is hosted at (mt) Media Temple and uses the extremely flexible Textpattern for content management. This site makes use of the following plug-ins:

rss_admin_show_adv_opts 0.3 by Rob Sable
Automatically expand article advanced options.
ajw_comment_alt 0.3 by Andrew Waer
Alternates output based on even- or odd-numbered comments
zem_contact_reborn 4.0.3.19 by TXP Community
Form mailer for Textpattern
zem_contact_lang 4.0.3.6 by TXP Community
Language plug-in for Zem Contact Reborn
rsx_plugins_list 1.1 by Ramanan Sivaranjan
Display a list of plugins currently installed.
rss_admin_db_manager 4.3 by Rob Sable
Database management system.
tru_tags 2.3 by Nathan Arthur
Article tagging
upm_img_popper 1.3.5 by Mary Fredborg
Minimal image selector.
upm_date_archive 0.2.3 by Mary Fredborg
Simple, clean and efficient date archive listings.
ras_if_dates 4.0.5.1 by raas
Conditional article content display control by posting time or date.
by_youtube 0.4 by Emil Enevoldsen
Embed YouTube video into your Textpattern site.
asy_sitemap 0.7 by Sencer Yurdaguel
Generates a gz-compressed Google-Sitemap.
mg_setheader 0.1 by Mike Gravel
Sets proper header for xml pages

Mostly a Creative Commons license, but don't steal the entire design.

In general, the writing, text, images, code or other items that are directly created by me and posted on this site are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. In general, this means you can reuse, post and distribute the information, make changes and revisions, but must give credit where credit is due. You also may not use the works for commercial purposes.

The unique combination of XHTML and CSS that together make the design of this website are not covered under the Creative Commons license but remain the sole copyright of me. Look under the hood and poke around, it's the best way to learn, but don't take the design as a whole and reuse it as your own.

Exceptions

There may be times that items are posted here that I choose to make available under a different license (see above). If that's the case, it will be noted along with the item.

Items (e.g. images, excerpts or quotes) which have not been directly created by me, but may be posted here as part of a notebook article or segue remain the property of their respective owner.

If you choose to leave a comment on this site, that comment belongs to you.