ainGide.com - The portfolio of James Gerlach…yep.

Attempt number two. I wanted to keep the garden theme going, but the next one may go in a different direction.

So here’s my first attempt. It took a bit to get used to the bloated XHTML and CSS (they were designed to make it easy to edit for novices) but the final version turned out well…it has a very 2.0 vibe, but it’s kinda cool.

So I’ve come up with an interesting (insane?) exercise to push my design abilities and time management skills: 5 sites in 5 days.

I’m going to take the skeleton of the Zen Garden site and produce five very different designs via CSS. The plan is to go in cold…start each day with a blank sketchpad and go to town. The clock will begin at 9 a.m. and end at midnight. I will post the results of each day when I finish the project or the clock strikes midnight, whichever comes first.

The experiment starts tomorrow and it should be pretty interesting. Stay tuned!

Click here to view it at Newgrounds.

My little flash animation has made a bigger splash than I expected. Front page of Newgrounds, a Daily Feature, in the Weekly Top 20, More than 70k views, and two people have contacted me to do work for their site! Thanks to everyone who enjoyed it enough to vote!

Welcome!

So this is it. My senior exhibition. There are probably questions…several questions, particularly from the faculty grading this monstrosity. I will try my damndest to address them, but for a brief overview you can head on over to the about page to see some design rationale and other background information. After that you can view the work section.

Okay, so why did I choose an online site instead of exhibiting in the Tweed? As I was gathering ideas from student exhibitions over the last few semesters I noticed that digital pieces displayed on TVs, projectors, laptops, etc. were often skimmed over. That’s not what I wanted for this show as a decent part of my work is animated, interactive, or generally digital in nature. Also, at best there would probably be a few hundred people viewing my work in the Tweed, while there will potentially be several thousand viewing the work here, and eventually/hopefully tens of thousands as both it and I grow and change.

There have been a couple of issues with this online format, however. For one, it’s difficult to convey a sense of scale without making some work indecipherably small to create contrast with larger pieces. Second, deciding on the amount of work to show was difficult. There is really a ton of stuff here compared to what would be shown in the Tweed, but I consulted some faculty and other artists and the consensus seemed to be that that navigating this amount of work is not that difficult since everything is pretty clean in terms of layout. The last issue I had was in designing the space. I’ve rationalized the design on the about page, but the gist is that it gels with my experiment on branding, the details of which can be found on that same page.

Lastly, feel free to comment…if the comments haven’t been shut off due to the spam filter mechanism thingy. Hurray for technology!

I’m running into a bug so comments are closed for the time being.

After a few weeks of messing around with WordPress, a wonderful blogging engine, I have finally converted my sloppy Dreamweaver HTML site to this sexy XHTML behemoth that will hopefully take me far, far into the future with few browser compatibility issues.

By the way, SCREW INTERNET EXPLORER. A huge chunk of my time was spent getting this beast to look right in that piece of shit. Every other browser on every other platform was fine, but IE6 mangled a lot of the code. Seriously, no native support for transparent PNGs? There are so many hacks needed to get something “working” well in IE6 it’s absurd. Grr.