Rob Goodlatte  

The spring semester of my junior year at Duke is nearing its close with finals beginning next week. The week after that I’ll be flying to Seattle for a summer internship with Newsvine.

I couldn’t be more excited about this internship—I’ll be spending the summer working on the user interface of Newsvine alongside one of the best teams in the business. I’ve been a fan of the service since day one—Newsvine brings some much-needed authenticity and transparency to the news businesses that’s frankly been missing for awhile.

Newsvine has just released an entirely new, entirely bad-ass user interface codenamed Evergreen which I’ll have the pleasure of working on this summer. I’ll be working directly under Mike Davidson—which will undoubtedly be an amazing learning opportunity and will provide the sort of direct access to leadership that no corporate internship could provide.

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Croft for my ongoing interview series Three Questions. Jeff is the Senior Designer at World Online, he’s an evangelist for Django—a popular web application framework developed at World Online, and he publishes his thoughts and writings on jeffcroft.com—which has quickly become a must-read for web designers.

Jeff is also an adept speaker—he recently ran a workshop on Web typography for Carson System’s Future of Web Design 2007 and was on a very interesting panel at South by Southwest on design workflows. His SXSW panel produced some amazing interviews on design workflows—I highly recommend checking them out.

Keep reading for Jeff on programming vs. design, web standards education, and justifying design decisions.

I’m really excited to kick off a series of short interviews called Three Questions with an interview I conducted with Bryan Veloso of Revyver. Over the next few months I’ll be asking three questions to several designers, artists, and bloggers I respect from around the web.

Bryan is an award-winning designer with a portfolio that includes work for Flock, Facebook, and Mashable. He’s the author of Avalonstar, a blog that spans his personal and professional life—it’s currently in hiatus until May 1st, so we’re all eagerly awaiting its return. Bryan is quite busy these days—he runs Revyver, he co-hosts Live From the 101, he’s a member of the newly-formed Sidebar Creative, he organizes some amazing events with his fiancée Jen, and he’s been a speaker at a number of web conferences.

Read on for Bryan’s thoughts on working with a team, mixing his personal life and his blogging life, and the future of Avalonstar.

I’ve been using Virb° for a bit over a month now, but I haven’t spent much time customizing my profile until this weekend. Put simply, Virb has built the perfect social networking tool. I can freely modify the HTML and CSS behind my profile, unlike the draconian methods required for MySpace customization. And with the amazingly-designed band pages and admin interfaces, Virb manages to add something that neither MySpace nor Facebook has—style.

Most impressive of all is the amazing quantity of beautifully customized profile pages, like Jina Bolton, Faruk Ateş, Brett Terpstra, Deric Mahaney, The Filthy Fragger, JK, the list goes on…

It’s very cool to be able to visually control my profile to such a degree. This weekend I designed a pretty simple profile with a Rothko-inspired palette—check it out at http://virb.com/rsg and send me a friend request.