design

I am the unofficial webmaster for our church community. Last year I had set up a nice fancy wordpress site based on Adam Walker Cleaveland’s Cleaker theme, but I managed to utterly destroy it. I’ve finally gotten around to rebuilding from the ground up. I don’t excel at troubleshooting, so I chose to gut the whole thing (including the database) and begin fresh. Kind of like God did with the flood, with Noah being the spared index file.

Here is the new site. Fresh and simple, it is missing some essential info relating to what we actually do and when, but otherwise it is alive and kicking.

Tags: webdesign, wordpress, rawdon street

Got pointed to this great tool for visualizing publications online. issuu has an incredibly simple and quick process to upload your content and there seems to be a great base of creativity already on the site.

I uploaded this to test it. It is a collaborative online arts mag that I contributed to a couple years ago. Give them pages a turn!

Tags: arts, community

I’ve started working on a website for my church.
Rawdon Street Baptist Church

I’m hoping this can add to our community’s vision to reach our neighbours with love. I dream of it being a hub through the course of our week where we can refocus on our shared goals and experiences.

How long before I quit my job and head off to school… keeps running through my mind. Amy and I both have designs on something, um, grander(?), more luminous(?) more spiritual(?), or maybe just different.

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So I’m surfing various themes trying to find something that fits.
I like this one from here. I may try some alterations.

edit… since I am STILL jumping around looking at various themes and seeing how the looks and feels fit my purposes, the current visualization of this page may not be aligned with the above hyperlink…

I’ve come to a fairly obvious conclusion. The right and left hemispheres of my brain do not like each other. I think I personally get along fairly well with both, but together, they do not want to play nicely. I came to this realization over the last few weeks in this place I now call home… the cubical near the front of the office at Cook where the whir of the laser printer prevents me from fully enjoying my music.

So I’ve been consumed with very technical tasks such as data entry, editing, text layout, orderforms and html over the last few weeks. During this time I was also responsible for a few scattered creative projects (all these projects are creative in some regard, but that said, there is still a distinction to be made) that now have either passed their expected due date or have been passed on to outside design houses. Why did this happen? I can assure you, not because I am not able to create the lovely pieces, but because I can’t start them! I am finding it impossible to switch my brain between the two worlds. I’ve tried to work on one creative piece over and over and it keeps looking like a spreadsheet or something!

So, today, I delivered an ultimatum to myself. Well, I delivered a few… One, I will go home at 6pm. No buts. Two, I will only work on creative projects and keep the printer going. Guess what! The pressure seems to be off! I’m nearing completion of the creative piece. All morning I poured myself into it. I allowed myself to drift around, to experiment, to undo, undo, undo… and I’m now getting somewhere!

I should have the piece done tomorrow, but I will not go back to orderforms until it is in the can. I can not go back and forth. It really drastically affects my creative output. It makes me feel bad about the process too… When doing an orderform you just keep moving. More and more fills the page. But with a creative project there are many points where a once colourful page gets erased and you start over and start over and start over. When in techno-mode I start to believe that maybe I’m failing when actually, it is just part of the process… but it is so easy to forget.

So, my tea is yummy, my artwork is pretty, and there are only 2 hours left in the workday! I feel a bit more successful.