One Minute Video

28 November, 2011

This is the One Minute Video for Green's MPM16 class. You can find a very long and detailed artist's statement here.

Walter Issacson: The Wrong Guy

24 November, 2011

After finishing the Jobs bio, I felt, like almost everybody I've spoken to about it, that it was kind of a let down. Everything at NeXT is glossed over and Issacson never really gets beyond a very superficial analysis of his subject. If you feel at all the same way, I implore you to listen to John Siracusa just go to town on Hypercritical episode 42. He really makes a devestating case against the writer, it's almost cathartic. And it's a lot of fun.

Transformation Into Richard III

22 November, 2011

This is a short film I made for my Image Arts application. My good buddy Josh Blacker stars in it. The criteria was to document some sort of change or transformation in 90 seconds, and this is what we came up with.

TAGS Portfolio, Josh Blacker

Rich Girl in the Ghetto

20 November, 2011

This is a shoot I recently did with Katya from Spot 6 Models. My idea was to have her seem really out of place in a somewhat harsh looking, urban environment, and yet still maintain a sense of confidence. We shot this just in the park behind my apartment. I was a little bit concerned about my team and I being mugged whlie shooting at night, but instead the worst we had to contend with was some little kids who thought it was funny to get in the photo. The model ended up yelling at them.

TAGS Portfolio, SPOT 6

Optimization For Mobile

14 November, 2011

Figure out who your audience is, this can impact which mobile platform you target. It may be better to design a platform specific app version of your site. For iOS this will allow you to create presentations that are written for a standardized screen ratio that will always be the same (for any iPhone or iPad). However, for Android and WP7, screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios can differ dramatically even within each platform, so a standard mobile version might be better for these operating systems. The minimum suggested horizontal pixel width is 320 (the iPhone 4 and 4S will double this exactly).

Avoid things like mouse-overs or flash (obviously). Don't create fancy intros to your site that require "skipping" (don't do this for any web design actually). Don't require important information to require a .pdf download (restaurants being a main offender). Don't bury your content,. the important information should be available with in the the first 2 screens. navigating a labyrinth on your phone is particularly brutal. Your entire sight needs to be designed for touch, which means large, clear icons with proper spacing so as to avoid activating the wrong button. 44px x 44px is a good minimum.

Make as much of you site available offline as possible, so that when people lose internet reception they can still use the site. This is easier with a dedicated app when you load new content at the beginning of opening up the app (the AllThingsD app does this well)

Give the option of being able to switch to the desktop version. Optimizing for mobile means making choices in terms of what portions of your site wil need to be accessed on the go, and those that don't necessarily do. i.e. there's no way of accessing the Facebook Masthead or company management profiles in the mobile app, and there doesn't need to be. If you try and cram your entire site into the space of a phone /tablet browser, you'll be sacrificing ease of use for quantity of content, and your mobile version can quickly become bloated. However, there may be an instance where the user does need to access an more obscure part of your site so allowing a switch to the standard version is a reasonable compromise.

Also keep in mind that optimizing the amount of data (using smaller image files, not using video intros, etc.) is not just about load times, but about data caps on people's mobile plans. Most people have relatively small limits of the amount of data they can pull down over their network compared to their home internet connection.

TAGS MPM 17

Interview With (Redacted)

12 November, 2011

This was another assignment for Green's class. We had to storyboard and film an interview. My partner bailed on me so I had to improvise. If you'd like to see the (amazing) storyboards you can click here. And please, no smoking.

TAGS Portfolio, MPM 16

The New Digs

10 November, 2011

So here we are. This is easily my most thorough attempt at creating a website. My previous attempt can be found here. Although that was a bit different; the vast majority of that site was created in Photoshop and then cut up in Image ready (BTW, where the hell did Image Ready go in CS5?). Only after that was some light HTML scripting applied on the backend. Ths site, however, is all code baby. I'll be using it to post new work, both from class and otherwise, as well as post links and commentary (rants). I hope you think it doesn't suck. Some of it clearly does.