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Tags: art buyers, photography marketing, art directors

853 Bloor West, Toronto

Flickr user pinkmoose has a pic of the same doorway, asking the same question. Other than pinkmoose’s photo and mine, google has never heard of such a thing, so I imagine it’s just an art project. Or a torture chamber.

Cool!

Last week we launched an info site for Found Folios, a new photography sourcebook set to hit the market with its first issue this September. Found’s books are unique in that they’re published monthly rather than once a year and each issue targets a specific market segment. Traditional creative sourcebooks are bulky annual monoliths (think: yellow pages of photographers) that make these sleek, targeted books look like an attractive new option for the industry.

I’m a big fan of Oxygen Design’s minimal, typography-oriented design featuring big, bold headlines and dramatic use of whitespace. While we were building this site I came across Smashing Magazine’s Top 10 web design trends in 2009, and realized that FoundFolios.com scores a 5/10. Is the glass half empty or half full? Either way, the effect is nicely realized and sets a terse, clear voice for the brand.

FoundFolios.com is built as a simple, static website making use of ASP.NET Master Pages. One could argue that Master Pages aren’t much more than over-thought include directives, but I find that they lend a pleasant formality to your project’s document structure. I was tempted to run with the idea and use them for everything, right down to css content layout, with different masters for 1, 2 and 3 columns, but decided there was ultimately no savings over repeating a few column <div>s on each page.

Alas, a simple static website is not without its tougher challenges. For one, Oxygen’s use of typography hits the web in one of its biggest sore spots – lack of rich font support. We tried to use the simple css image-replacement technique, but found ourselves spending way too long slicing the same headline images over and over again. It’s no big surprise that javascript font replacement ranks #5 on Smashing’s trends list. I think most people these days reach for sIFR when they need TrueType support on the web, and everybody is eagerly anticipating @font-face css support, but a handful of developers are making friends with a new kid on the block called Cufon. Cufon is essentially a font rendering engine written in under 6k of javascript. It dynamically draws fonts on the web using either VML in IE or Canvas in any decent, self-respecting browser. If you have ever bashed your head on the wall slicing and re-slicing hundreds of headline images, wrestled endlessly with sIFR or compromised a website design by giving up and using Arial, please try Cufon.

Last but not least are our subtly animated, jQuery powered slide shows. With real photographer spreads, these book images slide from one to the next, demonstrating various layout options and the overall look-and-feel of the book. The great jQuery Cycle Plugin saved us from many hours of slaving over swf slide shows. There were literally hundreds of different panels and we wanted to be able to easily update their contents and play order. Building everything in pure xhtml, css and javascript not only let us easily manage the content but also allowed for full animation control at runtime. Now that I think about it, maybe we should off those transitions for mobile browsers.

Lightweight!

Stephen DeMarsh and I just launched a new website for Change for the Environment, a cool new environmental charity aiming to raise some funds for tree planting. So far they have a bunch of retail partners in Toronto, Trenton and Belleville who have either agreed to host dropoff spots or have worked directly with CFTE on this worthy project.

My part of building the site was to create xhtml/css markup matching Stephen’s designs, build an interactive map to plot the various donation locations and integrate a WordPress blog into the core of the site.  I used the the Google Maps API to build an entirely JavaScript map application and location database, complete with pagination, IP-based geolocation, search geocoding and distance sorting.

Since we were using the excellent Mootools JavaScript framework anyway, we decided to jazz up some of the less interactive parts of the website with some subtle Mootools CSS effects. Translucent word bubbles follow your mouse on the what can a loonie do page, the partners area dynamically describes each partner’s involvement and answers to questions slide in and out of view in the FAQs section.

As much as the nerd in me loves Mootools’ clean, class-oriented design patterns, I have recently started reaching for jQuery before all other js toolkits. Its popularity, terse syntax and extensive plugin offerings make it a clear winner in my books. It already does exactly whatever you need to do, and adopts the convention over configuration approach to development. I’m thinking that this will likely be my last Mootools project! *sniff!*

As always, it was great to work with Stephen DeMarsh whose unique illustration style has found a nice harmony with his clean, minimalist website design. Best of luck to Greg White and the rest of the team at Change for the Environment, my wish is that your donations list grows long enough to break the JS map application I built you

What can a loonie do? page, featuring illustrations by DeMarsh

So I just completed my first week as a full-time software developer at Adbase, and I think it’s going pretty well. Adbase sells a database of marketing contacts to photographers and illustrators. They have been filling this niche for a little over a decade, and seem like a fairly solid fixture in the industry. My role is to squash bugs and develop new features in their database and web application tiers.

