Web Design Inspiration
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Web Design Inspiration - a photoset on FlickrI want to save this for myself, if nothing else.
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Thygiving away from home
Kim's sister's in-laws have a vacation house in the Eagle Ridge Golf Resort, about 20 minutes east of Galena, IL. Galena is in the Northwest corner of Illinois, about 15 minutes east of Dubuque, Iowa. Galena's claim to fame is that it was the home of Ulysses S.Grant. The first time we drove to Galena, when kim was pregnant with Elise, we went to see Grant's house. Kim has always been very interested in Civil war history, so she really enjoyed it, though my friend Ryan was less than enthused. The whole town has Grant plastered all over it; it's obviously full of history -- and tourist shops on Main street.We go to Galena once or twice a year - usually either Thanksgiving or Christmas and sometime during the summer. I generally enjoy the trips. I like hanging out with Kim’s family and it's nice to get out of the horse. My sister-in-law just recently got back from New Orleans. She and her husband went to see The Saints get beat by the Bengal, She had also gone down to see the first Saints game back in the dome. she had her "Rebuild" t-shirt one day, and I wore my nola fluer de lis shirt one evening and we wound up having a long discussion about New Orleans and how much we'd love to go back - and all of the things that keep us from doing so, (fear of another storm is pretty low on the list.) It's odd to me to talk to people other than kim about the passion we feel for Nola and how we just feel we belong there.
On Friday, the day after Thxgiving, we took the kids & kim's dad to Dubuque to the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium. Even with it being so close I had never gone to Dubuque before. I mean, why would you? But honestly, this museum was really nice. It wasn't a HUGE place, which was good in the sense that the kids didn't get too worn out by the end. There were lots of aquariums full of catfish big and small, turtles, sturgeon, and gar. We had such a love/ hate thing going on with catfish and gar as kids, fishing in Lake Pontchartrain and the marshes south of Chalmette, La. Alligator gar are just freaky and snaggle-toothed. And catfish, when we caught them, we just threw them back in hopes of catching a real fish like a speckled trout or a redfish.
Back to the museum. There were a lot of cool interactive displays but I think the highlights were the exhibits outside. We were fortunate to have really mild weather so that we could wander around. They had a small wetlands, and a few boats you could wander through including an old steamboat that Elise and Graham were really excited to see.
On Saturday, before leaving to drive back to Milwaukee, we decided to stop at a park that Kim and I had visited once before, the Mississippi Palisades State Park. (Now would probably be a good time to learn what Palisades are.) The park is in Illinois along the river with some nice overlooks and this cool little dock area where you can walk right up to the water's edge. For a long time I had a fascination with seeing the Mississippi this far north. It looks very different, but it's odd how comforting and at-home it feels to be near it, even 1000 miles away from home.
It felt really odd to get so homesick for New Orleans in Dubuque, Iowa of all places. The Mississippi River seems to carry a certain amount of culture in it that sticks with you. The fact that it was 60 degrees in November may have had something to do with it too.
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HDR Images
Friday, November 10, 2006
Fourth on Lake AustinMy friend adny has been talkin for a while about HDR photography. I can't tell you what HDR stands for, but it's basically a process involving multiple exposures, over-saturating your colors, and making everything look very dramatic. But it works, it DOES look dramatic. In pictures with really crisp focus, which most of them seem to have, it appears as if everything is in focus, almost to the extent that it flattens the image by bringing everything into the foreground. As much as I feel like the images look artificial, I also think some of them are extremely cool.
Flickr has over 75,000 images tagged with "HDR".
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Mr. Internet ain't dead yet
Saturday, November 04, 2006
I was going through some old files on my computer earler and found a bunch of drawings i had done for a website i was working on years ago called Mr. Internet's World.
The Mr. Internet idea started when the aforementioned Dave got his first internet connection. I sent him this goofy email about how something he had done broke the internet and not to do it again, signed Mr. Internet, Ambassador to the Web. To give you an idea of how long ago this was, it was before spam was a rampant problem. The email I sent to him spawned the idea to create a website where you could send similar emails to your unsuspecting friends. The website itself expanded into this helpful site where information about how the internet worked from a basic user point of view. Keeping content of that sort up-to-date would have been a nightmare, but the thing that really killed the idea was the spam explosion around 2000. I knew it was going to be a problem sending the emails with no disclaimers, which would have ruined the joke. So I dropped it.The Mr. Internet character has floated around since, surfacing in inside jokes around the office... But now "the office" is "at my old job" and so he's been somewhat forgotten. He's such a well-drawn character, though. How could i just let him fade to nothing?
So there he sits at the top of my sidebar, blowing bubbles with his pipe. He is genuinely happy to see you.
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Ace Denison!
Thursday, November 02, 2006
I've been talking to my friend Dave, an actor in Dallas, about creating a video blog. I mentioned it to him a few weeks ago and he jumped right on board with the idea. He was going out to get himself a mac book today and probably a video camera next week. He got his domain and hosting set up this past weekend, so it's my turn to get something done -- a website design for him.
So yeah, I've been working on these sketches from some headshots he sent me. This sketch... I started it in OneNote, exported it as a PDF, opened it in illustrator, saved it as an EPS and then finally opened it in Photoshop. It lost a bit of definition during the PDF-ing... but whatever. The whole thing is a bit over the top (and not a little gay looking), but Dave is over the top. I kinda like the contrast between the stylized type and the rough drawing. In two days I'm gonna think it's retarded.
So yeah, Ace is one of his character pseudonyms. His more developed alter-ego is Chauncey (5000), but he didn't want to use Chauncey in the URL cause people can't spell. The site's not officially up yet, in part because I haven't done the design, but also because he hasn't, you know, recorded any videos yet. I'm pretty hyped about the project. It's not about making money, although I think we will probably at least work Google Adsense into it. I just had this feeling about a month or so ago that video blogging was set to take off soon. The acquisition of YouTube a couple weeks ago really gave web video a big boost in the collective consciousness, so I think the time is even more ripe now. I think the space is there for the right people to get their faces noticed... which is what this is all about. I think it'll be a good vehicle for Dave to get his face seen.
I think trying to market it right away would be a bad call. I think it'd be smart to let a bit of material pile up before trying to draw a lot of attention to the site. I'm going back and forth on whether or not to use YouTube as the video delivery method. On the one hand, it would make it really easy for him to upload videos and create the posts on his own without a lot of learning involved. Most of it is automated. But the tradeoff is in quality. I could create a flash video player for him to display the videos at a much better resolution and fit them into the design better, but it would mean finagling flash into blog posts in wordpress. I'm not sure how hard that would be and I don't want to have to touch every post that he wants to put online.The site is going to be hosted through another friend's company in Vegas. He uses wordpress and convinced me to try it out for Dave's site. I'm kinda glad; I was considering ditching blogger in favor of a system that supports categories (although the new blogger in beta has it...). So using wordpress for him is going to be something of a test run for me as well. Fortunately, wordpress' API seems to be pretty widely used, which makes integrating things like YouTube's "Post This" feature easy to integrate with his site. Blogger being a Google product, though, makes it very appealing in that it's API is already incorporated into many of Google's other tools. We'll see how wordpress holds up.
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