creative

rare pattern

2006-03-27T01:59:35-06:00

Design launched 27 March 2006. This is a css-only theme for this site using Drupal.

rare pattern is my personal blog. I wrote a little bit about the new theme there.

Web site feng shui

2006-03-10T09:07:35-06:00

Feng Shui, we read on webterrace

... is the ancient Chinese art of manipulating and arranging your surroundings to attract positive life energy, or chi, so that it flows smoothly, unblocking any obstructions in your body and environment. Feng Shui evolved from the theory that people are affected for better or worse by their surroundings.

New Space; New Opportunities

As pingVision has moved into its new offices, Laura and I have had that lesson brought home loud and clear.

Here we have a lot of electronics: banks of computers, monitors, scanners, printers, phones, wireless routers, FAX machines, and modems; cables, hubs, wires, switches; speakers and sound systems ... on and on ... and I won't bore the reader with a laundry list, but the elements are like that of any other modern office.

Joni Mitchell in "Big Yellow Taxi, "sang, "don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone," was certainly not singing about moving!

The mountain view of Boulder's Flatirons is spectacular. It is part of the light and space of being at 5300+ feet above sea level, nestled along the Front Range of the Rockies.

The light. The view. The windows. The open spaces. All these contribute to join the exterior with the interior ... a Zen concept.

In classical feng shui there were "lucky" and "unlucky" directions ... sectors ... if you will and arranging a city, or a building, required a practitioner, often a priest, to work out the harmony.

Being modern and Western, and fresh out of Shinto priests, Laura and I have been moving the pieces to make the work flow effective.

Work flow management is time management.

As a cub engineer at DuPont, I became fascinated with cybernetics - the man/machine interface. Simplicity does not mean simple-minded. In fact, brevity takes wit. Churchill is quoted,

I am sorry this letter is so long; I didn't have the time to write a shorter one.

Time management specialist, Charles Hobbs, whose concepts evolved into the Franklin-Covey System, gave a talk some years back. He suggested we look at the "typical" desk - the working surface.

How often do we need the stapler? How prominent is it? One-by-one Hobbs went through the things that are on the desk. Are they vital, or are they a distraction? After all, how many pages does an average worker staple in the post-paper office?

Enzo Ferrari, it is said, kept his desk completely clear ... the deck of an aircraft carrier ... and it is even reported he kept his phone in a drawer. Extreme? Perhaps, but study show that the subconscious mind "sees" everything the eye sees and more. That is, the things the conscious mind does not see, the subconscious mind, does: the coffee cup, the pen, the scissors, the reading glasses. They're there too. Are they "good" feng shui?

The plants, the carved wooden box which is suppose to hold my reading glasses, and maybe the scissors. Is this "good" feng shui?

Surely man does not live by bread alone and the idea of an aircraft carrier deck desk - the sterile office - has little appeal ... especially to a creative design company. A stark environment does not invite. But a cluttered environment, beyond a certain point, can also be distracting.

A place to find things

John Hoyt, time management consultant, once remarked that many people find files and filing systems to be a bore, annoyance, and just about the most unexciting thing imaginable. He concluded with a piece of wisdom,

Files aren't a place to put things; they're a place to find things.

This becomes another element in the cybernetic feng shui of the office. Something may be out of sight, but if it is filed logically, in a snap I can have it in my fingers.

A gentle snow falls outside and reflects vibrant light into the office - connecting the tranquility of the mountains and sky with the fast-paced world of work. The light reflects off the plants that pingVision uses as partitions, rather than the standard corporate flat cubical 3/4-walls. It is a "forest" and not the corporate cubical canyon maze.

Not just light, space, and flow, but also the wonderful smell of coffee greets me as I power up in the morning to read the emails that have come in overnight.

Laura once asked, rhetorically: what message are we sending out if we brew bland coffee instead of flavorful coffee? What are we saving, a quarter per cup?

Feng shui may be ancient - with superstitious underpinnings - but in the modern office, and modern web site a lot can be said for making things smooth, simple, and easy.

And that in my book is what user-friendly truly means.

Duck's Breath 2.0: a DVD redesign for new release

2005-09-21T17:22:37-05:00

Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre is one of those comedy troupes that you never knew you already knew. As it turns out, they have 30 years of history presenting their peculiar brand of off-the-wall lunacy in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in places they've toured in the past, but that's probably not how you might know them. I knew them from the Ask Dr. Science spots they run on NPR stations around the country ("Remember, he's not a real doctor." "I have a Master's Degree--" "--in science!")

