Warmest Greetings,

Diane Vigil's Designer Jones Blog - There is Life Beyond The Computer Monitor  

:: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 ::

We hated to see Diane Vigil leave Cre8asiteForums, for the second time. Once was hard enough. An administrative level moderator, whose history in forums dates back to original JimWorld days, this gutsy, artistic, tell-it-like-it-is woman was the one person who could light a fire under my butt whenever I needed it.

Why does she leave, come back and leave again? Well, because, life is for the living. When you've been online as long as she has, run your own web design business (which she does with her husband) and devote all your "extra" time to helping people online, your whole world is limited to the size of a computer monitor screen and the tap tap sounds of your keyword.

The call of the wild un-web world won her over, again, and this time, we all can benefit as she relates to us about life from her Los Angeles view. On the phone she's told me stories of her love for design and how it feels to drive down Hollywood or Sunset Blvd and see the latest fashions in store windows. If it were me, I'd be looking at the expensive cars and trying to spot the movie stars, but for Diane, what's important is wherever creativity and beauty are hiding in the nooks and crannies of the place.

Her new blog, Designer Jones is a reading experience, not an RSS feed to the next headline to something you've already read about 50 times. Diane's online magazine removes the ads and perfume strips sewn into fashion magazines and replaces it with her own fresh writing style and wit. She finds class. She sees beauty. She shares art.

She gets it and then presents it to us and makes us believe that if we stopped racing around, we would get it too.

If you love food, don't miss her food section. On her Filipino mother's chicken recipe, she writes:

"I've served adobo to artists and society kids, computer gurus, visiting Internet marketers and health food folk — anyone who happened to be there when the mood struck. It's always been a hit because it's one of those can't-get-enough-of dishes."

You won't read anything like that in Oprah.

Designer Jones isn't a females only love pink kind of presentation. She hits on the technical stuff, finds a place for home stuff, tosses in some local thingys and in the "Current Events" section, makes the mundane or so-what? topic seem more like a wholesome conversation. You know the type you've been missing right? The kind with a close friend, splash of red wine (or three), gentle breeze in your hair, cute hotty walking by just as you pretend to scratch a fake itch on your lovely exposed bare knee type of moment.

I could care less about corporate blogs and how blogs add juice to marketing efforts. It's refreshing to see somone write a blog about the outside world (shower heads, Japanese gardens, Marilyn Monroe's auction...) that inspires me to look for the beauty and art and quirky weird nuances in my own little world.

In an Internet environment, Diane Vigil has discovered how to cleverly present the Outernet. Bravo.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 6/08/2005 02:04:00 PM

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