Heather as Falinian - Photoshoot Results

A bit of catchup from early December.

My friend Heather Cossette of Flam Chen was gracious enough to sit still for while and paint herself white for a special photoshoot.





This photoshoot was for gathering material for an online launch of my science fiction novel, Children of Falin. The novel has been a long, ongoing project for me, and the core manuscript was finished around two years ago. I've been meaning to publish it for a long time now, probably through self-publishing.

Well… since self-publishing takes money, and money is something I am not in great supply with, I've decided to do an even more alternative route: online publishing. Since I'm a web designer, a website is not something I need be in short supply of.

The plan is to release the novel online, with the greater 2/3 of it completely free and open to be downloaded and read. The last 1/3 would be a small fee for download—something like five bucks. And no restrictions on sharing it.

Of course the logistics of all this is something to be worked out—but I plan to be making print material for marketing. My dream is to even have a viral marketing campaign here in Tucson and the various events that travel beyond Tucson. But first, I needed some raw material to work with.

The novel focuses around a race of humans in the far future who are entirely female (sort of) and live in a very strict, theocratic
society. It's actually a big critique of institutionalized religion in metaphor—but visually, I'd like to think the novel is kind of striking, ala Avatar. The "Falinian race" as they're called, are noted for their pure-white skin and for tattooing their "sins" as visible symbols on their body.

I might be a little jealous of James Cameron's funding. But not to worry! I have my own tools at the ready: my camera, and Photoshop. Here are the results of the shoot with Heather:



There will be lots of versions of these, but this is the first step to the artwork which will ultimately exist on childrenoffalin.com (there is an ancient website I built there already). But I thought I'd share this first step, as I was rather pleased with it.

I'll keep updating with the progress of photoshoots like these, and with the project of publishing my novel in general.

Proteus Creative - Carbon Preview

I've been hard at work this weekend on the new Proteus site (finally). I haven't broken into code yet—I'm still perfecting the layout and the various pages in Photoshop. But so far, I think it's shaping up nicely. Here's a very small sneak peak of what's to come:



One of my big inspirations for Proteus's design intentions have been the web design techniques of Dragon Interactive and the sheer awesome quality of 2advanced Studios. If you're a javascript and jQuery freak, check out Dragon Interactive. If flash is more your style, you definitely need to get familiar with 2advanced.

2advanced in particular does periodical redesigns of the site—like most design studios, but theirs are typically exploration of some new theme or (daresay) "style". I've always done this for myself in smaller ways—technically, secondseraph.com is in version 11.0. But I'll keeping this trend with Proteus, as there are lots of potential designs and methods I want to explore. I'll save them for annual redesigns like what 2a does.

But for this one, of course, is Proteus v.1. I considered a couple of different names, all blackish minerals: Graphite, Onyx, Obsidian. I would do Onyx, besides sounding cool, but the gradients aren't shiny enough for that (maybe next time). For now though, due to the anodized or ashy quality of everything, I'll probably settle on Carbon.

Another site that influenced me: Xanthic Eye. I've known about this guy for a long time, and his designs, even though they are best suited for vanity sites, are definitely killer. I may try to make a pseudo-futuristic Proteus antimatter reactor for the next version.

But for now, I'll just stick with the basic elemental building blocks of the universe. Antimatter reactors can come later.

Website in 5 days (or, my brain hurts)

Whew—what a weekend.

After working with Concrete5 for a few days I realized that the design I wanted to produce for Proteus Creative was much more ambitious than my skillset within the new CMS could provide—at least, within the timeframe I wanted the site to be in existence (i.e. yesterday). So I did something I rarely do—I set up a compromise, or a preview site.

Head over and take a look: www.proteuscreative.com

Internet Explorer users beware! I've only tested it in the Macintosh browsers so far. Though comments and critiques are welcome if you spot something that doesn't seem to work right.

It's designed to be a halfway point between a splash page and the whole site that I have planned. Basically, it's enough to let clients know I exist and show them the best of what I do. It should be enough to get a few freelance gigs here and there.