Now, to be perfectly honest, I can't say I cared much for the Dr. Science bits on the radio. But when I sat down and watched the footage of the Duck's Breath 30th Anniversary Show, the Dr. Science sketch had me in stitches! Because in the live show, he takes questions from the audience and answers them on the spot, ad lib. And that colors the whole experience. (Dan Coffey, the man who is Dr. Science, also hosted the radio show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!.)

Another one of my favorites in the show is Ian Shoales, whose voice you might remember from snappy social commentary spots on NPR ("...I gotta go.") or recognize from ABC's "World News Now." His dry delivery and sharp wit are delightful.

My favorite sketch from the show is with Jim Turner as Randee of the Redwoods. Anyone who's been exposed to '70s stoner culture will get a kick out of this spaced out dude. I think it's his utter innocence that makes him so endearing.

How did I miss these guys all these years? They never hit the big time like Second City, but they really are just as silly, with perhaps a bit more of social satire. It's great to be able to work on a DVD project for such a talented bunch, but for me the real joy was being introduced to the nutty humor of these ascerbic wits. (And I'm not just saying that because we worked on the disc. You'll just have to trust me on that.)

The Duck's Breath 30th Anniversary Show DVD is being released at the end of October. Check Riverbend Entertainment for the latest info.

The fixed-width design dilemma

2005-06-17T18:29:05-05:00

Perhaps the biggest thing that every web designer has to grapple with is the fact that each website visitor might have any combination of web browser, browser window size and screen resolution. In other words, ten different people visiting the site might might have ten different website experiences. Site A viewed on Firefox for Windows on a screen with 1600x1200 resolution will look much different than the same site as viewed on, say, Internet Explorer for Mac with a screen resolution of 800x600. (Why any Mac user would even consider using Internet Explorer, I don't know. This is just a fer instance thing. Go along with me here.)

One of the ways designers try to address this is by creating fixed-width sites. My own personal inclination is against this. I just hate the idea of having a lot of wasted space with a website some 800 pixels wide seen on a high-resolution iMac. But the simple fact is that many site designs simply do not lend themselves well to variable width sites.

Most of the websites I've designed over the years have been of the variable width variety. When it comes to your basic community site design -- which is one of the more common applications of Drupal -- having variable width can be a boon, especially for people with higher resolution screens. Your typical community website is trying to present a lot of information, and the more you can fit on the screen without necessarily having gobs of text in sidebars a mile long, the easier it is for visitors to use.

But sometimes -- sometimes -- a fixed-width design can give a website more of a sense of unity.

This is because you can design all the components of the dynamic site for a specific display. Adding graphic elements to unite the site is also much easier.

All this is to say that as of today (and until further notice) our constantly evolving site design here at pingV has gone to a fixed-width design.

Some will note that in many ways this site does not follow the typical fixed-width display. For example, there is no horizontally oriented graphic that "binds" the site. I'd like to say that this was a deliberate, strategic decision, but really it was a (what I would consider) happy accident. It was on an impulse that I tried setting the width at a fixed 770 pixels. With a little tweaking of the stylesheet, it came together. Adding the ping-rings background to the page seemed to make it click. In fact, I think it's the ping-rings background that unites the site by providing a negative space context for the positive space elements (the posts, blocks, comments, etc.).

Anyway, as a designer with a living, breathing document that is this site, I can't say that I won't continue to tinker with the look and feel here. I really should be putting those efforts into the themes we're contributing to the Drupal community. Yet this is our front door. Our shingle. Our calling card. It's hard to just leave it be. I'm one of those typical Virgo perfectionists. There's always one more thing that could be done to make it just a little better.

Who was it who said, "You never finish artwork, you just stop"? I can understand that sentiment completely.

Trailer for "Made-Up"

2005-06-10T16:17:11-05:00

As a vendor for Riverbend Entertainment, one of the things we did for "Made-Up" was produce a trailer.

I'm almost hesitant to call it a trailer, as there's no dialogue or voiceover. But sometimes that's all that's needed. Budget was tight, so rather than compromise on the quality, we limited the scope of work. My own sense is that it turned out well.

We edited this in our online edit suite in uncompressed CCIR 601 resolution, anamorphic. What you see here is a quick export from QuickTime Pro, 10fps, using the Sorensen3 codec, which generates some truly wonderful results. I'd been a bit worried because the on-screen text is so small, but the resolution held; the font is small, but clean.

If you need to install or upgrade your Quicktime....

