145: With Sophie Shepherd

This week we’re joined by Sophie Shepherd. Sophie is a Senior Designer at Happy Cog Austin, organizes the Austin Dribbble Meetup, and teaches at Girl Develop It. We talked about (roughly in order): Q & A: 19:40 How do I choose the right font for my website? 28:20 I have been doing web design and development for a while and I’m wondering whether I should start blogging. Would you recommend hosting a blog with Github+Jekyll or go with a standard WordPress blog? 35:00 I teach web design and development at a community college in Michigan. We have a Special Topics class that allow us to teach just about anything. This Spring semester I have a class on Emerging Web technologies. What sort of topics should be discussed in a class like this? 42:19 When dealing with overlays, do you prefer to have them centered on the screen, or offset from the top? 52:00 What’s your experience/opinion on R&D within companies, and should everyone has its own project? (For example: how Grunt fits in the company workflow) 58:40 I work with WordPress and create custom themes using a Bootstrap grid. I can develop roughly quickly, completing a site in 3 to 5 days. My coworker uses the same WordPress theme for all the projects, but gets praise for his quick turnaround time. Should I sacrifice my opportunity to grow for job security, or perhaps start looking elsewhere? Is this a new business trend, quantity over quality? Sponsors: 26:20 lynda.com – The best online learning resource. New courses are posted every single day. Check out some super great courses like: Audio & Music Production Logic Pro X InDesign Typography with Nigel French Writing for the Web with Chris Nodder Selling on the Amazon Marketplace with Peter Kent And so much more! Learn all the things! Get a free 10 day trial now! 48:11 CodePen – CodePen is an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code editor in your browser with instant previews of the code you see and write. It is a searchable trove of your own creations, and a world of other people’s creations. A place to troubleshoot, to teach, to learn, to test, and to grow. CodePen PRO takes things further with features like Collab Mode which allows you to pair program in real time and Professor Mode for allowing a group of students to follow you as you teach code and chat with each other. You can get a free 14-day trial of the Pro account – go sign up now! Show Links: Sophie Shepherd Follow Sophie on Twitter Serial Parody Dribbble Meetup Austin Girl Develop It Austin Jekyll CodePen Radio Grunt Travis CI If you’re enjoying our show, please take a minute to leave us a review in iTunes. We really appreciate it, and thanks to everyone who has already left a review!