Joe Buchwald Gelles

About me

If you don't want to read this, you can just go home.

Not sure where to start, since you know me well from many years ago. But I'm now 62 years old, have a delightful family including my wife Mia and three children, Ruth (26, living in Atlanta), Noam (15, autistic), and Shani (13).

I'm on the downside of a career mostly in the print industry. I spent 16 years at Orange Blossom Press, and I guess you know something about that. (They still exist, but not as a co-op, and they dumped your beautiful logo a few years ago.) After that, I set up shop as a graphic designer. Problem is, I wasn't a very good one. Last year, when I lost the [unpaid] job of doing work for my wife's nonprofit (Milestones Autism Organization), I realized it was time to hang that one up. I still have one client, by the skin of my teeth.

The last few years, I've stumbled into a business selling Jewish books, mostly for one client in Jerusalem who does books for the North American market. I've designed a few of his books as well. And I've added a few other clients. I sell through my own website, and have lately become frustrated at what I don't know. I did one class in HTML about 9 years ago, at Dynamic Graphics in Peoria IL, and have more or less been stuck there. I use Dreamweaver with a lot of frustration.

My goals

I'm taking this class in hopes of getting more up to speed in web design. I find that a personal limitation has always been that I have a hard time imagining something different than it is right now. So I walk into a room, can't imagine how the furniture could be re-arranged. When I bought a house, it had to be one with kids running around, because I couldn't imagine a "grandma house" becoming a house with children. And I look at my own website, and I'm sick of it, but I have a hard time starting over to do it better.

So: smaller goals:

to face some design challenges, maybe get a bit more creative within the limitations of the web
to learn a few bells and whistles
to get a lot better at doing forms
to learn to do all this without Dreamweaver

Favorite things

Well, this sounds a bit like Sound of Music, or maybe a singles ad (movies, long walks on the beach). But forthwith a list:

trips to beautiful places that are also physically challenging: backpacking, canoeing

some specific places: Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario, Grand Teton Park in Wyoming

having friends over for meals and good discussion, usually on Shabbat
learning almost anything new

Favorite websites

Again, a bit harder for me -- I don't really love the web, even though I use it all day long. So most of my favorites are news sources, to wit: