I’d like your opinions on these two scenes I’ve made for my animation so far.

They were made by tracing over images in Illustrator and then scaling them up, added the different textures (to the park one) and yeah… I think they both have a nice effect but they’re both very ‘busy’. I’d be most appreciative if any of you have tips for toning it down! Let me know what you think and I’ll change them accordingly =).


I like the idea of the big colours and textures, I think that will engage children but then characters on top of that will simply get lost.


So there we go. Oh, I got another first for my essay on GOB =).

I am finally ready for the day at 10.30, despite setting my alarm for 8.30!


Anyway, over the last couple of days I have already drawn a rough idea for 7 characters for my animation, most of which will appear in the background with the exception of the two main characters. I also already have an idea of their style but I’ll post about that later today.


Here’s my first Character Sheet for the character tentatively known as CJ.

And the style, a homage to Amanita Design.

Key Motions

Kneeling

Waving

Walk Cycle

Animated Walking

Static
Static Walking


Tweened
Tweened Walking

Since the dawn of our species we have found evidence that we produce, it is not unique to humans or our own society, but we do seem to be the most prolific. To start to explore ways production shapes culture we should also ask, are production and culture entirely separate? Or, to the other extreme, is production the driving force for the creation of new cultures and subcultures? Are production and consumption symbiotic or mutually exclusive? These are the questions that I will address in relation to asking the overall question, does production help shape culture? By looking at the production of various items and contextualising them with theories I will arrive at a conclusion that I feel is plausible.


The ancient civilisation of ‘Old Europe’, roughly spanning 6500–3500BCE, produced and traded clay female figurines (among other items). The significance of this seems to be that they were a product of their culture, they believed in the beauty of the feminine form and fertility and so materialised and produced this ideal (Wilford 2009). Given the example of this early era, we can see that the production and consumption of commodities is not new to modern cultures. However, did the fact that they had clay furnaces and the ability to mould gold, drive their production and culture? If so, this would be a demonstration of technological determinism.


Bimber (cited Smith and Marx 1996) writes that there are three main factors that drive production in a technologically deterministic society. Firstly, Bimber writes that there is a basic human drive for self- expression. Secondly, he writes that self-expression is one of the outcomes of productive activity and thirdly, that technology meets the expansion of human needs. This articulates well with the nodes of identity, representation and production in the cultural circuit model. When left to our own devices we produce artefacts that express who we are; the Internet shows us this in a very apparent way. We can view personal blog sites on Blogger, we can listen to people’s own music using SoundCloud, we can look at people’s art on DeviantArt, we can see people’s photos on Flickr. This massive display of ‘personal’ files is arguably detritus to the masses, but as Shirky (2008, p85) eloquently puts it, “It’s simple, they’re not talking to you”; we unwittingly become eavesdroppers. Perhaps strangely, this seems to be the current state of the Internet, anyone can produce by writing or uploading their own content. Yet are these personalised websites built as an expansion of human need as Bimber would argue or does the democratisation of files become a hinderance?


Taking the example of Blogger, it can be seen as an extension of Western democratic society, ideally giving anyone with Internet access an equal voice. Alexa ranks it as the seventh most visited site on the Internet and Jenkins (2006, p179) names Blogger as “at the heart of this [blogging] phenomenon.” The expansion of the blogosphere has been integrated into news services, television programmes and other media. This convergence suggests that, yes, we have adopted it and allowed it to shape how we experience certain events, and to some extent our culture, although we will often consume them among a range of other sources to gain a variety of viewpoints. Also, because one of our dominant ideologies is that of democracy, Blogger and blogging in general serves to re-enforce the importance of this.


All websites are built for a purpose which is usually apparent within the first few seconds of viewing. Be it Amazon, built for selling products or my own portfolio site, built to show others my work. Aristotle saw teleological causality in nature but it can be applied to technology as well (Lister 2008). So following this, Amazon can be seen as the manifestation of consumer culture online that was bound to happen. This suggests that production and culture are closely tied, the aforementioned websites are destined reproductions of our reliance on the dominant ideologies that make up Western consumerist society.


A Danish graphic design company, 2GD designed and wrote Introduction to the Strategy of Aesthetic Creation that demonstrated an awareness of the influence culture has in shaping production, putting the argument in reverse (Sundqvist 2002, p148). Soenderstrup writes maxims like “Culture is freedom: Cultural reproduction” and “Work is enlightenment: Culture is the means for retaining this condition” which is framed by the diagrammatic designs of Lund, the pieces are then grounded by Nielsen’s black and white photographs of urban, manufacturing places that are grim and sparse with the illusion of industrial reproduction in them. This is an example of an understanding of culture influencing what they have designed and is a strong argument that culture and production are linked.


