I can honestly say that from the view of the lifeboats I now know exactly what not to do when Icebergs unexpectedly enter the mix. In other words; I am going to handle next semester in a different more successful way. These past three months have been a nightmare of developing course curriculum, grading, juggling studio work, and family. Although all four were addressed and tasks completed, all four suffered. It was a mess that I am still pulling out of. I know that it can be done. That fact that I have finsihed the race at all is a testiment to the viability of the concept. But my process was nieve and not very organzized.

Luckily, I have survived the test and I have somewhat firm ideas to manage the second round.

As a side note: I am thinking about redoing the blogfolio again. I am split between the traffic that I get from making and keeping a blog updated and the self-promo aspect of new clients just wanting to see my work. Most of my new clients say that the blog is a great reflection of my laid-back style and practical “no hidden agenda” approach.

Then again. Some people just want to see work samples. This part is not really me. Not sure, not sure, not sure. Well … like I said, I am thinking about it.

My blog site is not immensely popular, but it has it’s moments. I average about 15K-20K hits a month. There are spikes of course. Every once in a while, somebody with middle eastern connections will trip across the editorial cartoon I did of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This will cause a flurry of comments, which I ignore. (I shut down the comment thread for this blog post a year ago; out of sheer boredom.) Of course the comments and the hits bring relevance to the post in Google’s eyes, which position it higher in the search engine. This means more eyes see it, which feeds its relevance. Again, those who see it, almost without exception, send links of it to their militant friends, which Google watches. Some of these people will post the article, or the caricature link inside a web forum, which will also cause a flurry of inbound links and then subsequent outbound moves to other relevant sites. All of which reflects positively on the page which they just left. (Mine.)

I sometimes wonder if those who are so militantly apposed to the cartoon (going on three years old) realize that they make it popular by visiting it and commenting on it? If you want to kill something on the web, ignore it. It will get buried under a mountain of apathy and nobody will see it. The more you rubberneck a particular post, the more other people will slow down to look at what you are looking at. It is a simple fact. Congrats to Google for quantifying this quirk of human nature into the most powerful search algorithm in the world.

However, this past month Mahmoud took a back seat to a new key-word rising star on my blog. This magic phrase is “bubble butt.” I mean really? How disappointing this hit must be for the ardent connoisseur of bubble butt when he(?) arrives at my post to see the G-rated rant about my anatomical drawing issues. It makes me chuckle a bit to be honest.

People all over the world are searching for criticlal relevant information, and the nexus is Mahmoud Bubble Butt. There’s a cartoon in there someplace. But the mental image is far to powerful to reproduce. Sometimes it is better not to draw what you see in your minds eye. Sometimes it is better to just let go.

I am currently creating a small illustration of a woman holding back a tide of crap from falling out her closet door. The client is a wonderful woman who owns a series of storage facilities (amongst other things). I sought to tone down the overt femininity of this character (read: not draw a bikini model) in an effort to be politically correct. This was my first mistake. I clothed her in baggy clothes, I de-emphasized certain parts of anatomy and I added a little age to the features. Nothing was drastic, but she did look a bit “manly.” When asked if I could make her more feminine in form I said “sure.” So I tucked the shirt in, broadened the hips, pumped up the chest, and dropped about 10 years from her age. I also fixed a number of other issues, but in the process, somewhere, somehow, I gave her bubble butt. I would really like to find a middle ground here.

Phone book ads remind me of protection rackets. “Youz are gonna pay us $650 a month, for your full page display adz. And we promise to cash your check and forget who you are for the next year. And ifs youz nice, and don’t scream too much, weez will actually attempt to get your phone number correct — no extra charge.”

I am creating a new phone book ad for a client to replace last years (freebie) ad that they (the phone book people) screwed up. Freebie is a loose term really. They design it for “free,” although at $8,000 a year it’s hard to call anything free. And the quality of the design is three steps above Bongo the chimpanzee and his amazing finger paints.