Though the design is simple, it is running on a full Concrete5 system, with a few modified javascript/php blocks I've implemented. Some of them took a little twisting, but it all seems to work the way I want it to (again, at least in Mac Safari and Firefox).

From design concept to finished upload, the whole thing took about five days—most of it being done on the weekend. Today and yesterday were a blur, as I head my head fully… well, stuck in concrete.

But now it's there, and I've already learned a lot. Now at least this can bide me some time to actually sharpen my skills and work towards implementing the big fish.

Enjoy!

Sharpen the Skills (or get new ones)

I've been very focused on some personal projects the past few weeks, which is why it's been a bit quieter here than usual. There's only so much time during a day, and only so much of that time can be used for personal things—which is normal.

But, with the refocusing of my design identity under Proteus Creative, I've started to bring my skills in web design and content management systems more up-to-date. I've been working with concrete5, a CMS I recently ran across. I was impressed very early on with its ease of use, its ability to add content per "block" live and on each page, and its mentality of "it should just work". Having with some CMSs, some of which can be very cumbersome, concrete5 strikes me as lightweight, flexibla, and easy to program. I've decided to use it for both my new websites, the future Proteus Creative site, and a yet-unnamed art website for my personal works and writing that is currently in process. I'm using the art website as a testing ground to learn c5, and then apply those newfound skills to a more considerable project, Proteus Creative.

However, learning a new CMS is no small task. And the major disadvantage I have is that I do not know JavaScript nor PHP. I can use them and implement them as scripts in my HTML files, but when it comes to manipulating them I'm at a loss. The thing about c5 is that it is extremely new in the CMS neighborhood, which has no shortage of competitors. Though it was a private system used by its makers to provide clients with an easy-to-use management system for years (it's in its fifth version, technically), c5 suffers greatly from a lack of templates and a lack of functionality that systems like Joomla and Drupal simply have a crushing weight of, due to their years of open-source development. Thus, for me, a working web designer who has some gaps in his skill set, I cannot depend on a large pool of components, extensions, etc. to do my bidding. In the end, I will be learning how to implement, probably even create, my own c5 "blocks" (concrete's version of adding functionality to a website like video players, forums, etc.). This means that I will be learning Javascript and PHP.

Of course, this is not a bad thing. If c5 not only avails me with a client-friendly CMS, but also forces me to learn the things I should've known all along, all the better. But it's one of those things that would be worthy of multiple days to learn in-depth—a completely new language like JS or PHP. It makes sense, however, as the whole idea of Proteus is not limited to XHTML/CSS—the idea is to create a methodology that uses all languages and capabilities—whatever's necessary, really—to make an attractive and interactive user interface for web-based applications and sites. My opinion now is that websites are no longer static pages—they are, in the typical sense of the word, applications—things you apply to your life as tools to further your function as a human being. Especially things like Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and YouTube—these are all applications in the sense that they are not static sources of information, but are particular to "you" and your needs/preferences. The only difference between them and Photoshop is that they use the nature of the internet to their advantage, using the information present in the "cloud" to create a dynamism an application that is just on your computer cannot present.

I would not be surprised in XHTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript become the languages of a sort of "cloud computing" operating system. These things are already being used both by servers and computers—the connection between things like websites and dashboard widgets that live on your computer, and may or may not be connected to a website, are just a hint. They're probably not the UNIX of the cloud computing operating system, but these are the languages that are making the current web UI's what they are, and it would be unwise to think that I could survive in the long run without understanding them and their capability.

So it's exciting. But there's a lot of learning to do. I try to pick at it a little bit each day, working towards the goal of implementing the things I want to see into my new personal/work websites, which will then be the stepping stone into using them in a professional production environment. And even though it may be frustrating, especially givent that when I go through these "redesign phases," I can have the expectation for myself that the site(s) will be done in the course of a day or two. That's certainly not the case here—try a month or two. But despite the frustration, I know that I'm learning a ton at each step. It's the drinking from the firehouse method, but I tend to never dip into things feet-first anyway.

