San Diego People: 40th anniversary of the PSA Flight 182 crash

Usability Study available to view on LinkedIn

Recently, I created this proposal for a new user-centered website for a fictitious defense contractor called ESE. The details of the fake company and the logo design were provided by Professor Emily Kay, my mentor at Mesa College. The resulting PDF presentation gave me ample space to demonstrate what I know about creating a user-friendly, accessible, and search-engine optimized site.

Please take a look at it on LinkedIn or ask me to email you a copy if you are interested. 

Book Jacket and Promotion, re-imagined

I was asked to choose one book and then to re-imagine its dust jacket and promotional poster. I chose Beryl Bainbridge's An Awfully Big Adventure because I felt that the popularity of the book had suffered from the mishandled marketing for the resulting movie here in America. I used free-to-use images to create in Photoshop a cover that brings us back to the story's grounding in post-war England where actors in a theatre ensemble are reuniting for better or worse.

Original Photoshop Art with an Essay

My Dog is a Little Bridge Between the Man-Made and Nature

I was inspired to create these two images by the book I was reading at the time. The book was ostensibly a reference for animal caregivers who might find themselves in the position of having to determine if a stray animal presented to them at a shelter or vet’s office is a dog or a wolf. The philosophy that the authors wanted to put forth is that, if the animal’s suitability as a pet—possibly a matter of life and death—is on the line, the animal should be judged on its behavior and recent history, and not on its looks. The difference between a dog and a wolf, they argue, is pretty much a human construct anyway. And that got me thinking—has there ever been another natural entity as heavily influenced by humans in its biology as a dog? The dog/human connection is in the dog’s DNA—it is the outcome of natural selection that actually is human selection.

In the diptych, my pup ambles across a manmade structure, a concrete handrail or fence, doing what he loves best—enjoying a brief history of smells and other flotsam that man and nature have left behind for his senses.

At rest, he guards a little droplet brimming with life as yet untouched and unaltered by human hands. He seems to know that nothing could be farther from his own story. He is a dog, the animal that men have made from wolves.

There is a bit of an inside joke here, too. My dog is no little sprite—he weighs 108 pounds!

Ektachrome Cafe website

Ektachrome Cafe is a website that I have created entirely by hand coding in HTML5 and CSS. As noted in previous posts, I'm thrilled that I am able to create to venues on the web to show my father's photography to the world. This particular project challenged me to exhibit my coding skills to create galleries, embed video, and provide contact forms, among others.

East/West/1980 website

East/West/1980 was designed at the same time as the Color Years, and like that site, it was the culmination of all I had learned in my first semester of web design studies. I used Adobe Dreamweaver and hand coding in HTML5 and CSS to create the site.

My original photography from travel in West Germany and the GDR are the inspiration for the design elements and the featured items.

The Color Years website

The Color Years is the first website I have designed. I studied Adobe Dreamweaver software and learned to code in HTML5 and CSS at San Diego Mesa in the spring of 2014. The Color Years website is the final project of the Dreamweaver course.

The Color Years is my first opportunity to showcase what I think of as Anthropologic Ephemera. I enjoy documenting period sensibilities and styles throughout the decades of my life through my family photographs.