Visiting Silicon Valley

sean — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:35:00 +0000

Last September I took a trip to Silicon Valley. One of my good friends from college grew up in the area and lives in Mountain View now working as a senior consultant at Google. He was an awesome host, showing me the sights and introducing me to a ton of great people. It was amazing to experience the vibe and unbridled enthusiasm that is pervasive in the valley, to know around every block was another tech startup, every coffeeshop filled with developers and designers. I visited some of the big campuses like Google, Apple, and Facebook. These places are set up so you basically never have to leave, or would want to. The free food is better than you could imagine – Sushi and Noodle bar at Facebook, wood oven pizza and grilled items at one of Google’s many cafeterias.

It was very enticing but at the same time it made me appreciate Chicago more as well. Chicago is a great city with an up and coming tech scene. Places like 1871 are on par with the incubators in the valley, and there are plenty of talented people trying to build the next great thing. Who knows where the road will take me, but I know I don’t have to move across the country to pursue my dreams…

Google Campus in front of the Android development buildings, explaining the mascots scattered throughout the lawn.

Checking out the iPhone 5 launch in downtown San Francisco. I saw Walt Mossberg but he was busy giving interviews so I didn’t get to say hi.

Zynga HQ in the SOHO district. I passed the Adobe building along with a dozen others on my way to a tech talk.

I attended an awesome tech talk at the AirBnB HQ about building single page apps. They served beer and organic tacos.

I’ve been dreaming about One Infinite Loop since I was like 12 years old. The Apple campus was nice, more reserved than Google or Facebook.

Little computer shop in Berkeley. This place was nostalgic for me, reminded me of my family’s computer store.

The University of California has a beautiful campus with tons of amazing trees. These stairs felt like a gateway to knowledge.

We checked out LightSail, a green energy startup in Berkeley (the place for green energy). They recently snagged a huge funding round.

Had to grab some wine after a long day of exploring. They had an awesome Pantone color book in the lobby.

Did a bunch of touristy stuff too. This view was from Treasure Island, we hiked Angel Island on a different day.

Van de Graaf canon of page construction

sean — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:40:26 +0000

I recently ran across these classic page layout techniques while updating my resume. Golden ratios meet gestalt principles in the page layout concepts thought up by Van de Graaf and Rosarivo, and used to design beautiful ancient manuscripts and many of the early Gutenberg printed works.

Check out the wikipedia page for more.

Galaxy Merger

sean — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:09:43 +0000

Before there was a pale blue dot, and after…

Sean Schraeder

Visiting Silicon Valley

Van de Graaf canon of page construction

Galaxy Merger