I’ve been acquiring more and more DSLR photography equipment over the past year or so, and apparently getting some decent shots these days. This provides me, a new dad, the ability to take thousands and thousands of photos of my super-awesome baby girl!

I often bring my camera to work, in the event there may be something cool to photograph, thus guaranteeing that I won’t have something cool to photograph. For example, I did not have my camera when rabbit-on-his-head-guy came to town to play his guitar.

Today was different. The brilliant design people at IMVU needed some shots of our pre-paid cards, and I had my camera. There were a bunch of outtakes, and so I saved them and played with one in Photoshop. With some more polish, I think this would make a cool promotional poster to hang in a retail store.

This means that I took pictures while being paid for my time. Technically this makes me a pro, right?

(Aaaaand… don’t forget, you can purchase IMVU Prepaid Cards at your nearest Best Buy, Target, Seven-Eleven, Speedway, and Blockbuster!)

I even titled the design. I call it “Web 2.0 Overloaded.”

For those who design web stuff, this should be obvious. For those who don’t, “Web 2.0″ refers the current catchy buzzword in web business and web development. Regarding business, nothing’s really different, except that nobody’s raising billions of dollars to sell gigantic bags of dog food online. Regarding development, the term is an amalgamation of web technologies that have matured over the last ten to twelve years and a design aesthetic that attempts to communicate simplicity through minimalism. This means large text (which is easier on the eyes of those who had to work sixteen hour days on-end during the boom times), squares with rounded corners (more friendly, I suppose), and the use of colors with gradient effects (partly because of restrained use of color palettes in the past).

The term “overloaded” describes the over-use of the “Web 2.0″ term for better or worse. I took a few of the typical design aesthetics and played with them: Rounded corner shapes, visual embellishments using gradients, and a hyperbole of objects sitting on a polished surface, a nod to Apple Computer’s successful design meme. For example, have a look at their FrontRow software — and the observe its propagation across the web design world.

I also had some fun with the Yahoo Animation Utility, which makes coding up cool UI effects tremendously easy.