Their food wasn't bad...just their web site

2005-05-15T09:06:30-05:00

No one in the market square shouts, "Sour wine! Rotted fish."

- proverb of India

We stumbled on a wonderful restaurant. What a find! Someone with an eye for decoration knew what to do. Beautifully appointed to the last detail. Spacious and grand. And the chef...wow. And affordable. It was a light lunch, so the bill did not come to much, but the service! I tipped 35-percent.

I could hardly wait to tell my friends about it.

As we left, my colleague took one of their eye-catching business cards and said, "I wonder what their web site is like?" Yes! I quickly followed suit and I look at the lovely card here on my desk as I type this.

The web site did not reflect the restaurant at all. It was the restaurant's name, but after that it seemed as if it were an entirely different thing - no attention to any detail. Not grand. It gave little information, few of the links worked and those that did took me to a Chamber of Commerce roster where they were one of several restaurants in a category. Other links were broken. The attractive logo could not be displayed because of web page error.

Was I going to tell my friends to look at this "great restaurant" and have them look at this page? The dissonance was too much.

Am I blogging on their site about how grand the experience was? No. I am blogging about it on pingV, but I do not include the name as the site bears no relationship to my dining experience.

I suppose this surprises me because I am in advertising, web development, and marketing, and here we see a place that has everything going for it, but the web site is completely out of step with who and what they really are.

DVD menu design for "Made-Up"

2005-03-23T16:00:53-06:00

Last week we completed some DVD menu design work for Riverbend Entertainment's upcoming release, "Made-Up" (starring Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams).

The main menu

The main menu was a motion menu. Because we had a beautiful video montage with which to work, this was perhaps the easiest part of the project. Our job here was simply to create the "buttons" and selector graphics.

Doing our work in Combustion, first we masked out an area with which to work -- the edges, and a lower-thirds area. Then we added a gaussian blur, a glow effect, a bit of desaturation, and played with the histogram a bit. We also added a touch of blur and glow to the overall image.

This way the text pops against the diffused background, while we still get a nice clear view of the action in the center of the frame.

Scene selections menus

Here are two of the six menus we did for the chapter/scene selections.

This first one is actually the last menu for the chapter selections. It proved to be a bit of a challenge because we had five chapter selections instead of the four offered on each of the other chapter menus -- this in addition to the menu selections listed down the left side of the screen.

I liked this one mainly because of the background photo. The approach we undertook for this entire project was to use the production value in the film itself. In "Made-Up," this meant using the actors themselves. The film really has a wonderful amiable atmosphere, and we tried to capture that in the stills we used for the menus.

On all the chapter selections menus, we de-emphasized the background by using a combination of glows and desaturation. This allowed the smaller stills representing the chapters themselves to pop out.

The extras menu

Since Tony Shalhoub directed "Made-Up," we thought it made obvious sense to use a shot of him while doing some "directing work" ... like standing at a video tap monitor.

Initially we had tried a bit of a "zip zoom" effect on this shot, to make it look like we were zooming rapidly in on him, but the effect was too distracting so we abandoned it. Instead we opted for a bit of a diffuse glow, radial blur and some burning of the background where it threatened to compete with the text.

The subtitles menu

This was one of my favorite stills from the entire movie. We used this one for the subtitles menu because the photo itself seemed to ask, What are they saying? Since the composition seemed to fit the text layout so well, we opted not to step on the photo so much.

It's always fun to work on good material

Over the years, I've worked on some real cinematic dogs. Producing a quality trailer or one-sheet for a stinker of a movie can be like trying to draw blood from a stone. Ironically it can be the most difficult and painful with an independent movie that strives to break out of the mold, but simply does not work. Then, if you worked on the picture, your heart aches over the missed opportunities; if you're doing the marketing, you're often left puzzled as to how to position the film. On the other hand, the easiest jobs can be the genre pieces. There it's clear what the movie needs, and it's downright obvious how to sell it. However, there's only so much genre you can take. (There's a good reason why the big action pictures need real "stars" -- the stars make the forumula watchable, maybe even enjoyable.)

"Made-Up" breaks all the conventions, and is all the more delightful for it. Having been able to work on this project -- even in such a tangential way as doing design work for the DVD menus -- has put a nice gloss on the first major project for this start-up company.

This was a last-minute job that we undertook on short notice when Riverbend, unhappy with the menu designs they were getting from the graphic designer they had retained, turned to us. Unfortunately for us, our work will go uncredited as the "DVD credits" roll already had been produced.