site updates

What I'm Up To

2008-11-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

Find out what I'm up to by following me on twitter. Below are some of my latest status updates:

An Update

2008-03-04T00:29:00.000-08:00

I'm settled in my new home on the coast of Northern California (more on that here) and already back at work with several projects going. Among them:

I started a new series on ecopreneurist, a Green Options Media blog. All my posts on Green Options' sites will be archived here, and you can view the first post of my "Green Dreams" series on ecopreneurist. Check back often for updates!
I'm back at work at the PETA Foundation as a part-time web designer.
I continue to blog on unplug magazine and update Our Volksvegan Adventure from time to time as well.
I am keeping busy with freelance projects and I'm already working with local organizations in my new home.
Sen and I are participating in a local community garden and growing our own organic veggies!

Hope you enjoyed the wrap-up! The adventure continues...

Our Volksvegan Adventure

2007-07-29T17:32:00.001-07:00

There won't be much changing around here this summer since we're on the road in the "volksvegan" van that runs on veggie oil. You can follow our adventure on "Our Volksvegan Adventure" blog or see photos from our trip in this flickr photo collection. We're hoping to tour the Northwest in search of a new place to live, but until we find a place to settle, we'll be calling the volksvegan and the road our home. Head to Volksvegan.org for details!

Recently Finished Projects

2007-05-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

It has been a crazy spring! I have recently completed several long-term projects that I am certainly excited to be done with. One is a web site for a landscaping company (a friend of my aunt's): T & D Landscaping. I am quite pleased with how the site came out, and thankfully so is the client. Working with lots of green and natural imagery was really fun, and my client was very easy to work with. I love clients like that. :)

Another site I recently finished for my job at PETA is KentuckyFriedCruelty.com. The site is a parody of KFC's site, aimed at telling the truth about what goes into KFC chicken (hint: it's cruelty). I was the primary designer on this project but had plenty of help from my lovely co-workers. It was my first big site redesign since starting at PETA, so I'm very excited about it being done. And it even launched right around my birthday!

The first Moscow CommUNITY Walk was held April 28, and I played a role in making it a success. I began working with a group of local citizens to plan the event last fall, and have produced all the graphics and marketing materials for the event, including logos, letterhead, flyers, posters, t-shirts, news articles, banners, and even a giant mural that was recreated by children at the event. It was a huge success and a lot of fun. The goal of the event was to bring about unity within community and set aside differences to walk together and get to know our neighbors and fellow Moscowvites. The image shows the logo I designed on a vinyl banner that was carried by Moscow's mayor during the walk. She even used it to block traffic! More photos of the event are on flickr.

And last but certainly not least, I designed the t-shirts and promotional materials for Moscow's annual Hempfest again this year. I worked on this project last year as well, and had so much fun that I couldn't pass up the chance to do it again. When else would I have a chance to design with giant hemp leaves? The planning committee for Hempfest was a lot of fun, and so was the event, which was held April 21. This year's theme was "Hemp can Save the World" and once again, the t-shirts all but sold out. I encourage anyone not familiar with the hemp movement to check out Seattle Hempfest, Hemp.org, and the Jack Herer, who wrote what I call the Hemp Bible, The Emperor Wears No Clothes.

Hopefully if I have time between finishing up work and planning our ultimate Volksvegan Adventure, I can update my portfolio with these recently finished projects. :)

SPAIN PICTURES!

2007-04-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful time in Spain and have been busy catching up on work and organizing my insane amount of photos. I'm still not done naming and labeling them all... See some of the photos below, or visit my photo set on flickr.

I wrote about Spain on my life blog and discussed Gaudi's amazing Barcelona architecture on Green Options.

meganpru's Semana Santa in Spain - 2007 photoset

I will be out of the country...

2007-03-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

I just love saying that, but really, I will be out of the country! I am going to Spain with mi familia March 30 to April 10. I'll be heading down to Boise Thursday morning and then flying into Barcelona with my parents. I will be returning to Moscow the morning of the 10th. Be sure to watch my photo blog and flickr page for photos of the trip! I will try to post some while I'm there if I get a chance. :)

We are going to Spain to visit my sister, who is studying in Granada this semester. We'll be there for Holy Week, which is apparently a very big deal in Spain. I'll get to see Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, and Cordoba. The only thing I am worried about is that the Spaniards love two things I abhor - ham and bullfighting. I hope I can find good vegan grub there so I don't have to live on bread, salad, and wine. Well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad... :)

If I don't respond to e-mails or calls the next couple weeks, now you know why... :D

I'm all over the internet!

2006-11-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

The internet is a great networking tool, whether I'm catching up with old friends on MySpace, organizing my photos on Flickr, chatting with other designers on the HOW Forum, or blogging away. I figured I should collect all of my various profile pages so that people can find me all over the internet. So here goes, a list of my various profiles, blogs, and daily distractions on the web:

My profiles on Networking Sites

My MySpace Profile: you better add me as a friend (unless you don't know me that is, then I might get creeped out).
My Flickr Photos: peruse my amateur photography.
My MyBlogLog Profile: I just discovered this site for keeping track of blogs & the people who read them, and since I have so many blogs...
My HOW Forum Profile: this networking forum for creative & design professionals is how I survive working at home.
My HipForums Profile: yes, I'm a hippie, and HipForums are a web-savvy hippie playground.
My Facebook Profile: it's kinda like MySpace, only way better looking.

