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.

Happy Cog Redesigns MICA (or, why I'm not a Republican)

It's been awhile since I last checked Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog—Zeldman is the grandfather of things such as web standards, accessibility and usability evangelism, and the movement to ban tables and flash-based web design in favor of XHTML and CSS—but I got quite the surprise when I happened by his site yesterday. It appears that Happy Cog, his web design firm, just finished a complete re-design of the website for Maryland Institute College of Art—my alma mater back up in Baltimore. What a strange twist of connections! Apparently they even visited the campus to get a personal feeling as to what MICA is—which is kind of a shame, because I would have loved to have met Zeldman by chance. But oh well—of course, the first painting I see on the homepage when I visit the site is the work of an old friend of mine.

I did happen to get a pang of sadness for not being back at MICA—I won't lie, I have been having some homesickness/wanderlust lately here at Arcosanti. But then, Baltimore isn't going anywhere—and if I want an MFA, I can always go back to MICA (if I can afford it).

Strangely though, I realized during this same moment of missing Baltimore that there was a thread of anger, and I found out why I am not a Republican. Odd segue, I know, but it's true. I had to leave MICA for economic reasons after two years. And if the Republican theory of economics is right, that implies that I was not working hard enough—that somehow, I did something wrong, or my middle-class parents did something wrong, or that we laid on our haunches, or that I didn't pursue my education hard enough. Which is entirely not the case. Especially now, given the work I am providing for myself as a re-capitulated freelancer via Proteus Creative—even while many firms would not hire me due to my lack of degree. The reality of it was that my family got screwed when the housing bubble burst.

I'm sorry, but if Republicans want to reach out to my generation, the first have to use a tagline other than the moldy idea of the Carnegie-Vanderbilt "American Dream". They have to convince me first that "socialist" countries like Denmark, for example, where they pay a 50% income tax, is much worse than our economic model—when all the Danes get their college paid for from the day they step into pre-school.

It's funny, those Danes may be "socialists" (I'm so scared), but at least they have a college degree. Which is more than what can be said of me.

Anyway—odd political byway, but it was somehow tied into it. And I didn't quite realize how strong my feelings were in the area. It deserves its own post in all reality—but there it is.

Congrats Happy Cog on both a beautiful website and a wonderful client to work with.

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.