Benjamin (1999) believed that art has been changed by “mechanical reproductions”, it loses the ‘aura’ that it once had. In the last few centuries this started with the invention of the lithograph but others, such as the printing press and preceding woodblock printing, are also examples of mechanical reproduction. I would argue that within online communities there is a general attitude towards collaboration, taking advantage of the easy reproduction of binary. Let us take the ongoing production of jQuery as an example, when the code was first demonstrated it would have been of little use if it were traditionally copyrighted and only allowed on a handful of websites. Instead, what we find online is that people improve on it, contribute to it and utilise it; the consequence is not a withering of it’s aura, it is a growth. All of this is possible through mechanical reproduction and the invention of the Internet among innumerable other inventions. This suggests that production transcends culture, bridging international boundaries for the fulfilment of consumption by many in a common cause.


The Internet makes files easy to share and reproduce from one hard drive to the next and part of the problem with this simple digital reproduction is that often the shared files infringe the copyright of the originals. Lovell (cited Storey 1997, p477) writes, “Difficulties which capitalism has in placing essential marks of ownership upon such commodities, through copyright and its protection, difficulties which are compounded by certain forms of mechanical reproduction.” Currently, Vimeo are being sued because EMI believe that their use of “‘original works’ only extends to videos” and that their music has been used in clips by the staff themselves without a license (Anderson 2009). YouTube had a similar problem earlier last year and had to mute audio on offending clips and offer alternative songs. However, the difference with Vimeo is that it has been built on original video content, unlike YouTube, notorious for films and TV episodes split up into 10-minute segments. There is clearly friction between this regulation, identity and self-expression within the online media industry and law. This is a good example of how, despite the videos hosted by Vimeo being products of culture, there is still a tension between creativity and production with general acceptance. How can products of a culture cause controversy within its own culture? This would suggest that, at least to some extent, production and culture operate independently, and so production has a very limited affect in shaping culture because of laws that prevent certain works from being consumed the way the author originally intended them to be.


There are times when you literally lose the ‘essence’ of something when viewing it through mechanical means, the artwork of Wachtmeister often relies on shimmering gold which cannot be represented on monitors and thus lose something of their original form. Similarly, a mass produced print of the Declaration of Independence does not have the same effect as standing in front of the authentic copy, regardless of how accurate it may be (as in National Treasure 2004). Western culture seems to have a fetish for authenticity, museums are built around the premise of offering visitors restricted access to genuine articles. It could be argued that because we have limited access this adds to their aura. Our cultural heritage is shaped by this restriction and so we get phrases like ‘modern classic’ to describe something that will be added to the reverent collection. Benjamin (1999, p221) suggests a reason for why this is, “Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction.”


Within any industrial production line the shift between raw material and product is at its most apparent. It is the literal shifting and moulding of the unprocessed into the commodity. “The beauty of a [...] thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together” (Sagan 1980). Sagan sees transformation at an atomic level but Heidegger (1977) also believed that when we produce something, we are not creating, we are transforming. Sagan sees this at one of the most basic, tangible levels but even ephemeral creations like music are reproduced feelings, events and observations. The transformation of ideas is important to our idea of intertextuality, if someone were able to create something completely new it would be alien to us. It would bear no significance to our society and may even inspire fear. This is something Dadaists were probably aiming for when creating their ‘anti-art’ but, the same as everyone, they are still bound to the shackles of culture. So through their neglection of traditional values an opposite set were created, making their art decipherable.


When using someone else’s mobile phone, we can generally get to the parts of the phone that we want to because of the signs the phone carries, even if we have never used it before (an envelope to represent messages, a gallery for pictures, perhaps). This use of semiotics ensures that we are comfortable with using a new phone, more than a culture that is not familiar with those signs. Since all we can produce is a reproduction of other ideas and molecules (an extension of Plato’s forms (ibid)), we are able to decode and encode signs when looking at a product, we work out how it works for us, through its previous cultural meanings that are transferred into the product (Hall 2007). This is an example of culture shaping how and what we produce simply so that it makes sense and is able to be consumed by others. Culture acts as a regulatory force in shaping what signs represent in our products so that it can then identify with others and thus be consumed in the intended way.


Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene (1976) that ideas are able to be shared and spread through repetition and survive in a similar way to genes, he calls them memes. The Internet seems awash with them, 4chan created the famous ‘lolcats’ meme, whilst reddit lays claim to the narwhal and bacon memes. All of these seem to have little point or understanding outside of their niche communities but the production of these ideas, even online ones, can have real world consequences for society. Merchandise now includes two books of ‘lolcat’ pictures, bacon flavoured soap, T-shirts and posters. These all show how a globally connected consumerist culture embraces and produces memes (at least on the Internet), however outlandish, into something that they know will be bought by a specific demographic.


When looking at memetics it is easy to see the evolution and the passing of ideas, the transformation of thought into product. Wired writer, Mike Godwin (2004) created an online memetic project. He stated that his law is thus “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” He created this to counter the increasing trivialisation of the Holocaust among Internet newsgroups. Godwin watched as this meme grew and wrote, “Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it – the counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it mutated like a meme.” He concluded that it is good to fight off ‘bad memes’ with counter-memes and it is positively the web’s duty to do so. However, Godwin fails to recognise the moral ambiguity in the conception of memes, it could be a way to spread ideologies and although he sees it can be used for good and bad, he suggests these as absolutes, whereas good and bad are, realistically, relativist terms. Perhaps certain memes appeal to individual personalities and act as a form of self-expression and identity through their repetition of a particular meme. This then enters into their consciousness and is represented in their future work.


Heidegger believed that we are “constantly projecting ourselves into the future, always expecting things” (Beistegui, Human, All Too Human 1999), this is where we live and, by “practical action”, (Sheehan, ibid) it is why we produce. Sheehan gives the example of a farmer in the Black Forest making a barrel, the farmer is constantly thinking of the finished project and the logic is that the human is extending himself. We can see this at many levels of life, rarely are we content with the present and not pondering the future. However, this relies on Western culture’s concept of time, with emphasis on the future, that is not always found in other cultures (1961, Kluckholm and Strodtbeck). Other cultures, such as the Amazonian Pirahã or African Hadza, live in the present with little language or concern for past events. Their language and emphasis on present time influences both their amount of production and what they produce. Both tribes are stubbornly anti-agricultural because they cannot see how planting seeds now and producing crops can reward them later (Colapinto 2007; Finkel 2009).


It is argued that language dictates how we rationalise ideas and events, Hall (2008, p9) writes of the “fight against cancer” and using, wasting, saving and spending time. These are “largely consumerist terms” that are used as if everything is a commodity. Baudrillard (1999, p105) also arrives at a similar conclusion but with his focus on labour power “[labour] is no longer brutally bought and sold: it is ‘designed’, ‘marketed’ and ‘merchandised’, linking in production with the consumerist system of signs.” From this we could deduce that language is the overall framework in how cultures are shaped. It can also be seen as a driving force of production as it is how we largely communicate with one another, exchanging ideas and methods.

“Without production, no consumption; but on the other hand, without consumption, no production; since production would then be without a purpose” (p24, Marx 2005).

Here Marx views production and consumption as one-way processes, products are consumed but the consumption of products does not, on its own, lead to further production. However, I argue that consumption is not the only purpose of production; as we have already seen, Bimber (1996) believes self-expression is the driving force, to fulfil ones own need to reproduce their identity in other forms. When we doodle we do not do so for the consumption of anyone but instead it is usually the conscious using the pen in a separate way from the task at hand. This would fall under Aristotle’s praxis, suggesting that production and consumption are not symbiotic.


Huxley (cited Benjamin 1999, p240-1) wrote,

“In all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter.”

He believed, because of the increasing population, there is also an increase in talented people but to match the consumption of enough reading and music-matter, much “trash” is also produced. Huxley then wrote there may even be four times as many talented people as the century before but despite this the consumption of higher literature is falling to lesser texts, perhaps the shift in reading novels to newspapers to magazines. We have looked at the diversity of some of the things that we produce and their place in our society, but what is the impact of the plethora of products we have?


