While I love living in the Oklahoma City area for many reasons, there are just some things a city of this size cannot provide. Such is the feeling I get when I look at the breathtaking new library in Seattle.
This is probably one of the nicest Flash websites I have seen. In my opinion, the hallmark of any Flash site is a site that doesn’t screen “I’m Flash!”. The animation is tight and very atypical of most Flash in general. And it does a nice job a creating the illusion of motion elements in normal hypertext. Excellent!
What a great collections of truisms. A fun read for the experienced designer and an essential read for design students.
Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
Kurt Wenner’s work has been making the rounds for the past few weeks and each time I receive a link I am even more amazed.
Wenner is a street artist who “paints” in chalk in public areas. His subject matter leans to the classical but it is his mastery of geometry and perspective that is so fascinating. His paintings display an astonishing level of vision that I have never seen before. Images of classical figures and scenes appear to be fully three dimensional as if carved from and climbing out of the surfaces upon which they are rendered.
Even as an artist I am baffled about how one could possibly create these images in a perfect and perfectly unusual perspective. Truly amazing. I highly recommend spending time looking at his work online.
This has been a busy year in all the realms of my professional practice. At Advanced Academics I have been busily working on a brand new web site. This effort was a complete overhaul in content and strategy. Furthermore, the site has been cast completely in XHTML/CSS and Macromedia Flash. Its not 100% but its close. Some of the content is unfinished (in my eyes) and not every page validates 100% XHTML/CSS, but I think it’s a world better than the previous version. And more importantly, it launched last night. Visit the site now »
This has also been a busy year for me in my freelance work. Sometimes it feels like I’m too busy, but the work is rewarding and gives me a much-needed break from the single identity I design for in my day job. Now that my weblog is working properly, here are a few of the site launches that I failed to detail here:
Oklahoma Golfer is the online companion to Oklahoma Golfer Magazine, a new publication for golf enthusiasts. The site, like nearly everything I do these days, is all XHTML/CSS with data driven by PHP and MySQL. I can’t say enough about how powerful and easy it is to develop with PHP/MySQL. The syntax makes sense to my visual mind and the support of the community is fantastic. Any web developer with some familiarity with basic scripting (like javaScript) and access to PHP.NET should really consider PHP/MySQL. With OkGolfer, the site can accept and manage subscription requests and output them to a format compatible with the mailing house that ships the magazine; plus, it uses an open-source polling system to track reader poll answers —all via PHP. Take a look »
Pine Cone 66 Ranch is a very small company in Shawnee, Oklahoma that deals horse trailers. I built this site for a client that I had worked with in the past on Trailer Depot. The concept is the same, its a very basic site that lists current inventory along with lots of detail photos for online shoppers. While you can’t really buy a horse trailer online, you can get pretty close. It wouldn’t seem that horse trailers would be a logical online product, but Dave Mattern over at Horse Trailer World boasts over 6,700 visitors a day. The great thing about it is that Pine Cone 66 Ranch, via their web site, has the same access to customers that Trailer Depot and Horse Trailer World have. He can expose his inventory to shoppers all over the world. Furthermore, the site features a pretty robust content management system. The owner of Pine Cone 66 Ranch, who is a grandfather and lives out in the country, bought his first computer a month ago. Today he is updating his web site. The CMS allows him to type his listing and upload pictures from his new digital camera to the web site where they are dynamically re sized and displayed. That is what I love about what I do.