Slides for my FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX presentation “UX Concerns across Mobile Platforms” are now up.
A few weeks ago, I was being interviewed about my audio project “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced” and some questions came up around process. Specifically whether the process of creating had changed much for me over the last decade in regard to music composition. I’ve thought about this quite a bit since the interview and decided to make an attempt at emulating that old free-flow creative style I started with.
For some background, when I originally began writing “music” back in 1999, I did so in a very matter of fact and destructive manner in that I simply recorded whatever came to mind and performed a lot of additive overlay edits to the sound bed until it was what I wanted. The entire first album “August” was composed in this way. Since then, I’ve been using multi-track sequencers and a full production software suite to compose, record, and produce my music. It’s a more intellectual approach- generally a smarter approach- and certainly a less destructive method of working. However, you do lose quite a lot of spontaneity and flow in regard to the creative process. Almost as though your mind gets in the way of the emergent expressive flow coming out of you.
The video embedded below is a short film called “Furnace”. Both the video and audio portions of the work were conceived, recorded, and produced with this free-flow method in mind. What has emerged is something rather dreamlike in its structure – but not lacking in essential elements, for all that it is.
A statement in free-flow expression: Furnace.
Equipment used:
Before today, I wasn’t all that impressed with WordPress 3.0. I had been using several release candidates over the past month or so and aside from the new update mechanism (which is very nice!), I really didn’t see much that sparked my interest. With yesterday’s release, I upgraded and it went smoothly as always… but didn’t do much digging around. Why bother when I’d been using the RC builds for so long, right? I’ve known about the new default theme “TwentyTen” that is finally replacing Kubrick but had never looked into exactly what was new aside from basic visual differences.
I’ve been using a number of themes designed by others over the past three years or so with the last one being Traction. As my needs changed from time to time, it was much simpler to just adopt someone else’s design rather than going through the trouble of mucking around and getting my own up and running. Theme designs I’d done in the past had been based off of Kubrick, but as that theme aged, I wanted features that simply were not present there… so found myself jumping from theme to theme as my needs dictated. This has worked out okay- but I found myself regularly dissatisfied with certain quirks, bugs, or deficiencies. For instance, the Traction theme kept destroying my RSS feed. I had to make my own modifications and upgrades would inevitably start the cycle over again. A big pain in the ass…
So today I looked into TwentyTen to see what could be done with it. Hats off you you guys and girls over at WordPress! This is a great basic theme for customizing that includes all the new functionality introduced since Kubrick was released, and the ability to create child themes. What makes child themes so cool is that when the parent theme is updated, it isn’t going to wipe out all your customizations… yet you still have this nice, solid foundation to build off of that can be updated as necessary. So I created this current theme based off of TwentyTen and am really liking it so far. If I need something in the future, I’ll just do my own modifications. With the ability to push updates without destroying themes, I expect this one will not age so poorly either.
The theme is already HTML5 compliant (for whatever that is worth) but I also tossed in some CSS3 and Google Font Directory stuff to make everything nice and forward-looking! Want to know what else is new in WordPress 3.0? There are plenty of others talking about custom menus, custom post types, multiuser integration, et cetera; here’s the official scoop.
I was wrong about this release. It is the most useful to date on all fronts and am hugely impressed.
Look at that! Wrote something that wasn’t Flash or AIR related!
Great new resource from Adobe showing off some future products, services, and workflows that Creative Suite engineers are working on:
News and views from Paul and Lea. Paul Gubbay is Sr. Director Engineering and Lea Hickman is Sr. Director Product Management for the Creative Suite Design and Web Tools, Suites and Services.
Here’s a video demo of “Canvas for Designers” which shows the rendering of FXG within an HTML5 Canvas element:
Check out all the articles at http://blogs.adobe.com/designandweb/.
Every once in awhile, I receive postcards and such from my undergraduate institution, Worcester State College. I hold a BA in Communications Media from this school and have no complaints about the degree or the classes I took while a student there. I do, however, die a little inside each time I see one of the horrid visual clusterf@#ks that always accompany these publications. Below is a good example of what I’m talking about:
Got this one when I arrived home this evening. So we have a horrible stitch-job of seemingly random people all crammed together in what might pass for a 10 year old child’s first Photoshop project. That’s something I’ve learned to live with. Not everyone can design well, some people can’t design at all. Some people have no business even contemplating design. No big deal, right? Let’s look a little closer:
Wait a minute… the child… is that her name and a set of phone numbers taped to her chest? Oh yeah it is… wow. You can’t see it here as I’ve modified the image to remove the phone numbers- but sure as I sit here holding this abomination in my hands… you can read the numbers clear as day.
How does something like this get past the designer? How does it get past the approval process? How about the printer? No red flags anywhere along that chain, people??? Then they add the other girl staring directly into the name tag? Still nothing? How about now that I’ve drawn a green, glowing line-of-sight from her eyeball to the phone numbers? Ahhh… now someone might catch it.
Un-believable.