So I am calling it Generic American with a splash of Modern Vintage...I guess. I'm having one of those moments as a designer when the 'correct' images are present in my mind's eye, but for various reasons they haven't formulated on the canvas. Yet...but what the heck - I'm in no real hurry. I want to savor the taste of this one.

I absolutely love working on peacefield.info. It is a designer's dream, absolute creative freedom. An opportunity to shine, explore, create and innovate.

So what do I have to work with? Not much yet, and that is ok in some respects, because I don't want to ever steer away from my built in 'open source' aesthetic: championing the best of free fonts and hacked, and neo-Dadaist imagery. This new concoction hopes to blend cinematic urban cityscapes, with an adaptation of the ever trendy rustic earth tone color palette.(see my post on the the Neo-Green Aesthetic)

Actually, keyboardist R. Bruce Phillips says it best:

Peacefield isn't so "Pleasantville." It's grittier, even darker maybe -- or at least it has that side. Kind of like in the face of the ubiquitous B&W photo of the old man who lives on the street. He is generic, he is vintage. His face tells who knows what variety of stories? Some lovely, and some horrific, to be sure.

But there is peace still. His old weather face still attracts us.

Some may not see readily the quality of peace about this town. They might think it a contradiction, or irony, that the gritty, mysterious town has such a "nice" name as "Peacefield." Of course, America is full of contradiction and ironies, and people who don't get it when others do.

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tlbox - Web Design Tools

About tlbox
A lot of sites have been promoting pages for web developers, but none of them have asked what people are actually using to do good work. This site hopes to answer that question and provide people with the best sites first - not somewhere in the middle of long lists.
I also find myself looking for links I know I've seen on the web before, but can't seem to remember where. This site saves my good links, and organizes them by category so I can find them again. If you saw my list of unorganized bookmarks in my browser... it's sad.

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CareerJournal | Avatars at the Office: More Firms Create Virtual World 'Second Life'

Increasingly, businesses, particularly in the advertising and media industries, are opening virtual offices in Second Life as an internal communications device, a way to keep their fingers on the pulse of the fast-changing digital landscape -- and as a tool to recruit tech-savvy employees. By using Second Life, agency staffers, especially older ones or those who may be uncomfortable online, can experience the virtual world first hand, making it easier to respond to clients looking to design campaigns for new media platforms.

Both sessionswest.com and bajioranch.com received embedded google maps this weekend courtesy of the great drupal gmap module. I'm looking forward to taking this module and getting really creative - the possibilities are endless.

For community websites this module gets really exciting by allowing users that have lat,long information entered to be displayed on a single map so that you can see where in the world all of your users are coming from. The gmap.module also includes functionality to allow users to set their latitude and longitude on a gmap in an interactive fashion.

I am speaking with some of my other clients about incorporating more complex maps such as a historical map of the Tuscarawas River Band's 'Full Circle' tour. For other band's this may be expressed in a 'Places we have played" Interactive Map. For non-profits, such as the findingmyvoice.org project - this could be beneficial in providing individuals with disabilites an interactive map of local colleges and universities Disability Services departments.

My 9th grade Business Computer Programming class will be creating their own web page, as their first major project. Unlike most curriculums I have seen - the page will grow with them as they learn - and evolve into a fully functional html page w/ external css and javascript, and an embedded .swf that uses an xml playlist to play .mp3s.

I'm beginning with basic html so that they can learn from the ground up the ins and outs of an IDE, basic html structure, elements, tags, tag attributes, commenting, viewing source code.

We will reamin simple with our code, but I feel it important to dig deep into the 'bigger picture' aspects of writing html.

We will also use firefox developer tools to examine our products.

REMINDER TO CLASS

'If you want to prepare yourself for the next generations of HTML, you should start using lowercase tags. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends lowercase tags in their HTML 4 recommendation, and XHTML (the next generation HTML) demands lowercase tags.'

We will touch on CSS and javascript. I'll use javascript to introduce methods, functions, properties, and parameters.

Dave Child has posted a number of Web development related cheat sheets in .pdf and .png format on his blog. These include CSS, xHTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and MySQL.

Thanks Dave!

