I have not been producing much photography in the past two months. This morning at breakfast, I felt a pang of guilt when I laid eyes at the camera sitting on my table.

So, I wrote it a letter.

Dear Camera,

I know you have been feeling very lonely as of late without my hands wrapped around your shiny, black plastic case. I know that you miss our frequent outings to new and exciting places. I know you reminisce the times I introduced you to all my friends and how great it must feel when they ask to hold you. Or the pride you feel when you show them how beautiful they really are, both inside and outside.

I miss those days, too. Alas, I have gone through a major transition in my life and I seem to have lost my voice. I look at you and look at the world around me and I ask myself, “What now?”

Though, do not despair, for I will soon find what it is I am trying to say and I will soon introduce you to many friends and many scenes and share many experiences with you.

For I must.

Video from The Harsh Desert Exhibition

My friend Stacy Wiedmaier recorded this video of The Harsh Desert’s opening gala. It is quite amusing listening to their conversation regarding which pieces are popular with what demographic.

I missed out on all the excitement of my first exhibition, because I was in the Philippines conducting training with the 31st MEU. Many thanks to the people that made my exhibition possible, Stacy, Michael, Juan, Ryan, and especially Rick. Rick was going through intensive chemotherapy during the duration of my exhibition, but somehow managed to wake up at 5 in the morning to conduct an interview with KMIR 6. I am grateful for what he has done and for putting such a classy exhibition in my absence.

The Harsh Desert opened with critical and popular acclaim in February, 2008. It has had a successful run and I am definitely ready for a bigger exhibition. I am planning a much bigger exhibition of my work for this year’s season, one that will encompass more of my work and not just from Iraq. Though, I will most likely still use the stronger and emotional pieces from the previous exhibitions in the new ones. The question is, of course, is finding an appropriate venue that can accommodate the scope of the exhibition. Choices, choices.

The different paths an artist chooses to take in his eventual creation of art is a journey that has long held a fascination for me. The processes undertaken, the challenges faced, or the relationships that grew or suffered or neglected in the pursuit of art, some of the questions that not sufficiently explored when discussing most art forms.

Art permeates our lives and do have consequences, whether in the enthusiastic consumption of it or the joyful, pride-filled creation of it. We must not content ourselves in being mere passive consumers of art, but must be active explorers of its various consequences. Not only must we critique the art, we must also critique the profound effects it has in our lives.

I created Articles to explore the consequences of art. I solicit contributions from various artists, writers, and anyone involved in any creative endeavor to explore these questions. What sacrifices have they made for their art? How has their art changed lives? No topic or question is taboo or irrelevant.

In the first issue of “Articles,” we are joined by Linda Woods, best-selling author of JOURNAL REVOLUTION and Visual Chronicles: The No-Fear Guide to Creating Art Journals, who encourages us to “be the boss of your own art”; long-time blogger Liz Fine who shares with us her exploration into the consequences blogging has had in her life; and digital artist Devin Swick who explores the processes that went into his art.

→ Read Jayel Aheram’s “Articles.”

→ Got something to contribute? Send your writing to Jayel Aheram.

Though plans for Copyfascism Watch were in the works long before its official launch, the logo made its debut even before the first post was drafted. In fact, the logo was created long before I had even settled the question of where will I be hosting the blog — I finally decided on hosting my blog in the Ludwig von Mises Institute Community, where I hope to differentiate myself from the copyleftists that make up the bulk of the copyfight.

My first attempt at the logo consisted of swiping the Mises crest from the Institute’s website (without permission, of course) and super-imposing faded copyright symbols on it. The font color is inspired by the color scheme of the Mises crest, with its rich red and blue hues. The font face I chose was Courier New, a font with strong associations with the United States military. It is, by regulation, the standard font used in nearly every page of the official documents and correspondence typed up, printed, and delivered by motivated company clerks to and from their superiors. The simple banality of the font, with its traditional typeface and utterly conformist fixed-width, will serve to emphasize the utter, yet dangerous, dullness of copyfascism. It is Serif! It is fixed-width! It looks like it belongs to a type-writer! It is perfect! The logo lasted two weeks before I decided that a better, simpler logo was sorely needed.

I spent a grand total of fifteen minutes creating the first version of the Copyfascism Watch logo. While I do not regret creating it (I never regret any creative expression), I did feel that I can do a lot better. In the second attempt to create the blog’s logo, I made sure to review what it was that I did right in the first logo and see if I reuse some of the design elements in the next attempt. I did not feel like reinventing the wheel; I just wanted to make it better. The font face, Courier New, stayed. Its simplicity and all of its Serif, fixed-width glory (as well as its military associations) emphasizes the banality of copyfascism itself (I will admit, intellectual property is considered neither exciting nor sexy). The color scheme remained the same, with the word “fascism” highlighted in blood red. Beyond the font face and the font color, however, nothing was left of the old design.

The one that needed to go was the Mises crest. It was too strong of a design element for it to belong in a proper logo (at least, the Copyfascism Watch’s logo). And the way I implemented the design made it seem that the Institute was guilty of copyfascism or was that it was any way associated with the blog besides hosting it and inspiring the ideology driving its articles. My attempts to incorporate the copyright symbol into the original design failed miserably because of my inclusion of the Mises crest; there was no room for two aesthetically-opposite logos. By removing the Mises crest and making the copyright symbol a very prominent part of the new logo, I was able to solve two pressing problems: how to inform the casual visitor the purpose and subject of the blog (i.e., copyright, intellectual property) and scalability. Being a universally recognized symbol, the copyright symbol lends its meaning to the logo. Also, at any size, my logo will work; I can resize it the size of a billboard or shrink it into a tiny website button and it will still look the same.

