WEBSITES, WRIST DAMAGE, AND WAFFLES!

I have to be honest right up front. This post will not contain waffles, I repeat will NOT contain waffles. Now that that's out of the way lets get things started with a few doodle uploads.

 

These are just a a few that are floating around in my sketchbook. So since I last posted I mentioned that I sustained a rather serious wrist injury at my day job. It hasn't really slowed me down much however most of my sketches past this point have been in non-photo blue which has made them almost impossible to get good scans of. That being said I'll just discuss my most recent projects and more importantly at least start lining these things with a fountain pen. The next cannibal flower is coming up so I've been thumbnailing for a new painting as a tribute to Nujabes. Nujabes was a Japanese hip-hop producer, DJ, trip-hop musician, and all and all an influence on myself and so many others.He was struck down in his prime in a car accident. The painting I'll be doing will be a painting less commemorating his life, as I didn't know the man personally, but more his influence on myself. However, without images I'm sure this is boring and will be all the more clear in my next post. Outside of sketching I've been working on the design of my new website. Lets look at some mockups. Keep in mind these are mockups so most of the images are just place holders until I can replace them with Hi-Res images. We'll start with the splash page.

So ostensibly the idea behind this design is to create a bold and elegant informational based website. In order to personalize it I've taken a few aesthetic liberties that kind of give the entire website the same feel as my work. Most important to me, in the beginning, was making sure I implemented wood grain into it somehow as visible wood grain is a big part of my work. The logo on the top of the window is a silhouette of the bone structure of a summer flounder, or a fluke, which I found to be fairly clever. The fonts and filigree are all things you may have notice in my work before. All fonts used appear on all of my business cards and other collateral to keep a sense of cohesion. The filigree coming from both ends of the fluke I originally made for this painting on the left side which can be seen best in this photo of it still in progress.

Functionally the splash page will allow the user to immediately navigate to whichever section they are interested in quickly just as any splash page should. As far as aesthetic functionality the splash page front image will cycle through numerous different paintings giving more variety to any multiple visitors. Let's take a look at what might happen if you were to click the "Contact" link.

So this is the general layout of the entire site. The "Contact" page, I decided, would best function as a bio page with my contact info on it, and of course, images of yours truly as opposed to making two separate pages. Just quickly I'll talk about the layout. I wanted to make sure this website was as easily navigated as possible. I generally hate running into horribly complex and aesthetically crowded websites. The point of a website is to display information not to force everyone to listen to your favorite band or force their browser to ask them to update flash every 30 seconds. I set all the tables as rounded rectangles for all the obvious sleek web 2.0 reasons but also once again to keep cohesion with all of my collateral. I've left justified the menu and made the viewing screen as large as possible. I created little menu place holders so there's never a moment to be confused as to what page you're viewing and of course I've repeated the wood grain and placed my logo at the top. On to the doodles page.

As you can see not much has changed once you click on another menu Item. The big changes here are what is displayed in the info window and the contextual menu created when "Doodle" has been clicked. For the "Doodle" section I didn't see it necessary to add thumbnails as I figured it might be too many elements to load all at once.The idea is to stay away from making a resource intensive monstrosity of a website. I want all the images to be stock photography of my sketchbook as opposed to scans. In the menu I added the choice of which sketchbook to look through and have dated them just to keep some sort organization. The design section will work in the same way creating a contextual menu that will give the choice for "Print/Web" and "Broadcast/Animation." The "Broadcast/Animation" section's info window will look almost identical to the "Doodle" page sans the forward and back buttons as it will only house my animation reel. The "Print/Web" section will contain thumbnails and will look identical to the "Paint" section which looks something like this.

So this is the "Paint" section. As I mentioned before the "Print/Web" will generally follow this template. For now I've added a scrollable thumbnail gallery to browse the images easier and I'm less worried about this portion being too resource intensive as the amount of paintings I have are significantly less that the amount of sketches. This page like the doodles page comes with back and forth arrows as well as descriptions or each individual piece.

Last but not least is the blog section which of course will just link back to this site in order to keep track of with my progress and upcoming events. This is the layout for my website thus far. On the back end,  I've made it so this site can be scripted easily with nothing more than HTML, CSS, and maybe if needed maybe a little Javascript and PHP.  The only thing holding me back at this point is retrieving what work did not sell from the coffee shop and photographing it so all of my assets are clean hi-res images ready hopefully for a December launch(that and my wrist crapping out on).

Well that's it for this post. Next Time = more sketches + final thumb(nujabes) + final thumbs(2 other paintings)

AAAAAANNNNDDDD Once again for those of you still interested in seeing some of this work in person stop by Cacao for coffee and take a look!Time is running out! Everything comes down November 5th!