This month's issue of Wired is jammed pack with information pertaining to the next Green Revolution, and 'tech meets nature' topics such as: sustainable business, our looming environmental crisis, eco-friendly products, eco-chic lifestyles, and a feature article on the resurrection of Al Gore. To me, all of this talk is old hat. To be perfectly frank, I was beginning to feel as though the neo-eco mindset would never catch on. All of this discussion in a magazine as cool as Wired sheds new hope on the Green movement.

I once took an Environmental History course as an undergrad that turned out to be one of the most inspirational classes I have ever taken. The class turned me on to authors such as Edward Abbey, Carolyn Merchant, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Teddy Roosevelt, etc. The semester experience and discussion of relevant topics fueled me to adopt a 'Voluntary Simplicity' mentality and lifestyle that I have held on to ever since. For me, it clicked... and the point is...I just thought it was cool, so I adopted it as part of my identity.

All of this talk of conservation and simplification is nothing new. We all know this. I have often pondered: "What would it take to make it stick in the mainstream?"

In the article, 'Rise of the Neo Greens,' Daniel H. Pink quotes Ken Kurani on consumer motivation to purchase hybrid vehicles:

"Lower resource consumption is part of an identity people are constructing. They want to be seen as someone who's concerned about the world around them. At the same time, they want others to see that they've done this, so that others might see themselves doing this."

In other words, it is more about style, being hip, and being seen being hip. Like it or not, this is a very big part of the Neo-Eco mindset. I would also venture to guess that this was a very big part of the first Green Revolution. Yet, the first time around there was something missing: mass appeal.

I feel this may be the Green Movement's only hope in creating a Tipping Point. For those of you familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's salesman-connector-maven triad, the first order of business must be: To be green must be hip to the masses.

Caroline Schoeder
Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat.

Unfortunately, it will take something extremely powerful to encourage people to change before it is absolutely necessary.

So what does this have to do with a neo-Green Aesthetic?

Before something is hip, it has to appeal to people visually. My experience in education, culinary arts, business, and the music industry has taught me that people are influenced greatly by what they see more than any other sense. To be successul in any field, one needs to pay very close attention to visual details. In education, we say students have a visual learning style, and we arrange classrooms to ensure sucessful learning outcomes. In the culinary arts, your customers' first impression is the presentation of the food. Extremely important, yet so often overlooked. In any professional field, we talk of 'Dressing for Success.' In the music industry, we pay close attention to lighting, dressing to fit the part, and providing a visual experience for the audience. Perhaps far more than we realize, people are controlled by what they see.

Yet, all that being said, people also yearn for authenticity.

This creates a very interesting environment for a movement, a tipping point, a revolution, whatever it is you'd like to call it.

Do you suppose the answer is a fusion of clean, minimilist visuals such as represented by Apple, web 2.0 design, Toyota, Samsung, even Sony with the green aesthetic trend setters such as Whole Foods, Sun microsytems' new eco-friendly line of servers, and Patagonia?

Are you seeing/experiencing the fusion/overlap of these aesthetics in your daily consumer/producer/professional decision making? Are you being influenced by this type of powerful imagery? I know I am, and I am consisitently seeing others being influenced as well.

So what killed the authentic, natural aesthetic the first time around? Ask a baby boomer...many will tell you that at one time it was hip to be green. So what happened?

the awful 80's aesthetic - it even ruined the authentic beauty of Neil Young. Have you ever watched 'Live In Berlin' from 1986? Please don't. It's horribly painful to see Neil in parachute pants and a wireless headset.

The dirty hippy aesthetic: As fun as it is to be free and uninhibited, no one wants to hang with the guy who reaks of body oder, and is dressed in a burlap sack...And who is going to take him seriously? Take a look at home-grown websites: Let's compare: Sun Organic to Wild Oats. One must not negelct the power of visual imagery when creating materials that promote the authenticity of your business/yourself etc. In this day and age, it is a recipe to not be taken seriously.

I'm sensing that this neo-Green aesthetic is a much more powerful one; One that has much more potential to appeal to the masses. It is going to be interesting to continue watching it evolve.

