The US Campaign for Burma is still kicking with daily videos showcasing Burma’s fight against its military junta.
The above video is a collaborative effort. Isaiah Seret wrote and directed the video. Our nomadic homie Alexander Kori Girard created the drawings and hand-drawn type. I put all the pieces together, added the type cards and laced it all with a bright shiny ribbon. Jesse Klein edited it. and that’s Beirut on the track with “The Penalty”.
Again, do yourself a favor and watch it in high quality, under the lower right hand side of the video.
More on Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced kinda like “on son sue chee”).
This is a return to ‘form’ of sorts. Photography-wise, I’ve been experimenting with knocking the contrast and saturation down, intentionally making the images more flat. I’m tired ‘a that. Also, these are two images from a larger forthcoming series on losing local breaks to unchecked real estate development here in Nayarit.
I posted about Isaiah Seret’s Hitler is Alive in Burma spot (starring Ellen Page) a few days ago, from the Burma Can’t Wait campaign. Now check out another spot of his entitled Voices (do yourself a favor and go watch it on YouTube and click on the High Quality version, unfortunately there’s no hard-link to the HQ). This spot goes completely in the opposite direction of the Hitler piece. I love it.
The music is by Vetiver - “You May Be Blue (Neighbors Remix)”
– I did the type cards on this one. nothing fancy. minimal, to the point.
Latif just won the Pulitzer for the above photograph of japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai (of APF), as he lays dying, videoing Burmese troops attacking protestors, after just having been shot. Nagai later died. Latif weaves a lucid context for the photo in the Guardian article.
On a side note: this hits close to home for all the obvious reasons but also for the fact that recently I’ve been helping my homie Isaiah Seret on a psa campaign for the situation in Burma and the FREE BURMA movement. Isaiah is writing, directing, producing and editing several spots and I’ve been handling art-direction and on-screen graphics for a few of them. Too early to show, just yet. Isaiah’s campaign hits the subject matter from several different angles, each one more creative than the next. It’s a watershed project for him, and I can’t wait to see the entire campaign assembled.
My old Camp Sloane buddy, Darius, runs a non-profit soccer initiative for kids. He’s starting a new collaborative network for organizations similar to his and he needed a new logo, I gave him four options. Let’s see whish one he digs.
These hand-painted signs appear all over our corner of Mexico. They mostly advertise traveling Banda bands (think polka with heavy latin brass and rhythm sections) that are coming to the area. These signs change monthly and sometimes weekly. Palenques (cock fights) are also advertised as well. They’re always colorful, sometimes well done, other times totally sloppy and rough (those must be the monday morning ones). I’m beginning a series on these signs and since I started the project I’ve been religiously vigilant for news ones, new styles and old favorites.
Mexico is an endless landscape of hand-painted folk typography, I’m really gonna miss it in 10 years when everything is hastily designed and printed on cheap vinyl.
We finally got around to launching my sister’s new wedding photography website: www.elfoto.org. She’s been living down here in Bucerias for the past few months and trying to make it a permanent thing, shooting lots of weddings recently and her work is top notch. If you or any of your friends are thinking about getting married soon, think about Beth. Her site intro text says it all:
Destination wedding photography by Puerto Vallarta based photographer Elizabeth Lloyd. Contemporary wedding photography in areas as diverse as Chacala, Sayulita, San Pancho, Punta Mita, Yelapa, Las Caletas, Careyes, Huatulco, Cancun, Mayan Riviera, Cozumel and Los Cabos. Also, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Florida and more. Documentary style. Candid, evocative and totally natural.
As for the site, I’ve been tweaking it and getting it just right for awhile now. Like my photography site, it runs on Slideshow Pro and Director. The design is minimal and tries to frame the photos well, while staying out of the way.
Ok, so I’ve finally launched my photographic portfolio site. So what’s so different about the new site then the one you’re reading now? Well, first off, this was always meant to be my blog, a journal of sorts, to record the daily events of my life. I like photos with writing that firmly plants the photos in context. I host my images on Flickr and participate in the Flickrverse. My modus operandi has always been to tell a story, photos don’t necessarily need to be technically good in the classic sense as long as they help move the story along. In contrast, my portfolio site was created to display just the very best of my photos. In a simple, easy to use interface. no links, no blog roll, no widgets, no fuss. Sometimes you just gotta go with less. So edfladung.com is a more minimalist jawn. Just the best of the best.
