My favorite holidays are the ones that involve food. Which—come to think of it—is most of them. As the trees changed color and the temperature rose (Bay Area, your weather is kinda weird) I excitedly broke out the Halloween cookie cutters and tried to recruit people to decorate. It resulted in some abstract expressionist cookie icing jobs towards the end, but we were proud of our pile. Happy Halloween everyone!
Ghost Town
A Year Deeper Into This Mortal Coil
Gallery-focused Custom WordPress Theme
It’s hard to believe that we started working on this a year ago. Julia and I have been enthusiastic about launching her website and have continued chipping away at it whenever we can. We finally did a soft launch a few weeks ago in time for the holidays, and are smoothing out the rough edges and responding to feedback as necessary.
Julia is an incredible artist and keen on being involved with every aspect of her business. In order to have the freedom to update her ever-growing jewelry galleries and promote her shows and new product lines, WordPress seemed like the obvious web solution.*
Julia’s work is so strong that my challenge was to build a framework that could feature her pieces without competing with them. We created a minimal theme that shows off the color, detail and texture of her pieces, and customized a gallery plugin for clean, easy browsing for the viewer. Next we’re building a custom post type to make it even simpler for Julia to update it all, but hopefully that step will take much less than 12 months.
*If you know me, you’ll probably hear me declare that WordPress is the solution to just about everything except leaky burritos, but in this case it really was a practical decision.
Jortzing it up in Monterey
Sam & Caitlin of Team Jorts had their first cyclocross race of the season yesterday, so Will and I went along to support them. Though, by “support” I actually mean we waved cowbells wildly about, ate sandwiches and fell asleep in the car. But we were awfully proud of them when they kicked so much ass that they placed 2nd and 3rd in their division, which confused the bajeezuz out of the other competitors who seem to estimate one’s physical prowess based on the ratio of lycra to cotton on one’s person. The winners celebrated with what will hopefully become the traditional dollar grab.
PCZ Portfolio Site
I think if my neighbors weren’t already sick of hearing me yell “I love jQuery!” from time to time, then the last two weeks definitely drove them over the edge. I absolutely love swirling jQuery around in WordPress, and a web facelift for the artist Philip Zimmerman called for a lot of swirling.
Philip’s art is incredibly special, and a run-of-the-mill portfolio site was out of the question. He put together a really challenging and well thought out list of requests, requirements, parameters and wishes for what the new site would look like. It was a lot of fun to meet the challenge of organization and presentation, while keeping everything clean and tidy.
We collaborated really well and created a site that we both love. We’re still loading it with content as we catch up on several years’ worth of shows, articles and images that never made it on to his last site.
Mud pot cake
The latest contender for the Weird Cake Catalog. Made for a special occasion, and intended to be an homage to the very real phenomena of the mud pot.
If you have not yet experienced the wonderful weirdness of the mud pot, behold the real thing in action at left.
The edible version consisted of Ghirardelli chocolate cake and frosting made from scratch, chocolate ganache filling, a couple Whopper malt balls, and a truffle tossed into the middle.
Costa clamshell album
This started as a simple album for family photos, so I decided to complicate it by creating a case as well. Then I decided to complicate the case by integrating it with the album, and ended up with several pages of measurements, sketches and glue blobs. The end result fit neatly together, with plenty of room for the album to expand with photos and open comfortably on a table. I got to play with the laser cutter at Pagoda down the road to create the nameplate on the spine, and am now packing it up to be shipped to its home in Oregon.
skyline ride
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