I am not entirely happy with the final design. I wanted to evoke the Nazi insignia, with its red background and striking black swastika (yes, I realize that the Nazis were not fascist, but socialist. But really, is there really any difference between the Nazi ideology of hate, Communism, and Mussolini’s Fascism?), but I grew attached to the clean white background. The white background allows me to transfer the design on different colored background besides white.

Art by Jennika.

Jennika is an aspiring painter and she recently remixed my photograph War and Peace as a painting for a scholarship. Truly wonderful work.

After working for five incredibly long days and producing several pages of code revisions, an updated version of Creativist Pursuits went live early Monday morning. It is nearly identical to its previous incarnation, but this time it has dynamic content.

Anatomy of a website.

My friend Stacy Wiedmaier was the one who originally implanted the idea into my head of turning Creativist Pursuits into one-stop shop for everything Aheram. The goal is to create a sort of web portal that follows everything I do in the online medium and publishes snippets and previews of every content produced by me. A sort of supra-MySpace that is more than twice as fun to create and with an underlying code that looks as good and clean as its graphics.

Not a Vanity Page

One thing Creativist Pursuits is not is a vanity site. I believe it offers something more than your usual vanity page. It is a self-updating website that pulls from various sites the content generated by me. It is not static and people can actually find new content everyday, from Twitter updates to newest Flickr uploads to recently published articles from my blogs. However, it is not my intention to keep the casual visitor in Creativist Pursuits. My goal is to funnel them as quickly as possible to my content.

An overwhelming number of visitors to Creativist Pursuits landed there not because of direct traffic, but rather were referred there by external sites.

1. Most people do not type the address of my website into their address bar from memory in order to access my site. Most are referrals. A lot of it from outside sites like MySpace and Flickr. Some are referred to the website by other people talking about me in blogs or news articles. And a few are referred to my website by the Moo cards I hand out. In many of the social networking profiles I have, I link to my main website.
2. If they are interested enough, they will usually click the link and land…
3. On Creativist Pursuits. Successful implementation of the ideas I am putting forward in this post will ensure that people are
4. ..properly funneled to my…
5. …content. Whether it be my blog, my about me page, my contact information, my Flickr photographs, or one my many social networking profiles, the goal of Creativist Pursuits is to guide people to those pages.

It is the digital middleman, the online concierge, the traffic warden in a world of Aheram-generated content.

User Interface

If it is takes more than five seconds for people to find what they are looking for in this website, I have failed. User interface does not apply to just iPods and computers, it also applies to the website. One of the challenges I faced was how I can best make sure that the design of the website complements its function in streamlining the user experience of the casual visitor. I made generous use of obvious navigational graphics. They are displayed in a very easy-to-read font, yet remain aesthetically consistent with the design scheme. Also, I made sure that the graphics I use worked for me and the website. They are not merely there to look pretty, they actually do serve multiple important functions. Not only do they provide a preview of the content they link to, they also serve to attract the attention of the casual visitor to the information that surrounds it. The visitor’s eyes are drawn to the distinctive graphic that accurately represents the content the graphic itself links to.

The interface of my website should not be a hindrance between my audience and my content. I utilized white-space to effectively compartmentalize each block of information so that the casual visitor can easily navigate and separate different kinds of content from each other.

Social Networking and Feeds

There is a bit more emphasis now with social networking in Creativist Pursuits. My Twitter and Flickr, as well as my profiles in MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are prominently linked to in the index page. Joining those are links to various RSS feeds of my regularly updated content. Clicking >> SOCIAL NETWORKS will lead the visitor to an even larger list of social networks I am a part of.

Dynamic Content and XML Parsing

One of the biggest changes implemented in the site is the addition of an XML parser. Using a Magpie derivative called Feed2JS, I am able to republish snippets of my blog posts in my website. Unlike the original Magpie RSS (which was quite unwieldy), Feed2JS was painless to install. It parses RSS feeds from FeedBurner and converts it to a simple JavaScript code that I am able to include in my website’s source code. It looks clean, it is painless to edit, and it just works. The republished feeds joins the Twitter and Flickr badges in providing new content to Creativist Pursuits.

Thinking Ahead

I created a mock up of what I intend to do if I were to announce an important event or news like an upcoming gallery exhibition or something. Of course, it will be temporary and will most likely go up and remain up from a week prior to the event until the duration of the event. I am debating if there is some way I can automate this to make this as painless as possible for me. Most likely, just adding the HTML snippet is a lot simpler and easier.

The Purpose of All of This

The purpose of Creativist Pursuits two-fold and quite simple. Create an audience of my work and then facilitate opportunities by exposing audiences to my work. By providing ways to easily contact me, friend me on MySpace, drop me a line, follow me on Twitter, or view my work while making it very easy to do so, I am creating a base of audience that will appreciate and enjoy my creativist pursuits. ]]> http://aheram.com/blog/journal/web-design-dynamic-creativist-pursuits/feed/ 0