Technically, it runs on wordpress and uses slideshowpro/director to run the photo slideshows. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get slideshowpro to work nicely with flickr using Brian Sweeting’s flickrssp. It seemed like a great idea and after some serious code finagling I got the mashup to work, but not in the way I had wanted. So, I scrapped flickrssp and chose to use slideshowpro director. This created a small problem in that I have to upload images twice, once to flickr and second to the new site, but it was a small sacrifice to be able to present the photos as I have intended.
Underneath the hood, is a fully functional wordpress blog with the comments turned off and all meta data hidden. There are no archive pages (category, date, etc…). Everything else is essentially the same. The latest gallery shows up on the home page. Using All in One SEO plugin, I add keywords to each gallery that then show up as meta keywords in the html header. This allows me to describe the content of each slideshow for search engines and crawlers. Each gallery has an excerpt that describes the content of the photos (with screenshot), that shows up in the rss feed.
My sister needed a new brand identity for her work down here in Mexico, so I happily busted out a new logo, cards, flyers etc… for her. We definitely get on each others’ nerves when we work together, but the outcome is usually pretty good. I posted the process on her logo as well (view large). One of these days she’ll get around to finalizing her photos, so we can launch her new website.
My friend Molly asked me to redesign a logo for one of the (many) non-profits she works for. It’s called “Art & Philanthropy”, the organization teaches kids art and sells the work of several artists, with profits going directly towards philanthropic causes. Unfortunately, the organization didn’t like my version, so it remained tucked away inside one of my hard drives, until today! I posted some process for this one as well (view large).
Roots, our favorite little veg joint, is growing. Roots will be three years old this summer, in restaurant years, that’s like early 20’s. With it’s 3rd birthday, comes a new location and brand identity, logo, menus etc… Andrew asked me to whip up a logo for the new identity, so over a 3 or 4 month period (about a year ago) we went back and forth and came up with the new logo. I’ve posted my process, since there were a lot of directions I went in that I particularly liked (it’s best seen large). Since there was no real rush, it was nice to let the logo marinate on the back burner, putting in a few hours here and there, every few weeks. The M.O. of the logo changed on a weekly basis, so it was great to have an extended time frame to work on it. In the middle of the process, our buddy Ro joined Andrew as a partner in Roots and entered into the mix as well.
I’m fascinated by small living spaces. David and Im’s “One Space” is way cool. it was featured in Dwell’s May07 issue. I’ve been thinking about doing something like this in the Bucerias/Sayulita area for awhile now. Very small spaces (around 600 sq. feet) sharing a common lot, minimalist construction with warm mexican touches. I’m still in the formulatin’ stage, but this could be so much fun. who’s down?
Now that my new site is up and running, I have decided to generify the design and clean up the code a little bit, add some documentation and release it as a Word Press theme. It’s based off of a theme called Qwilm! designed by Lokesh Dhakar and rebuilt by Oriol Sanchez. I remixed the theme, added a bit of typographicalization and a dash of code politely-appropriated from Kubrick (the default wp theme). I’m calling it QPwilm!
It’s definitely for the 1024×768 and 1280×1024 crowd, but it’s got qwilm!’s elasticity for smaller monitors. i ♥ big type. next up, i’m working on getting the theme fully validated. Since I made this theme to suit my own site, it features varying out-of-the-box support for a bunch of handy wp plugins and widgets, which pretty much makes it WP 2.1 and above. The template pages detect if a plugin is installed, so the theme is essentially plugin independant, which means that you can use or not use any of the following plugins at your descretion:
My brother-from-another-mother Mr. Isaiah Seret is part of a group that teaches meditation to young adults in prison. It’s called “The Mind Body Awareness Project” or MBA Project. Isaiah had been asking me to help him design the site for eons. One day he showed me what he had in mind, later that day I whipped up a photoshop comp for him and a few days later, this is the result. It wasn’t much effort on my part, just a small exercise of my pshop design chops to give it a decidedly Web 2.0 flair and then Isaiah handed the comps off to Xhtmlized to code the site out. They choose TextPattern as a back-end which is great. The site still has some rough edges, but overall I think they did a good job bringing static comps to life. And The MBA Project has a nice professional looking site that they can update themselves. Very very cool.