Overproduction is currently affecting (and so by extension, also shaping) all cultures and our governmental systems urge us to use less energy and be ‘environmentally friendly’, Baudrillard (1999, p113) predicts such recycling of production as “an immense equation adding up to zero” that will then continue to grow. He left it open as to if this were for better or worse. Giving a postmodernist view on production, he writes, “Since products, all products, and even work itself, are now beyond the useful and the useless, there is no more productive labour, but simply reproductive labour. The same holds true for consumption, but simply reproductive consumption.” (ibid, p121)
He seems to hold that, even though everything is reproduced and reproductively consumed, growth is synonymous with the end of production because we will all have to eliminate our waste and this will culminate in the “endless growth” of reproductions. This shows production and consumption as symbiotic. The impact on Western cultures move to reproductive labour and consumption can be seen in the shift from labour work to office jobs becoming more important thus what we do now is reproduce information rather than produce ‘actual’ things.


Birringer (2008) writes of his experience at Suite Fantastique that featured post-structuralist artwork which showed a trend towards a montage of ideas, taking representations of different products and making something new from them. A similar experience I witnessed was the collaboration between The Bays and the Heritage Orchestra at the Colston Hall, Bristol. The score was written by two composers on computers as the concert took place, this was then fed to electronic music stands to the orchestra and displayed via three large screens to the audience. The music was produced as a reaction to the audience; as Birringer (p176) writes, these performances are “like a stream of consciousness narrative.” He focuses on the importance of the temporal and spatial and where we identify ourselves within these works. We can view such pieces as a product and reaction to our fragmented multi-culture society; the way these groups have chosen to express this, is through a convergence of ideas and genres made possible through technology. The effect of this is a representation of different genres to create something that combines the ideologies of both. It is through the pushing of genre boundaries (classical and drum and bass; audio and visual; improvisation and formality) in events like these that add to the shaping of culture.


Our producing is a byproduct of being in a culture, what we produce is culture fabricating itself (because we instinctively produce according to Aristotle’s praxis, poeisis and theoria). For example, when creative pieces are produced in other countries, often the influence of the culture is cited as a contributing factor to the work. I have no doubt that production helps shape culture evolve. I also believe that there is a strong link between memes and ideologies. Ideologies being the frameworks within which memes survive or fail, while memes are the individual thoughts that propagate and mutate themselves. These in turn influence what we produce and thus are the ultimate products of culture. The effect of this is that, because changes in memes, like genes, are small mutations, it is easy to see progress as simply reproductive. The overarching foundation, to conclude this analysis of production, is language: the ultimate extent to which cultures can exist.



Bibliography


Anderson, N., 2009. Vimeo sued; have staffers uploaded infringing content?. Ars Technica, 16 December 2009. Available from: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/vimeo-sued-have-staffers- uploaded-infringing-content.ars [Accessed 20 December 2009].


Baudrillard, J. 1999. Revenge of the Crystal. Gateshead: Pluto. Benjamin, W., 1999. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations,
London: Pimlico.


Birringer, J., 2008. ‘Architecture & The Digital’ in Performance, Technology and Science. New York: PAJ Publications.


Colapinto, J., 2007. The Interpreter. The New Yorker, April 16, 118-137.


Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 9, The Lives of the Stars, 1980. TV, PBS.


Dawkins, R., 2006. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: OUP.


Finkel, M., 2009. The Hadza. National Geographic, December 1, 94-119.


Godwin, M., 2004. Meme, Counter-meme. Wired. Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 2.10/godwin.if_pr.html [Accessed 11 December 2009].


Hall, S., 2007. This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics. London: Laurence King. Heidegger, M., 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. London: HarperPerennial.


Human, All Too Human, Episode 2, Martin Heidegger: Design for Living, 1999. TV, BBC 2. Jenkins, H., 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. New York: NYUP


Kluckholm, F., and Strodtbeck, F., 1961. Variations in value orientations. London: Greenwood. Lister, M., 2008. New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.


Marx, K., and Nicolaus, M., 2005. The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.


National Treasure, 2004. Film. Directed by Jon Turteltaub. USA: Walt Disney Pictures.


Smith, M., R., and Marx, L., 1996. Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Massachusetts: MIT Press.


Shirky, C., 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. London: Penguin Press.


Storey, J., 1997. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Second Ed.). Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf.


Sundqvist, P., 2002. 55° North: Contemporary Scandinavian Graphic Design. London: Laurence King. Wilford, J., N., 2009. A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity. The New York Times, 30th November 2009.

I believe we should be conscious that every statement and most sentences we utter has the phrase ‘I believe’ invisibly appended to the front. With that, I’ll continue. Edit: Ryan North made a brilliant, comical example of this that appeared like a day after I posted and highlights what I’m trying to get at.