My Sites & Blogs

unplug: the site of my activist magazine, which someday I hope to continue producing. In the meantime, I do update the blog with my political, progressive, environmental, and activist musings.
BarterFaire.org: this is a site I design & maintain for the barter faire community in the Northwest. I love attending barter faires so much that I made a site about it. This site has a blog, too, of course.
Our Volksvegan Adventure: the story of our veggie-oil-fueled VW bus. I discuss how we converted our VW to run on bio-diesel and waste veggie oil, our progress in restoring our beloved bus, and hopefully I'll cronicle our many future travels in the bus.
MeganPru.com: obviously you know about this site, since you're here. This is my personal and professional web page, which also features several blogs (I told you I was a blog addict!). Do check out my Life Blog, which serves as a journal of my adventures, and my Photo Blog for a sampling of my favorite photos.
I recently joined a blog on green living called Green Options. I write a weekly column on Fridays on green art, design, and culture. You can see my recent blog entries here.

Wow, that's a lot. Bring on the internet stalkers (I'm kidding, please don't stalk me in a creepy way)!

Yet Another Blog...

2006-08-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm addicted to these things. This time I thought I would try out WordPress, a different blogging platform.

The blog is called Our Volksvegan Adventure and is about our VW bus and the process of converting it to run on bio-diesel & waste vegetable oil. I'll be discussing bio-fuels and detailing the conversion process, showing our progress on restoring & converting our bus, and sharing stories from our (hopefully) many veggie-oil-fueled travels once it's up & running. It'll be a big project, but we'll soon be one step closer to living more sustainably and ending our petroleum dependency. Woohoo!

Please check it out and leave me a comment! I will be sharing what I learn about alternative fuels as I go, so it might even be educational. ;)

Vacation Pictures!

2006-07-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from an awesome road trip in our new VW bus. For details on the trip, see my life blog and for some select vacation pictures, see my photo blog. If you really have some time to kill, there are more of my photos on flickr. Of course there are many more where those came from, I took about 900 pictures over the 2 weeks we were on vacation! Yes, I am a camera-aholic. I will admit it. But as I always say, when I'm an old lady who can't remember jack and has nothing to do, I'll be awfully glad I was so camera-happy in my exciting youth... :)

Pigs Fly (aka I updated my portfolio)

2006-05-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

I finally updated my portfolio. I added my biggest and best projects from the past year or so. Do check it out! I replaced a couple in the Graphic Design section with some newer projects (both pro-bono and political, actually, yay!) and added a few new ones to the Web Design section.

I also updated nearly every page, so now I'm feeling a bit more up to date. Now I just need to update my PDF resume and portfolio... but that's a big task for a different day. I work enough! :)

Unplug Blog

2006-05-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to do a better job keeping the unplug blog updated. So you oughtta check it out for some political/environmental/activist info and thoughts. Feel free to comment or see the connect section of the site for a discussion forum. Hope to see some participation and idea exchange there soon. :)

Comments are Good!

2006-03-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

Well not much has changed on my site recently, but I just wanted to remind any visitors to please leave me some comments on my blog (on the life page), so I can see if anyone actually reads this stuff. :) And if you are reading this right now, you are awesome. Thanks for visiting my site!

Work Page update

2005-11-30T16:15:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to implement a few comments I got on the site from the How Forum, one of which was that it took too long to get to my work. So I've decided to remove my work blog (did anyone even read it anyway?) and put my portfolio page right up front in the work section. A minor change, but hopefully it will make my work more accessible. Now, if I could just get my porfolio up to date...

Tweaks

2005-10-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

Hopefully the site is starting to look better to you, as I have been tweaking the layout so everything lines up better in all those pesky browser versions. I'm still doing some testing, once I get the motivation to actually attempt to use an evil Windows machine.

And perhaps more obvious, I have added pretty new pictures for the banners (I randomly selected one for each page, and will probably add more at whim). Much better, eh? :)

unplug site up

2005-07-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

I have been working on the unplug site for the past few days, so now there's actually something up there! The layout's pretty much worked out and now all I have to do is add the rest of the content. Eventually I'd like to set up a discussion forum and some other features, but for now I'm focusing on getting the magazine content and introductory stuff up. Feel free to check it out, and watch for more soon!

Global Warming

2005-06-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

I just joined the virtual march on Washington to stop global warming. Maybe a virtual march won't do much, but anything that raises awareness of the issue is good! You can join to, just click here and sign away. It's about time that global warming was addressed as a serious issue, and not ignored by the administration. Instead, they like to censor scientific reports and doctor them up to fit their agendas. (See this article at CNN if you don't believe me.) I don't know about you, but rising temperatures and increasingly weird weather have been pretty obvious indicators to me that something is just not right with our climate.

On a lighter note, I am working on my portfolio pages. I have about half of the images done, so my online portfolio should be up and running by the end of the week. Yay!

Portfolio

2005-06-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

I promise I will have portfolio pages up soon. I'm trying to gather better pictures of my work and design the layout for the portfolio pages, which has been quite a hassle since I went to Italy and now I am in the process of moving. Until then, download my e-portfolio to see my work. Sorry for the delays, but it must be perfect!

Italy pictures can be found on my photoblog. I took over 1,000 pictures, but of course I didn't publish all of them here. What an awesome trip!

Backwards Bush

2005-05-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

Climate Signals is a great editorial at the New York Times site. It's really ironic that Bush denies that global warming exists, especially since he's so deeply invested in fossil fuels and the energy companies that are causing the worst pollution. This article points out that now even some people in the energy industry are starting to criticize Bush's stance and are asking for mandatory limits on pollution.

Political Compass

2005-05-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

Political Compass: This is an interesting way to find out where you stand politically. I'm in the Left & Libertarian quadrant. Interesting how Bush and Hitler are in the same quadrant, huh.... :)

New Site in Progress

2005-03-27T21:57:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my face-lifted site. I am still working on it, so please be patient. The new site is organized into two areas: work (my professional site: resume, contact info, portfolio, etc) and life (my personal site: photos, bio, blog, links, etc.). Have a look around and check back soon for updates. :)

ciao!
megan