By the way, did you know Walmart sells organic food? They have been for quite sometime. I am now of course being the facetious devil's advocate. There will always be those that take something remarkable and taint it, but to me the fact that the Global Corporation is selling organic food is a significant indicator of a change in consumer behavior.

How can you, your business, and your business community benefit from supporting this movement? It is something to think about.

Here is a visual example of the fusion I spoke of yesterday. A true authentic mashup...Natural color scheme: borrowed from West Saloon, still rounded corners, a texture inspired by Trevor Dodd, the background image from here, and the tutorials for torn paper - a simple Google search.

The font is called Copyright Violations - no pun intended, its free.

Totally 80's
The renewed interest in the 80's has me thinking Basquiat...the personification of the 80's art scene, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction.

I don't know about you, but I'm not too fond of the 80s. Looking at pictures from those times is just painful. Not just pictures of me, but anyone from that time...including the attractive...one can't help but wonder how much better Debbie Gibson would look without the awful hairstyle and guady garb.

But I am fond of Basquiat. Basquiat's work was my first coherent introduction to mutlicultural, ''melting pot' fusions of styles and influence. Of course, as Americans we are surrounded by so many multi-cultural representations that it might seem silly to even acknowledge the existence of various influences on one artistic representation...I mean for me, I have been eating Tex-Mex since I was born, but the point is I didn’t realize what I was eating until much later. So somewhere along the lines, I began to find it extremely interesting to engage in the deciphering of influences- whether it be cuisine, music, art, and now web design.

Deciphering Influences

So I'll try to decipher my influences. In the larger scheme of things, I’m a newbie to designing for the web.

All this talk of web 2.0 design is beginning to wear on me. In lieu of rounded corners, pastels, and large fonts, I have been exploring some revolutionary alternatives. Yes, it is rather ambitious, but nothing worthwhile was ever unambitious, well I think. Shoot…what the heck do I know? I’m just searching for something different without going backwards.

I’m into simplicity…as is everyone nowadays. Well, not everyone.. There is something to be said for usabilty’s sake by stripping décor and busy-ness from an app’s design. Yes, more is less. We all know this.

But I am beginning to miss something: representation of the natural world. This whole web thing is becoming too simple, too zen minimalist, too pastey pastelly, too lacking of décor and naturalness.

This whole train of thought is taking me back to my time in the Rice Art department, and a project I began at that time: Multi Sensual Color Explosions. Sounds like an acid trip, but on the contrary it was indicative of a much more natural experience. It was more of an exploration of all of life’s treasures captured in artifacts such as food, music, sculpture, and paint. My mindscape hasn’t changed much since then except for one major transition: the acceptance, if not infatuation with digital artifacts and the world wide web. Those that I shunned previously, I now embrace. So, basically I’m into man and machine coexisting and the multi sensual representation of this existence captured in digital representations.

Instead of the large carved totem bear holding humanity upside down, nuevo-Southwestern roasted chipolte crab cakes, and funky bluegrass tunes about environmental terrorism, I now find solace in envisioning a community of do-gooders gaining grassroots, guerilla-type strength by embracing the phenomenon of the world wide web - and having that all look really aesthetically pleasing - including the code at work behind the scenes. As I have said before, that inspiration to me is truly bliss.

Kandinsky

I have always been into Kandinsky, particularly the work he did from 1934-1944. The history books call this period The Great Synthesis…and so does wikipedia:

Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist's inner life. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic popular art, and which look like precious watermark works. He also used sand mixed with colour to give a granular texture to his paintings.

Lichtenstein's House also really gets my attention....color, geometry: structure - and a little natural world on the side. Tasty.

Oh and by the way, I'll be Deciphering Influences this weekend at the mecca of Music-Food-Art Celebrations: the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

See ya this weekend!

So digg and reddit have both posted on the work of Stu Nichols and his pure CSS photo gallery. Check it out: here. I'm anxious to try it out. I'd like to find a way to blend this image gallery with a liquid three column layout, but the gallery is fixed - so it may have to be implemented on an internal page. Although, it would be interesting to have this image gallery present on a home page - since before the hover it only takes up the room of a horizontal menu. I'll be exploring this idea further - stay tuned.