I believe we live in a world full of distractions. I had the privilege of sitting at the back row in my lecture today and every laptop in the lecture theatre visited Facebook at least once. Instead of reading (for leisure, in the pursuit of knowledge, both) I watched a film after dinner. Now that the film has ended it would be the perfect time to sit down and read, I’ve been trying to get through the mock-epic(?) novel Independent People by Haldór Laxness for months now and I’m barely half way through. I enjoy books but I’m a poor reader. Instead I spend hours perusing reddit and Facebook, but why?

I suppose the main reason is convenience, it’s so much easier to sit in front of a screen, very much passively, slowly taking in whatever is being fed to me by the Top News stream or Recent Activity feed. Because these do not move at my own pace perhaps that is why it spurs me on? And it’s got me thinking, would a device like the Amazon Kindle or iPad change this? It adds the convenience factor and both devices promise to offer easy readability (although I find the arc90 readability bookmarklet does a marvellous job on making things on the web easier to read).

What is the point of living in a distracted society? It seems to make sense from a work ethic, keep working and make money; keep consuming and keep buying. I believe we’ve tried this for a while and it’s failed. They say in (post)modern times we live in a (post)consumerist society, (the post I suppose would mean that we’re well aware of this?) but surely we always have? Consumerism has had such a large effect on me I can’t really imagine any other way. Anyway, this is about distractions but this in itself is a good point. How are we meant to think of such things when we’ve got friends, happiness and such so nearby?

I am sure I am oversimplifying it, all the great thinkers had distractions; some shut these distractions out better than others. It just seems to be amplified and quicker now with the www. I heard a really great quote in episode 1 of the BBC documentary ‘The Virtual Revolution’ currently on iPlayer,  Lee Seigel says, “Like all technology, the internet is not a cure for human nature, it’s an amplification of human nature, both the good and the bad.” The distractions become amplified online.

What are your views? Am I isolated in my thinking, do I make sense? Do you agree or disagree? It would be nice to know.

Already I’ve reached Phase 3 of the first year of the course and the time seems to have gone so quickly. I’ve just handed-in the previous essay and the site hand-in is Wednesday (not feeling too confident about either of those) but with the kick start of a new term I’m hoping for the best. So some reflections on what’s happened with working in my first proper group on this course.

Well for me it’s been quite stressful, after some group meetings James gave us roles and we all agreed that he should be project manager (organised, reliable, confident – all good qualities for the position). Since then it has taken a while for us to get much work done, there has been a lot of planning but not much doing. Because of this I broke out of my own roles as image/ graphics/ producer and started on the site. With hindsight I should probably have done this from the beginning but I’m glad I started because the team member that was supposed to do the site still has not contributed any work to the project.

Sorting out the navigational content and site map was surprisingly hard. A lot of sites these days are quite ‘flat’ everything can be accessed from the front page (BBC is an exemplar of this). We wanted ours to be similar but a lot of issues came up from that, how do we implement profile pages? Should we have extra pages? The latest example of which is showcasing the video, we did have the idea of putting the video you clicked on in the middle left of the page with a featured video on the right and a video carousel at the bottom but even when roughly making this it was clear it was too complicated and too many video thumbnails. Currently we’re going for something like the BBC’s YouTube channel with small thumbnails on the right in its own box.

A few other issues I think is just the number of people in our group, six is quite a large number to all give meaningful jobs to. Yet some have ended up working a fair amount more than others, I think this is to do with group dynamics and perceived roles. I think I always seem to believe I have to do much more than I actually do but only it seems to pick up what others don’t do. I was also a fairly active member in the conception process. Coming up with the initial idea of a music review site, the name and the current logo, of course the others helped shape it and it would be silly to think that I could do it all by myself so thank you to all.

I’ll leave it there for now. =)

I figured the About Me page is pretty one-dimensional, after all, it’s only meant to showcase what I am in terms of the web and the rest I display elsewhere in tidbits.

As you can probably tell by my headers on each page I’m pretty into the natural world. I don’t think we should forget it with our ever increasing dependency and pervasion on/ of the Internet. Part of the reason I chose Dreamhost was because they’re carbon neutral and I think that’s an important step in today’s businesses, if you can, there’s no reason not to do something like that.

I’m also a huge fan of music, I guess chilled electronica is my game but I love so much more. Anything that has soul and talent. You can go to my Last.fm page, I guess that has the most detailed stuff on what I’ve been listening to better than I can try and say. I love going to concerts unfortunately I haven’t found any good places or people to see in Poole/ Bournemouth yet so if anyone has any suggestions based on my likings do get in touch!