For the last decade I have worked for a handful of web application development shops, startup.coms and freelance clients. These sorts of projects typically ended up in the open-source realm, built on Linux operating systems, Apache webservers and MySQL or Postgres databases. Open-source programming languages such as Java, PHP, Perl and Python seemed so ubiquitous, I figured the whole world must be using them. I had developed a kind of second-nature comfort with these packages and have even become a bit of an advocate for their adoption.

I learned quickly that Adbase does things in a different way. They are a Microsoft shop. “Barf bags are over there” said Nelson Nunes, CEO after breaking the news of their vilified software vendor to me. I figured Nelson had heard it all before, so my I decided to keep quiet.

But things aren’t that bad, as it turns out Microsoft’s .NET platform is actually quite nice. I think I’m going to really enjoy enjoy writing in C#. Over the christmas holidays I picked up a copy of Programming C# by O’Reilly Media (thanks Greg & Meredith!) and spent some time with it. O’Reilly makes great books. They are always comprehensive without ever dumbing it down too much. After a couple passes through that one and a few test applications, I feel I have a solid grasp on what looks like a very clean, robust language.

The Adbase office is at Bathurst and College, a convenient walking distance from my house. I spent my first week there learning SQL Server, writing TSQL procedures and getting a general grasp of their data schema. I completed a few assignments and even had some code commited and launched, which is a nice thing for your first week. Here’s hoping my Dell workstation arrives soon!

Marketing communications wiz Lindsay Renwick has created her own blog, where she plans to discuss the finer points of writing for that field. I know from experience Lindsay’s uniquely effective writing style, and I’m eager to hear what she has to say about the subject.

We used a free WordPress theme (Cutline by Chris Pearson) and a handful of  community WordPress plugins. Easy as pie!

A few weeks back I was asked to rebuild The Fremantle Corporation’s website in a way that would make it easy for staff members to make changes to the online product catalog.  After comparing the usual suspects (WordPress, Joomla! Drupal) and factoring in my own experience on previous projects, we decided that Drupal’s unique mix of growing popularity and powerful administration tools made for a winning combination.

I got to work migrating the page content and coding an xhtml/css Drupal theme to present it all.

Andre Skinner provided me with some photoshop mockups that I used as a guide to build the xhtml/css Drupal theme, exposing some of the features provided by the framework below. The final product makes liberal use of some popular Drupal modules such as ImageAPI, Taxonomy Image, Pathauto and, of course, CCK.

The staff at Fremantle have been diligently updating their page content, changing images around and generally updating their catalog. The site I see on fremantlecorp.com today is very different from the one we delivered a week ago, which in this case is a good thing.

There comes a time at the end of every hardware lease when you have to send your beloved toy back to the nice folks you were borrowing it from. In my case, Dell will be receiving a package this week containing my Inspiron 9300 (17″ bohemuth) workstation. I don’t think Dell needs to know about my personal finances, downloading habits or photos of my family so I decided to wipe the disk.

I burned a Knoppix live CD with said laptop and then like a snake swallowing its tail, booted from that very cd with the intention of blowing everything away. In the past, my demolition tool of choice has always been GNU’s dd utility which can easily erase a block device like so:

(old-style) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024

Running the above command would write a zero to every sector of my drive, in chunks of 1024 bytes. Not for the faint of heart! I had a hunch that upping the block size to something larger (bs=2048?) might yield faster performance so I google’d for it and ended up learning about another tool altogether, my new favourite GNU-ism, shred. From the shred manual:

shred – overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.

Ha! That was exactly what I was looking for, and I found a copy of shred conveniently installed on every Linux machine I had access to. Even my trusty Knoppix live cd had shred installed, so I took it for a spin:

(now with shred!) shred -vzf -n 100 /dev/sda

• -v means verbose
• -z adds a final pass of zeroes after n passes
• -n means 100 times
• /dev/sda is my hard drive (all partitions)

I know that 100 passes is overkill, but hey, I wasn’t pressed for time. Apparently the US Government standard is 7 passes, the shred default is 25.

I love this little tool, I could watch it all day. At 100 passes, I think I might just have to.

My buddy Jon and I shot this video back in October at a high-school on Shaw street in Toronto. A security guard came by while we were shooting and told us we had to stop because the school would be liable if we got hurt. But he eventually caved and let us finish the shoot. Plus, I think he was just jealous of the sweet dunks.

Apart from running the camera, I did the composite effect for the Jordanesque dunk, sound effects, image manipulation and helped out with the edit.