Redesign: The Reason

October 27, 2007

As I write this I am taking a hiatus from, once again, coming up with a new design for my blog. The major question I'm sure that's on everybody's minds is "Why do you redesign your blog so often?" After pondering this question myself I have come to the conclusion that I just enjoy coming up with new designs. This in turn begs the question why go live with every new design? Why not just create the designs on the side and leave the live version alone? Because I end up liking what I've just created more than what's currently implemented.

The relationship I have with any piece of art I create is generally a strained one. I'm very self-critical of everything I create. It is very rare that I make something that I like for any extended period of time. I think the problem stems from the fact that every time I see one of my works I begin finding flaws. These flaws are not necessarily seen by others, but I can see them. This is generally fine for, say, a movie or a drawing. I don't have to look at them once they're done. My website, however, is something I see fairly often. I come to see if people have left comments, to post entries, etc. It is hard for me to turn a blind eye to any flaw I see in the design when I am faced with it over and over.

As stated earlier, I also just plain and simple like creating new designs and trying out new things. As I surf the internet I am constantly bombarded by all sorts of different color schemes, layouts, etc. and these intrigue me. I get all excited and before too long I've got Photoshop and Notepad++ up and running and I'm hacking away at the latest entry of my long list of designs. Excluding the Wordpress and Blogger themes, I have made live three designs for my blog since June of '05. That's not including the designs I had from '01 to '03, anything I created for any of the various other sites I've managed (YPN, my church's website, Digital Double), or the designs that never saw the light of day.

I realize that changing up the site design so frequently is not necessarily a good thing, especially in a commercial environment. It can confuse people and probably would piss some off to the point of not returning. Granted, there are sites that do this (digg comes to mind). However, since this is my personal blog, my sandbox as it were, I'm not worried about too much. I generally try to keep the overall aspects more or less the same breaking everything down into navigation, body, extras.

Though it is beyond the scope of this article, one thing I have messed up through all the redesigns is my URL naming conventions. Usually when I roll out a new design I'm also rolling outa new CMS (conent management system) to go with it and these don't always use the same naming conventions for internal links. This causes links in older posts, google's index, etc. to become broken and raises general chaos. I'm happy with my naming conventions now and this will remain the same even when I do change the back end. Permalinks will be exactly that.

So, that is the "logic" behind my madness, tune in next week to watch the evolution of my designs and learn the rules behind them.

Tags: web design

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First month of school completed!

October 24, 2007

It's been nearly a month since I last posted anything of relevance. A lot had happened since then. I've completed my first month of school and, as such, my first set of classes. Now I won't pretend to understand I know how a traditional college works but I do know that Full Sail's approach is much different (and, in my opinion, much more sensical). Every month we have two courses that we attend for four weeks. These are broken down into, generally, five eight-hour days per week with few breaks in between save major holidays. This is how we pull off a four year degree in only twenty-one months. These five day weeks are broken down into one subject being done three days and the other two. This month I was lucky enough to only have four days of school per week but all I did were gen ed classes, namely art history and english composition.

Art History
Art history was interesting if nothing else. We got see all sorts of art from various periods of time starting with the cave men and their wall paintings. My favorite eras were definitely the Renaissance and Baroque. It is rare to find an artist that skilled these days. The Greeks were awesome as well with all their master marble working. The only problem with them, however, is their crazy preoccupation with penises. I could've done without that, thank you very much. We also took a trip to the Orlando Museum of Art. Some pretty interesting stuff their from ancient artifacts up to Andy Warhols. But, the best part of the whole thing was when we had to make our own pieces of art emulating other styles and then have them displayed in front of the whole class. A lot of good laughs shared there. Here's my pieces:

For this we were supposed to do a cave painting using a movie as the theme. Fifty points to the person who can correctly name the movie.

I was shooting for cubism but wound up pulling a weird combo of things, namely cubism, abstract, and pop art. I like it, though.

English Comp
This is the course I've been sweating through the most. Though I have a better than average grasp of English and grammar, primarily through keeping this blog and a lot of reading, I felt that my writing was too erratic and too concise to pull off this class successfully. Luckily we only had to write three papers (four if you include the ungraded one we wrote at the beginning of the course). They were each a different kind of paper, these being a memoir, a print ad analysis, and a research argument. We've also had to do some group presentations in front of the class. The last of these almost got seriously screwed up because we misread our little topic card. About ten minutes before we did our presentation we realized this and were scrambling to come up with relevant information. We wound up just pulling the whole thing out of our asses at the last minute but still managed a one hundred. I'm surprised points weren't taken off for my visible knee shaking.

On the whole I've been having a good time considering that I'm in school learning stuff. I've made a bunch of friends and at that ones who are in the same boat I am, meaning they can quote the 300 PG trailer. Next week I get to look forward to designing computer graphics and networks and operating systems as my courses. Should be awesome.

Tags: school art ecd ahd

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I'm not dead and here's the video to prove it

October 22, 2007

No, I'm not dead. I'm not even necessarily all that busy, just no real drive to write anything on this blog. However, there is something I need to bring to light and here it is:

Maybe some more on me later after I'm done with finals and stuff this week.

Tags: video