i suppose the operative question right about now would be “where the hell have i been?” and the answer is “right here, and busy as hell.” things have been happening.
today su, milan and i launched our thirteenth site—oddjack—for gawker media. those who’ve been watching on a regular basis will see that this is a drastic visual change which began with sploid.
a few weeks ago, during radar’s launch, we began ongoing work with the mountain laurel center in the poconos. this is clearly still in progress, but it’s oodles better than where they were before. keep watching; we’re changing things around.
boy howdy, am i tired.
last question, i think. do you want your contact info to stay as is, or do you wanna add phone and postal?
i ask because i get tons of work from having my info publicly available. surprisingly few freaks call.
you don’t write about assfucking as much as i do. it could be a problem.
oh right. so no phone and postal. check.
su and i have made a new site for ana marie. imagery by jesse. enjoy the sneak peek. this isn’t quite public yet.
“management is always necessary. strong management raises profits.” blah blah blah. traditionally-accepted human gathering patterns don’t always work. i wish this post at slashdot had proof to back it up, because it sounds exactly like events at a company i worked for in 2000.
once management fell apart, the company re-gathered itself under its own accord. the members created work that won best in show at SxSW, the ID interactive awards, and won sustainable work based on buzz. once management got back on its feet, they promptly drove the company into the ground, laid off the entire staff except for a skeleton crew. the remaining crew was forced into highly noncreative (but profitable) production work. morale dropped, staff left one by one, and the company was eventually liquidated and sold to the holding company that bought razorfish’s corpse. and now? dissolved.
strong management is not always a good idea. creative nurturing is. can i prove it? nope. but it’s something i’ve seen work over and over.
so apparently i pontificated for NYU. which is interesting. but the bizarre thing? i don’t remember it at all.
ugh. this is probably tiresome to everyone who’s linked to any of my material over the past half-year or so, but i, um, switched my content management system. again.
why? oh, hell, why not.
actually, i had switched my management system to expression engine, which i thought would be a great platform, considering it geenrates pages dynamically. at the time, it was important (i have over a thousand entries here; you sit and wait for everything to rebuild on a static site). but not so much any more.
while i liked the platform, it relies extensively on PHP, which i like. what i don’t like is that PHP is slower’n’molasses when you want to do as many dynamic things as i do. a page load time of eight seconds from my sites are inacceptible.
so pmachine, i love your work. but unfortunately, it’s not going to work for me. and while i’m not in love with movable type, i still have to respect that it’s my primary development platform, and i really know how to make it work.
you know what, i am just completely not into paris. dunno why, don’t even ask. but the carl’s ad? so cute. i mean, it’s just such a dumb boy-joke that it completely works. you really can’t go wrong with a gorgeous bombshell blonde washing a car. total hallmark of life in guyville.
but even cuter? take the ad and re-purpose it to make a different point. add a great big bear in a one-piece. bingo! winner. it could’ve been cuter, though. jason schupp woulda done the shit out of this one and had a field day doing it. i’ve seen him in a little pink dress, and really? omg. so cute.
anyway. take a lookyloo. this is a great parody ad. requires quicktime.
right now i’m working on a site for a fairly large performing arts center in the poconos. (here’s the temporary site). all of today was filled with the frustration of trying to shoehorn photography from about 30 different artists into the design in a way that made any visual sense. the source material was infuriatingly limited.
performing artists, to make sure you look good in public, follow my advice.
send multiple photographs. the basic things designers have to work with are landscape and portrait formats. a square one wouldn’t hurt either.
make sure you send high-resolution imagery. images that look great in your web browser are actually crap. they can’t be sized, they’re compressed and therefore damaged by the time the designer gets them. send TIFF files, at least 5 by 7 inches at 300DPI at the very least.
make sure your images are clean. no dust, no specks, no scratches.
more often than not your image will need to be converted to black and white. either send black and white copies, or make sure your color image looks good in monochrome. multplie images? fantastico.
and have your photographs available on your website. you can be the most talented person around and nobody would care if your info is accessible only to you.
hire a professional photographer, not your kid sister (unless your kid sister is a professional photographer).