To compensate for the screw up, they are giving my client a “free” color upgrade this year. Yes, my client had to live with the awful ad all of last year. (Phone books don’t do reprints.) And yes, my client lost business because of it. But the best the phone book people could do was a color upgrade?

(In my best Tony Soprano voice.) “It’s just bitness, nuttin personal … you understand?”

Speaking of which … when was the last time you used a phone book? It might just be geeky me, but when I need to find a company, I Google it. When my client asked me to look at their ad, I had to quickly dig up the book, which was buried under winter coats and boots. It was placed in this place of respect by my son, who distributed them as a Boy Scout fund raising project last fall, and dropped it here when he walked through the front door. We must have kicked it around for three weeks before the accumulating strata hid its whereabouts from view. Otherwise, I would have had NO clue where to find it.

Which reminds me … I need to add my address and phone number to my big yellow blog header.

It has been a long time coming, and I have not yet reached the point where I can say to myself that it is finished (is there ever such a point?) but I have successfully updated my portfolio and made some navigation changes.

To start off, I killed all the drilling down into specific folders and lumped all my logos and advertising together. I have also brought all my illustration under one umbrella. This should make it easier to view samples and keep navigation simple. I have moved my sculpting portfolio off of this site and I am moving it to another domain. I know this goes contrary to what I was saying earlier this year, but it never felt right to have it sort of frankenstein-ed onto this site. Instead of a blog, however, I think that my sculpting site will be a stand alone informational site. We will see, a lot of this rearranging is still in the air.

Comments or no comments? The rest of this site is open to comments and those of you who read and send “good vibes” my direction are encouraged to keep doing so. A few of you have noticed that I do not have my portfolio open for comments. I am not sure why I choose to do this? It is not like my portfolio is more “formal” than the other parts of my blogfolio. I will think about it. If you want to influence the decision, I can be bribed with M&Ms or you can leave a comment here.

My grandfather had the Sears catalog. During the depression, he would leaf through the pages and dream of things he could never afford. It provided a generation with the catalyst for hope; unbound avarice. Gone is the Sears catalog and their pages of advertising delights, but in our current economic times I gotta admit that I too, turn to a catalog for my hope of better times and looser budgets.

My catalog of choice is ThinkGeek. It is filled with the things that make me go “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna!” Where else can you buy the world most convenient surge protector (the squid), a titanium spork, astronaut ice-cream, and caffeinated soap?
This past week was April fools and like every year, they offered a never before seen product. A Tauntaun sleeping bag. It is the coolest thing ever. Although meant as a joke, it generated enough response that they are actually thinking about creating it for real. Is this America or What? My 5 year old saw it and went crazy. He can’t wait to sleep in the belly of the beast.

This is just another reminder that I am geeky without reproach.

Search engine optimization is the daily dental care of blogging and webwork. While most of us I am sure have regimens that ensure a reluctant nod to SEO, I am sure that there is a great number of us who are annoyed with the bothersome tediousness of making sure everything is google friendly.

I my case, I was still using the broken and frayed stick method of this SEO routine. Wordpress helps. They make it pretty easy to add tags and keep things organized, but I am lazy and (embarrassed) I rarely use categories and tags. I am mostly a “write and post” kind of guy.

So I am trying to fix that problem and I found two plugins that are both easy to use and make a world of difference. One is called Headspace2. It is a meta tool that easily creates and suggests tags and allows custom page specific information to be applied to pages, archives, even themes.

The next plug-in is called Google XML Sitemaps. As most everybody knows Google uses its own secret magic formula for generating search engine results. However we do know that is scrubs for data from sites in a specific way and if if your site doesn’t mix well with the web crawlers you ranking drops. This particular plug in creates Google Friendly sitemaps that ensures that Google has the most up-to-date info every time you add delete or update a post. What is even better about this plug-in is the Ron Popeil “Set it and forget it” nature. It just works in the background as you write.