Ok, Mosbef.com is up and operational. I’ve been hacking away at this site for a little over two weeks now. most of the time has been spent thinking through exactly how: to create a photography portfolio site using a blog system that was primarily designed for text; make it easy enough for my technophobe sister to update and manage; making the look and feel as minimal as she would like and last but not least - keeping some semblance of meta data on the site so that google searches can find content. This was a tall order. After several redesigns and one picky client, the final site is up, lots of tweaking still left to do. Thanks to the brilliance of Word Press and BB Edit, the final build took no more then a couple of hours. Go Word Press.
To handle image uploads I installed Daikini Software’s Photon plugin for iPhoto. This allows Beth to upload to Word Press straight from iPhoto. She can make albums of images and then upload specific sizes. easy as pie. She’s a visual girl. I spent about 3 days playing with Flickr-Gallery, a plugin for WP that allows you to display and navigate your Flickr photos directly from within your own branded site. I never actually got the plugin to work correctly and from studying the php file that controls everything, I realized it would be next to impossible to alter the content of the output of the file, given my (relative lack of) experience with php programming. Flickr-Gallery makes it easy for you to alter the design of the output, but not the contents. [note to self: must learn php.] But Flickr is such a strong web app that one of these days someone will code an easy to install and easy to customize Word Press plugin for Flickr. Until then, my solution will have to do.
The design of the site was a two week struggle with my sister to come up with something that was as minimal as she would like while still retaining some sort of functionality and usability. Obviously she was using other photography portfolio websites as examples, but I was trying to rethink the photography portfolio. Most photography sites I go to have terrible usability. It’s like they have a beautiful design but the usability is from 10 years ago. You can’t sort images you can’t search images, there’s no text anywhere and meta data isn’t even on the radar. So why not give the viewer more options? Is it really necessary to force the user to view your portfolio as one would in a book? After seeing a close version of the final design with a bit more text, Beth said to me that she didn’t want it so “designy” and she didn’t want so much text, it had to be more about the photos then anything else. But I think she was wrong. To her it was more about the static page being as minimal as possible, rather then it being about giving the user enough options to see as many photos as possible and using things like type size, color and contrast to subdue the type and bring out the images. For instance: in her music category, she has atleast 15 famous MCs and DJs she has photographed. Not your flavor of the month here today but gone tomorrow one-hit wonders, but true underground hip-hop super heroes. This is no small achievement.
One of the ideas that i had was to have a list of the people at the bottom of the main index page, so that people could navigate a few separate ways, by main menu or by a secondary people menu. I cut this feature, ultimately, because there is so much more content then just the hip-hop people and I didn’t want to add emphasize to just the ‘music’ section. But my feeling is still that you can present people with more then one way to navigate a photography portfolio site without cluttering and detracting from the images, which I agree, should be the overwhelming major emphasis by far. But just as an aside, look at the site for Michael Muller. This is a non-linear approach and works well for showing his high-gloss images in a simple and sophisticated way, while still letting the user decide how he/she wants to view the images.
In the end, I think we came to a pretty good balance: me, the graphic designer and Beth, the photographer. playing nice.
Hi, my name is Ed Fladung, I'm a recovering web-designer who moved to Mexico about 4 years ago. Learned to surf, got married and bought a nice camera. This is my weblog/photoblog. It covers broad subjects like becoming an ex-pat, surfing, photography, graphic design, music, art, architecture, living in mexico, all things Apple and WordPress related, etc... You can find more about me here. I hope you enjoy.
Powered by WordPress and my own home-rolled flavor of the Qwilm! theme. I call it the QPwilm! theme and you can download it if you'd like. This is my 4th iteration past the publicly available QPwilm! theme.
