I'm currently a Designer Director at USWEB/CKS. I has been involved in
numerous projects,
including Sony Music, Guess? Jeans, DEP Gel, Columbia Tristar Television and etc.. Throughout my career,
I has worked with a variety of entertainment companies, including Columbia Tristar, Disney,
Warner Brothers, Castlerock Entertainment, FX Network, Paramount Pictures
and Jim Henson Productions.
including Sony Music, Guess? Jeans, DEP Gel, Columbia Tristar Television and etc.. Throughout my career,
I has worked with a variety of entertainment companies, including Columbia Tristar, Disney,
Warner Brothers, Castlerock Entertainment, FX Network, Paramount Pictures
and Jim Henson Productions.
on life and design:
Take it easy and live one day at a time.
Simplicity and focus is the keyword of a woderful design.
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One Site, One Day, One Buck I believe it was Lynne Cheney who told me: "There's fast, there's cheap, and there's good. You can have two out of three." I would invariably opt for fast and cheap, my chiseled American head held high. Sure, fast and cheap often gives us shoddy results, but they are results nonetheless, and I've applied this lesson to all aspects of my life. One of the few family-friendly examples of this lifestyle came about recently when I had to build a quick 'n' dirty website. After finding myself jobless due to "creative differences" (I thought setting up Caribbean-based dummy corporations and selling office supplies at a 300 percent markup was being creative, the boss didn't), I was hitting the pavement, applying for pretty much any job that didn't involve handling raw, unfrozen meat products. This is how I ended up getting a call from InterGlobe AudioWorks, which was looking for a copyeditor. "The spelling in your cover letter was almost completely without error," the guy on the phone said. "So why don't you give me a URL of your resume, some writing samples, some references, that sort of thing, and I'll run it up the flagpole." Terror gripped me then, sweet and pure. This was my one and only lead after months of searching and I had no URL, no online place to store my almost completely fabricated resume, my prolix and profane writing samples, my references consisting of paid family members and prison penpals. I barked out my trademark shrill laugh to stall for time, then said something about the site being down for maintenance and that I'd call him first thing in the morning with the address. I hung up the phone with shaking hands. I was doomed. I'd only made one website before — Bea All You Can Bea: The Bea Arthur Showcase & Marketplace — and that'd taken me fourteen months thanks to extreme levels of perfectionism and incompetence. Plus, I'd been unemployed so long I'd forgotten what dry erase markers smell like, and thus: no money in the bank. And websites cost, what, ten thousand dollars to make, just for starters? But after finishing the bottle of Old Granddad I calmed down, looked at the clock: I had 24 hours to get a fully functional website up and running, paid for with the $1.02 in change I'd found in the fountain downtown. And build a site I did. Indeed! Want to see how I swung it? Follow along at home as I detail the steps I took to get the site off the ground. (I'll even throw in a list of inexpensive site-building applications, just to show you how much I care.) You might find my nightmarish ordeal useful if you ever find yourself needing to quickly get something on the Web — a corporate page, a portfolio, a brochure, or even just a birthday haiku for your mom since you forgot to send a card. Brainstormy Weather 9AM - Noon Nothing like a soothing nap to focus my thoughts. Noon - 1PM I sketched some plans on the inside cover of What Color Is Your Parachute 1994. I just needed a simple site with a handful of pages, nothing fancy — table of contents, resume, writing samples, references, a bio, some contact information. Then maybe a nice logo up top and some pictures to liven things up, make it memorable to the bigwigs at AudioWorks. I had most of the written content already on my computer (except the writing samples, which I'd need to manufacture), but I had to find a way to make some images and get a picture in digital format. And then all this needed to be plugged into HTML and uploaded ... somewhere. I needed a scanner, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, ImageReady, my own Web server, my own domain name, a MySQL database whatever that is, a Sun Workstation, on and on. But no, no, I remembered that the Internet was all about circumventing copyright laws and getting free stuff. And I really didn't need anything fancy, no Flash intros, no DHTML drop-down menus, no JavaScript-fueled chicanery. Just some simple code for three or four pages. Each page needed a consistent look and navigation, so I really only needed to come up with one design, and thus one HTML template. But I certainly didn't have time to build that from scratch, not with my track record. So I had to swipe the code from someplace else, or stand on the shoulders of giants, as I call it. 1PM - 2PM I fired up the computer and start hunting around for some HTML to "borrow." For budgetary purposes, I'm going to assume that you already have access to a computer with an Internet connection so we won't have to include those costs. Maybe you're reading this article on a free library terminal or in a computer store or over the shoulder of an employed friend — doesn't matter. As long as you can pilfer some time on it for your own dark purposes, it works for me. Now, I could've probably gotten away with stealing someone else's code since only a few people were going to see my site. But a) the gnawing guilt would've interfered with my already shaky interviewing skills, b) there is the off chance that my potential employer would've visited the original site ("I see you also frequent vaselinepix.com, Mr. Allen"), and c) deciphering the HTML of someone else's site is usually a lengthy and baffling experience for me. So I did the honest thing and searched for some pre-fab Web templates that I could use guilt-free. Juggling Templates |