I run through these blog clients every couple of years. I think the Idea is to make blogging more accessible by giving us a simple interface from our desktops that allow us to post “on the run” without having to actually be logged into our blog site. Of course, my question to this is; “I’m not logged into my website? Is there anything wrong with this picture? I am constantly logged into my site, and Facebook and Twitter as well as a few others … 99% of the time.”

There is the argument, that if I had a blog client maybe I could let go of all these log-ins and concentrate on the blogging. Which is why I test them. The determining factor as to whether it stays active in my dock mostly boils down to a few features that I like and some others that I don’t and on which side of that weighted equation wilI the software fall.

We will see if my life gets more or less simple.

BLOGO link

Advertising is great. I make a pretty good living at providing new suits for fledgling products. It is a world that is constantly changing and evolving. There are new technologies, new tools and new media to exploit for the greater evil and nefarious advertising plan of global consumerism. (Stumbling into an abrupt segue) So it should not be a surprise that I would post a link here on my blog of a great example of new media greatness.

It is called Dr. Horribles Sing Along Blog.

As geeky and strange as I freely admit that I am within my closeted circle of friends, This show is just weird times ten. Therefore I love it and have bookmarked, RSS feeded, digged, and now outbound-linked it to geeky stardom. It ranks up their with my other web serial passion The Guild.

Could it be that I have a middle-age crush on Felicia Day? Pass out the pocket protectors and over clock my motherboard, I am hopeless.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming (sigh).

Is it just me or do all the sites created by designers and ad agencies start to look the same after a while? A giant blur of super slick flash based professionalism that has all the personality of white noise. Not all sites are this way, there are exceptions of course.

This past month or so, as I was assembling my new version of this web site; trying to make my life simpler by combining bits and parts of other sites that I own, I kept reviewing what I liked and didn’t like about what I saw on the web and came up with a personal site plan for my own:

I am a blogger. There I said it. It is out and I am proud of it. Is it SOOOOO bad to have a real unvarnished face on your site that has not been combed and spit polished to the point where it is interchangeable with a dozen other sites? Most of my clients, who honestly don’t spend a lot of time here, say they see the sites point blank, laid back, casual frankness as a true reflection of me.

I do a lot of varied things. All of it is commercial art in one form or another. Somebody told me when I was in art school that I needed to specialize. I suspect that he was right. However, I make a darn good living (Well, from OK to darn good depending on the month) doing my version of commercial art. My version includes Illustration, some logo work, advertising design, some web work, teaching and sculpting. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know that it is an eclectic mish-mash of specialties. The people who do work for me often raise their eyebrows in disbelief when I explain what we are going to do next. But it is what it is, and I’m good at it. I’m not going to reinvent design as we know it, but I am having fun so get off my case about it already.

My portfolio is (and should) reflect all of the above. It should also be easy to update and annotate as well as to navigate. My portfolio before was laid out across the top of this page in various sections and was a bit of a pain to add things to and the scrolling was obnoxious. It was also centered around illustration, which was cool, it is a major portion of my business but it also limited me (see above). So I have unashamedly combined all my portfolios together. They are in clear sections under one tab and you can jump around at will. If you don’t want to see illustration or sculpting, don’t look at them. If you are looking for advertising but find yourself sneaking peaks at my illustration; I won’t tell, your secret is safe with me.

So what does this give us? Well, this site doesn’t have flash (not that I couldn’t have incorporated flash into it.) and I am OK with that. It doesn’t have all the spit and polish of a designer heavy site. I am OK with that too. The portfolio is eclectic which is a reflection of my studio, and I am OK with that.

It is almost exactly what I need. Which means I will be making little changes for months. But it is not your typical corporate motion media design site, with the inevitable “click here to enter” button at the bottom.

For all intents and purposes it is the anti-site. And I am OK with that most of all.