Tree Outliner for Organization Geeks

This is a short post for all you organization freaks out there. I just recently (today) stumbled on a great little Mac app for making tree-based outlines. It is called, out of all things, Tree.



It's tiny, straightforward, and it's probably my new favorite application. Funny thing is, it's hard to make an already simple process already more expedient than it is. Since the first website I designed for a client (which would date back to high school), I would create site outlines in TextEdit. These site outlines would become the map of webpages for the website, as well as describe the navigation for the site (each heading or subheading would be a button on the homepage linking to a sub-page, with its own list of links). Maybe it wasn't pretty, but it worked, and I didn't need fancy editors because the outlines were supposed to be short, sweet, and easy to send to the client through email.

Well… I'll be using this spiffy little program from now on. It allows you to add notes, of course, to each subheading. They can be collapsed or expanded from a tree-like layout to a bullet-point layout, and you can easily drag and drop other sections from each other. The only thing I'd ask would be to be able to post sticky-like post-its wherever I want on the outline, as if it was a digital whiteboard. But that's about it. It exports things to text files and OmniOutliner too, which is a necessary feature.

In fact, just today I had finished the new site outline for the upcoming Arcosanti website (redesigned of course) using this little program. Even Tomiaki seemed to like the program—and when something passes enthusiastically under his eye, you know it has to be doing something right.

So if you're like me and constantly need a way to make simple, text-based outlines, you should really check it out by visiting this link.

Greek Gods and Design Studios

So I've a special treat for those who follow my personal work. As a graphic designer, I've gone under the domain name of secondseraph.com for a few years now. It used to be a personal site, but later transformed into a professional portfolio site as I started shopping myself around as a graphic and web designer.

As my skills and portfolio has improved, however, I've grown steadily uncomfortable with the name "SecondSeraph". It was originally a biblical reference to Isaiah's vision of the seraphim, and I had made up the name as an AOL screen name when I was thirteen. As I grew, the name grew with me, and basically become my second identity.

Well, not very designer-ish, is it? These have been my thoughts lately. As I've grow as a graphic designer, I've thought about rebranding myself more as a one-man design studio, rather than a simple freelancer (mostly because I can provide clients with a full package of print, multimedia, and web). Though I'm not quite at that stage, I am close to it. This past weekend, I felt it was necessary to make the switch.

So, in the coming month, I will be getting a completely new domain name to host my professional work. I will also be separating the art website from secondseraph to its own domain, and either get rid of secondseraph altogether or reappropriate secondseraph back to what it originally was—a personal site with a flavor of experimental webdesign, like so many other cool and crazy interactive web projects out there.

I'm pretty excited about the new professional site though. I spent almost a whole day this past weekend working on it. It's not finished yet, but I can promise you it will be a next step upward, as my redesigns tend to be. Here's a sneak peak of what you can expect:



I've always been a fan of naming things after Greek gods, and recently I took a liking to Proteus—one of the early, primordial gods of the sea. He is noteworthy for being a shapeshifter that could tell the future—if anyone could capture Proteus, the "Old Man of the Sea", he would tell them the future—after he had tried turning into anything from from a serpent, to a lion, to a tree, to water itself. It's where we get the word "protean," connoting flexibility and adaptability.

Probably a good name for a design studio, mm?

Anyway, that's the progress on so far. Look forward to more updates regarding "Proteus Creative" and where it will be heading. I'll be using a new CMS I recently discovered to create the engine the site runs on, instead of head-on XHTML/CSS programming (as much as I am a fan of it, sites are more and more run on engines now rather than individually coded webpages).

Feel free to tell me if I'm out to lunch on the logo. ;) Typically it would be aligned to the right side, but this is a screenshot of the new site, so the P symbol is centered at the top. Hence why the text is justified to the left.