Archive for May 2009
I had lunch with my friend Chris on Saturday. He is a creative art director/consultant, and I thought, “who better to get an opinion from about the graphics and layout of my site than Chris?” Principally, I had a question about the layout of the site’s portfolio page, but I wasn’t really settled on the home page. Well, it didn’t take long for him to move from giving feedback on the portfolio page to suggesting a cleaner design for the entire site. While Chris scribbled sketches of a new site design on the back of an envelope, I started to create a new site–using WebPlusX2. Of course, Chris is a Mac guy, and didn’t forget to give me a number of jabs about how easy the design of the site would have been on a Mac. (Sidebar: my computer is still having the faulty Windows Explorer issue. It has to be reset just about every third time I try to access something in the system tray. I may wander to the Apple store after work this week.)
Anyway, long after Chris left, and well into the night, I committed to revising the look of the site. I thought I would share “before and after” shots.
Before
After
I think it’s pretty straight-forward and clean, but I am interested to getting feedback on this layout. A link to the site can be found in the sidebar. Please share your thoughts in the comments. I want to hear reactions–postitive or negative. Let me just ask that if you a have less-than-favorable reaction or comment, please offer it in the form of constructive criticism.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give Chris an end credit. Check out his creative work at http://www.mchriscurry.com
It’s been raining all evening here in DC. I love rain, and discovered that I really like to capture water at various speeds. Here are a few shots I took of a fountain near the Smithsonian Castle last year.
My very close friend, Dotch, has been an Apple/Mac aficionado since college. I still get a hearty chuckle reflecting on him clearing space and polishing the corner of the dorm desk for his first Mac. Over the years, he’s stayed true to the brand, and I’ve never once heard him cursing at his computer.
Fast forward to the last few weeks with my (knock on wood) trusty Toshiba 17″ wide screen Satellite laptop. The machine itself has been humming along for nearly two years. What’s been giving me increasingly giving me fits, though, is the buggy Windows architecture. (I’m running on Windows Vista Home Premium.) It begin with an occasional hiccup here and there with program compatibility. I bought a few Windows Vista magazines and the tips provide in them seemed to tweak out the goofy stuff. Recently, though, I’ve been nagging little problems. I could see if this was a one off thing. Maybe something happened that my system didn’t like. However, the system alerts has been showing up with some frequency. It seems like nearly every time I point my cursor down to my system tray, I get the hour glass. A couple double clicks later…this stupid alert.
What the…? COME ON!!!!!
Notwithstanding Dotch’s testimonials for the last 20 years about Apple products, I’ve been relatively neutral on the platform issue. I’m not really one for peer pressure or so easily enamored with Apple products. Sure, they’re pretty, but, heretofore, had not discerned a difference in utility between the two platforms . So when I’ve receive a distinct, almost incredulous, “WHAT? You don’t have a Mac?” from follow photographers, I brushed it off. I enjoyed a quiet chortle, observing that all these Mac owners are running programs–Photoshop or Lightroom–that run on PCs in lieu of Apple’s Aperture. What’s the big deal?
At the sake of being redundant, this…
…is becoming a BIG deal!
Starting out in this business is costly enough with the expense of “photography equipment.” However, as I acknowledged in a previous post, in the age of digital photography, a computer is just as much photography equipment as are the camera bodies, lenses, lights and filters. I’m a very patient person, but I have a low threshold for equipment that doesn’t perform as designed. I can’t blame Toshiba, really. It’s the unstable Windows OS that I’m learning deserves all the criticism heaped upon it by Apple and countless numbers of technology writers. After all these years, I think I’ve reached the end of my rope with PCs. A MacBook Pro just may find a home on my lap in the near future.
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