Silicon Prairie News

Omaha Silicon Prairie News: With Oriental Trading Company, you're designing for users looking to make purchases that are usually fun and whimsical. How if at all do you try to reinforce those feelings with your design? | Josh Lawler: While the majority of our current product selection at Oriental Trading Company is geared towards children, our users are adults planning events for those children. As far as our web presence is concerned, we attempt to bridge this gap by using subtle design elements such as rounded corners and fonts to reflect safety, bright colors to reflect our culture and mission of making the world more fun and photographs of human faces to make emotional connections to … read more

Omaha Silicon Prairie News: As a developer, you've been largely self-taught. What are a couple of resources you found most valuable to the learning process when you made the decision to eschew classroom instruction and teach yourself? | Adam Lassek: My friend Aron was instrumental in getting me interested in web development. When I was first starting out he would give me programming puzzles to solve. I spent an enormous amount of time on StackOverflow — I can't recommend that highly enough. Screencasts are also an effective way to learn — my favorites are Peepcode and Tekpub. I wish learncodethehardway.org was around when I was getting started. … read more