I’ve just been reading some of Understanding Foucault (finally) and it seems pretty cool. Kind of what I was trying to get across last night – or at least that’s how I read it. Am glad I did Philosophy and Ethics for (almost) A level as quite a lot of those ideas come out in these figures.

A big part of me is my beautiful fiancée, Julia. We’ve done nearly together the past two and a bit years, Iceland, Cyprus, car journeys, living together, living apart and being in love. I can’t really express how much she means to me. I was reading an interview with Umberto Eco and he said everything comes down to lists. Lists are the sign of a more advanced society, more then just the descriptive, all the characteristics that try to make up that thing. I guess it’s a step towards trying to show the complexity of even the simpler things.

Maybe you’ve learnt a bit more about me, perhaps not. I haven’t done much better at understanding myself tbh =).

Maybe it’s because it’s 2AM, maybe it’s because I’ve just spent the last two hours listening to Autechre and Squarepusher or maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Web.Studies, more then likely is it’s a mix of all of them and more. But I’ve come to the temporary conclusion that there is nothing of us.

I’ll try to explain what I’m trying to think. From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything to McKee and his Textual Analysis book and the more I read about post-structuralism. It’s just another theory that radically goes against the previous theory (structuralism and its ilk). Then someone in a century or more or less will say something else plausible and academic thought will shift that way.

It makes sense then, looking at it from afar and above, that there is no thought. No tangible way of being. I feel this should shock me but it’s like the Lemon Jelly song, Page One from ‘lemonjelly.ky’ (you can tell I like them, can’t you?)

Imagine if you can what it is like to have no possessions at all, nothing. Very few people are able to imagine such a thing, to have nothing at all. Well let us, you and I, try to imagine something a hundred times harder, not just to have nothing at all, but when there was nothing at all. The very beginning of time, the dawn of history, page one. Nothing at all. The earth itself without form, a void. Only an emptiness, formless, a dark endless waste of water. No living thing, no plant or tree no bird or animal. Nothing. This is before people; before anything at all. A void, sitting silent, still. And then.

Nothing.

Same applies for human thought, there’s no connecting factor with how we are or think. There’s progress and then nothing comes of it, or at least that’s how the song seems.

Well that’s it for the time being.

I believe the site’s took taken shape (thank you Julia) and is fully working. If anyone finds any usability bugs please do get in touch, though.

Things I have learnt in the last couple of weeks:

• Some basic PHP
• Some basic Javascript
• How nice (so far) Dreamhost are, even if they do keep trying to sell me a private server.
• The loveliness and forgiving nature of HTML 5
• How the best designs in Photoshop are the accidental ones
• That I actually find it easier to hand code than use Dreamweaver and go through its menus.
• The importance of typography
• The importance of accessibility
• How WordPress works and how to customise templates.

It’s been pretty fun designing this from the ground up and getting back to grips with it all. Everything validates at HTML  5 and CSS 3 apart from my  blog, but I’m working on that. It has two errors because of inline CSS when a gallery is implemented but I’m not sure how much I can influence that or if it’s just WordPress, anyone got any ideas?

I still have to make the kerning on the titles look more natural, they’re all set to a kern of -75 but because of the nature of the waves it makes some letters look much closer to each other so I’ll have the fun task of typing each letter into it’s own layer and aligning them tomorrow!

It seems that in designing this site I have overlooked one crucial aspect. Actually showcasing my work in a good way. The way it is now I could have a maximum of four projects before it started to look bad and I’d need a scrollable div. Not the end of the world I’m sure but there are better solutions out there and I want to find them. So that’s today’s task, make a cup of tea and think, design, implement. All from 12.40, I need to stop going to bed so late!

I can’t help it, I’m really not liking the site as it’s turning out so I’m going to propose some changes. Leave a comment if you agree/ disagree with any of my suggestions.

1. It looks unbelievably amateurish, probably because it is.
2. The silly bubble things don’t really make sense.
3. The header is ugly and hard to integrate into a good site design.
4. Meh.

On the plus side, apart from the nav element, it looks relatively consistent across ~50 browsers although I’ve had a few complaints about screen issues which hopefully will go away with the redesign anyway. So I’m going back to my visual diary and going to kinda start again. Here’s hoping.

Update at 8.50pm: I’ve had a change of heart, I’m going to give my design one more chance and build it from scratch (again) but this time with a couple of ideas I picked up from brainstorming a separate site. I’ll post the results up here after I’ve returned some films and bought some milk!