Nine Point Oh, or Sangria

Holy crap, it’s finally up. I am very proud to introduce Version 9.0, a design that has been about two months in the making. At least 17 designs were scrapped in the process, including a few that made it all the way from scribble to Photoshop mock-up to fully-functional website. If you’d like, you can call her Sangria — the link colors remind me of oranges and red wine.

I wanted the site to be outfitted in a look that stays out of the way of the content, but is extremely designed at the same time. That’s what I feel I have achieved with Sangria. I realize that these days a lot of people remain within the confines of their feed reader, but I hope that the new design encourages them to pay the site a visit every so often.

A couple months ago, while brainstorming in my notebook, I jotted down phrases like “emphasis on beautiful typography,” “minimalism and lots of white space,” “let the content speak for itself.” After weeks of revising and perfecting the design, I feel that I have finally reached those goals. Taking advice from “Design is in the Details” over at A List Apart, I obsessed over every facet of the site, analyzing it at various times and in various settings, removing anything deemed unnecessary or superfluous. I am very happy with the results and can’t wait to start filling the site with fresh content.

I plan on writing a more detailed recap of the design process in the coming days, so keep an eye out. I learned so much over the last two months, and would love to share that knowledge with the rest of you.

If you guys come across any bugs or glitches, I’d greatly appreciate it if you left a note in the comments. On many occasions, I didn’t make it to bed until the sky had begun to brighten and my brain had started to fry, so I know there’s a mistake or two somewhere.

That’s all for now.

Changes, big and bigger

After years of using MovableType to manage the site’s content, I have finally made the jump to WordPress! MovableType, while very customizable, was always getting in the way of my creativity and never very easy to work with when I needed to make changes to the look or structure of the site. WordPress was an instant winner, in my eyes, and I finally found the time (not to mention courage) to take on the task of moving the entire site. I now use it to manage every page on the site, and while there is still a lot of work to be done until all the bugs are worked out (mostly stuff regarding permalinks), I am extremely pleased with WordPress and its powerful simplicity. I think Zeldman put it best when he said that it simply “stays out of the way.”

The other big change, one that should have been made a long time ago, is that all photos are now uploaded to Flickr and served up on the site. For years now I have battled by my lonesome with image resizing, thumbnail creation, tagging, and all the other work that it takes simply to get a photo up on the site. I am ecstatic to have Flickr now taking care of all of this for me, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this will have me posting a great deal more photos than I ever have in the past.

I have decided to update every entry to reflect my using Flickr now, not only for consistency but also because in the past I created photos with a 550 pixel width and Flickr, instead, creates an image that is 500 pixels wide. This is obviously a time-consuming process, involving finding and uploading the originals of each photograph, then changing each photo’s respective entry on the site, however I plan on having it done in the next few days.

As I said, there are a lot of small details and bugs left to work out, so don’t be surprised if things seem off in certains corners of the site. I have hundreds of photographs from my recent trip to London and Paris and simply couldn’t wait to share them, so I wanted to get the site back up as soon as I could, even if it was a little buggy still. Feel free to report anything you notice in the comments of this entry. Thanks!

Here I am, Once again

First came version 1.0 - “The Trials & Tribulations of a Young Designer”. The stuff I wrote about usually had nothing to do with my trials, tribulations, or the fact that I was relatively young (around 16 years old). When I started posting photographs and realized that I was basically writing about anything that was design-related, I moved the site into version 2.0. The new tagline? “Everything Design”. Original, I know.

Eventually I grew tired of writing. So I stopped. And version 3.0 was born. Now a photoblog, the site’s tagline read, “Living Life One Photo at a Time”. Ouch. Thankfully a few months later I realized that the tagline was cheesy as hell, so I dropped it, redesigned, and had version 4.0 - a pink and green design that stuck for quite a while. Then purple became the new pink, so I updated to 4.1. Version 5.0 came about mostly as a need for change. Since then, my posting habits have wavered, much to everyone else’s attention.

So now comes version 6.0 - a bit more grown up, an added touch of sarcasm, and, most of all, more focused than ever. The new design reflects a realignment of my goals and interests, away from “everything design” and towards professional photography, film, and cinematography. Face it: I am a film major that wants to direct music videos, and the old site format simply didn’t communicate or allow for that.

Anyways, I hope you guys dig the new look. There’s still a bunch of refinements to be made, so if you come across a dead link or a poorly-styled page, turn around and try back later.