Sunday, September 07, 2003

Rejection Part of making my "real" website means coming to terms again with the need to photograph my sculptures. In the past week I've been warming up for this, looking at where I left off. That turned out to be not as far along as I'd hoped. I have a lot of experiments to do before I can be sure of my lighting arrangement. After a lot of searching online, I found the Kodak color separation guide I need. This is the strip of colored squares that will tell Modern Postcards and people who make prints from my slides, how to adjust the colors. I had a hard time finding it because I didn't know what it was called. Finally I lucked into it. It was in stock at Calumet Photo, a store I haven't used before. At their site I ran into a wonderful article on rejection, by photographer Jennifer Bailey. Here's a quote from it that I admire: I will not create boring art. There is far too much of that already present in the world and I refuse to contribute. Life is a lot more fun out there on the edge where sometimes things work and sometimes they don't, but when they do, fireworks go off. No, I will not make safe photos. No, I will not make safe sculptures. I hope I remember this tomorrow morning when I grope for my first cup of coffee. Will I feel up to making even a safe, boring sculpture? Probably not for the first hour or two. 11:43:43 PM    comment []

Website Progress Building a website is beginning to remind me of building a house. It goes on and on. You have the distinct feeling that once you say "done" you'll start changing and adding things right away. I've been plugging away getting a solid foundation - staying with the building metaphor. First I looked at all the artists' websites I'd collected over the last two or three years - then looked at more. I made notes in a Word document as I looked, sorting my comments into categories so I could make sense of them later. This looking and commenting helped a lot. I began to refine my ideas of what I wanted, what I liked and disliked as a viewer, what felt comfortable and what distracted. Then I made dozens of layout drafts and looked at them at different screen resolutions, even on webTV (via simulator.) I published them to a test site to do this. I noticed that it was very helpful to look at pages on a friend's 800x600  monitor. That's the way the majority of viewers will see the site, and somehow the different layouts had more distinct impacts at that resolution. When I narrowed the field to just a few choices, I printed out the screenprints at different resolutions (using online viewers) and took them to the studio where I could lay them all out to view. Now I have my basic layout and color scheme. I've looked at it in a lot of browsers and screen resolutions. I've fixed a lot of things. And I've checked the colors in a color blindness online viewer - that filtered them to show me how people with various kinds of color blindness would see them. (This is about 8% of the male population so it's a significant issue.) Now for a bit of bragging. My layout is ultra flexible. It looks fine on my 18" LCD monitor at 1280x1024. Yet it shrinks to fit a webTV screen, showing all the essentials there without horizontal scrolling. And it looks good at sizes in between. I designed it for sleek search engine access. That is, the code is as simple as possible. The most important parts of the page are at the top where the search engine robots can read them first. Usually links are at the top of the code, but in my layout they're at the bottom - tho the links themselves are at the left where users expect them. And the pages load fast - main page under 10 seconds, largest picture pages under 20. I've accomplished a lot. I'm happy with my design. There's so much more to do! I need to relax and enjoy it. After all, I'll never make my first site for myself again. Yes, I've made sites for other people, just not for myself! Let's make this fun. Now there's CONTENT to do - photographs and writing. Then there's selecting a host, which is all tangled up with selecting a shopping cart, which is entangled with payment processing....which is all going to work out fine. For a perfectionist, it seems as if I'm doing ok. I'm smiling at least once a day. Just kidding. I'm having a ball. 11:25:27 PM    comment []

DVD Review: A Song for Martin - 4 stars This is a Swedish film about a love story between two middle aged musicians - well, maybe a bit older than middle aged. It's quite a story. I do recommend it but there will be parts that are quite sad to watch. It's a good film to watch with someone you love. It made me realize that much of the time, I may be relating not to the person before me here and now, but to my ideas and memories of how he or she has been in the past. That makes every interaction a near miss - a little late by a day or week or moment. Now that I write this, I guess it's an obvious thing. But the movie brought it home to me in a poignant way so that I really know it now. I'll give the film 4 stars. Acting, by the way, was superb. There are English subtitles.   11:07:01 PM    comment []