It has left a layer of black fuzz on every surface, including my eyeballs.

More materials coming in soon, and then a marathon session of putting together the limited edition box set by hand.

www.jotastula.com has been one of my favorite sites to build, and it’s been a slow build for sure. I started collaborating with the client in 2007 when I was still developing in Flash, and we came up with a whimsical site where buttons swim away and it left options open to add in more sections as time went on and her needs changed.

I no longer create Flash sites, and nearly all of my past Flash clients have since gone through HTML/PHP rebuilds. www.jotastula.com is an active site that gets frequent updates and plenty of traffic and by all means is a candidate for a rebuild, but neither the client nor I have the heart to take it apart. In fact, we made recent plans to add more whimsical buttons to accommodate some eCommerce opportunites.

So instead, we’re problem solving as issues come up like the incompatibility of Flash with iPhone and iPad. This prompted me to finally get serious about playing with Media Queries and style sheeting for Mobile Safari and other handheld browsers. It was a much gentler transition than I ever imagined, and it has bought us a little more time — hopefully years — before we are forced to dismantle our little aquatic world of navigation buttons that wave their claws over their heads.

The blog is quiet but it’s BUSY here. Somehow a 12 day vacation took place which felt extremely decadent but necessary. Now back in the thick of things, the desk is covered with such projects as bottle silkscreen designs, sites for iPhones, sweatband embroidery, kayak photo shoots, packaging for a soon-to-be-announced documentary, illustrations of kids with skinny legs, and a website that I’m so excited to release it makes me all a-tremble.

More on all of the above some time soon….

For those of you who visited my last studio space, I assure you this one is not only warmer (how could it not be?) but this one also allows such fantastical activities as lifting your arms up away from your sides without crashing into anything.

The boxes are nearly unpacked and the French press is rocking, so if you’re in the neighborhood come say ahoy hoy:
1777 Yosemite Avenue
Suite 230
San Francisco, CA 94124

When I put a sketch together for ActorCast, I even tricked myself into thinking I had created a clean layout for a simple template solution. It was only when I tried to tackle the magazine-style layout that featured the most recent article in a feed for the home page that things turned ugly.

Starting with my secret weapon Thematic, I began the process of branding and customization. Along the way, a wave of insanity struck me and I realized the design was a perfect candidate for programming a fluid layout which I had wanted to attempt for ages. This means that dimensions for all elements are established in percentages instead of pixels or ems. This means that your brain begins to fall out when you have to account for fluid divs that need to stack. The payoff is a layout that still has adequate white space to soothe the eye, but will accommodate a screen of any size instead of looking shrimpy on a large screen and bloated on a laptop.

The magazine layout required PHP on a level I had never attempted before. The final function sheet grabs the most recent post from the database and slaps custom CSS tags on it to display all of its elements at a more prominent size and style for all elements within. This seems easy until you consider that the featured image in this area is receiving unique size conditions, and having a featured post that looks like it spans two columns requires an odd number of posts for the feed on the home page. All other pages have even numbers of posts. Genius friends Patrick and Dave helped push me in the right direction to get all of the code working.

Even with all of those kinks worked out, final details to make the fluid post divs stack correctly had to be dealt with because post excerpts differ in length and thereby change the height of all the post divs. After all of the PHP and CSS is applied, one last step in the DOM script is put in place by good old jQuery to set simple “clear:left;”s on the odd posts to make it all work. jQuery has become my 11th hour savior when things get weird and my PHP and CSS skills have hit a wall.

Final result is a site that looks clean, and simple, and runs on code that I’m really proud of writing. No one can really see it, but I know it’s in there. And most importantly, the client likes it.
ActorCastBlog.net

I created a Flash-based site for Karma Travel a couple years ago, and they re-hired me to design a WordPress template so that they could blog about their services as well. I’ve been busy working on a lot of child themes lately, but I particularly enjoyed this one because of its quirky challenges and ease with which it came together.

When I get hired to create a WP templates, I do the wireframing, design and coding, so you would think I’d be a little more savvy about proposing designs without major php challenges. Some evil part of me always manages to create designs that are just a little beyond my coding skills, so every template offers its own learning curve and share of profanities.

Some items that are now a solid part of my toolbox: sticky footers, oddly shaped content framing, playing with WP3′s featured image functionality, and finally taking advantage of author blurbs.