The dance continues!

Phase one of the reorganization is complete. Phase one is an interim phase. Accept no substitute. Supplies are limited. I have unified the design of MyrthCo and laid it onto a 960px 12 column grid, courtesy of the 960 Grid System. It's a lot like Blueprint, but with a lot less (fewer? grammar!) options (i.e. columns).

I say this is interim because while I brought my portfolio pages over the new style, they will eventually be cleaned up even more and moved to tophermcculloch.com. I'm going to move away from the thumbnail/lightbox configuration in favor of straight up large images. More scrolling, less clicking. I'll also have fewer examples but will discuss each more in depth. The new portfolio will be focused more on quality, less on quantity. Retooling my presentation is a big part of the next portfolio phase.

With the portfolioness moving to a new domain, MyrthCo will become more of an experimental playground. It's still going to be my hub, which is why I'm keeping the SweetCron aggregate thing on the front page. I'll start feeding more blog posts into it, and the new portfolio site will also be blog based. Whenever I post a new project, it'll automagically be thumbnailed and tagged into the MyrthCoverse. I'm also going to reformat the blog that is associated with MyrthCo. It's going to pool all my old deajournal and livejournal posts. It's going to be an overly revealing memoir in process. As I work my way through the archives, I'll edit entires and remove the most revealing. It's a race to find the blackmail material!

This was rambly. Anywho, I've not tested the new design across all browsers and the CSS is still in progress. Let me know if you see weirdness. I'll be tweaking as time progresses. Oh! And one of the ideas behind using the grid for the site is to use the same grid for all my sites, but make it modular so things look vaguely related but not the same.

Aggregate!

So here's the plan. I'm going to figure out how to pull updates from my flickr, twitter, miscellaneous blogs, youtube account, and so forth and have them all show up on MyrthCo's front page when I update. It'll be like Facebook's newsfeed, only all about me and my internet addiction.

It's going to be off the chain. As soon as I work out the details. I hope I can work out the details.

Let me show you what I'm working with

The past few weeks have seen me working on a few different web projects. I am putting the final touches on an artist portfolio site for my old painter professor Jen Dietrich. She does really amazing, textural paintings dealing with the themes of Americana seen through the lens of barns, baseball, and Kennedy. Her "Earthly Flesh" series is especially inspiring to me.

When not painting or teaching, Jen is also a filmmaker. I've been helping do a special site/blog for her documentary on Philip Pearlstein, entitled Not Made in Heaven, which is a reference to an article Philip wrote for ArtNews on figure painting in the age of Abstract Expressionism. I really like the simplicity of the film site I'm doing for them. The content is still being shuffled around somewhat.