This Sunday, May 4th, there are a couple of great art events to keep your eyes open for. The first is the 47th Annual Art in the Park event put on by the Lawrence Art Guild. I’ll be playing for about an hour in a jazz trio starting at 11:00 a.m., so if you’re free and want to see some cool art, you should come on by South Park on Mass. Street!

Also on Sunday is KJHK’s Jazz in the Park event featuring the Chicago Afrobeat Project, The Yards, and RedLefty. I have a couple of good friends in The Yards and they’re an amazing band, so get out there and support some live music! The other bands are great too, so it’ll be a LOT of fun! It’ll be at Watson Park (the train park) staring at 1:00 p.m.

I’m really excited about the newest old camera that I’ve recently acquired! It’s a Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera and it’s in amazing shape! I have another instant camera, but what I’m excited about with this one is the ability to control the manual focusing and, to a certain extent, the exposures. There are a few tweaks I need to do including buying a neutral density filter, but it shouldn’t be too bad. Hopefully, I’ll get some good shooting in before Polaroid completely discontinues it’s instant film in 2009!

*sniff*

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I just wrapped up a new website for the Kansas Summer Flute Festival, a new summer flute camp for all ages from beginning flute students to experienced high school musicians. The festival organizers Annie and Mary wanted a very direct and clear website that was eye catching, yet easy to navigate.

Rather than have a bunch of columns or unnecessary information, I decided to try out a skinny design (440px!) to see how it works and I think it’ll be just what they’re needing. I also utilized some MooTools on the front page which are some cool javascripts that fail very elegantly if the viewer doesn’t have javascript running. Always important for accessible websites!

Check it out at www.kansasflutefestival.com!

Between massive KU celebrations around Lawrence, I’ve been going poster-crazy this past week! Here’s one for the UGA (University of Georgia, Athens) band department who I’ve been extremely fortunate to be able to work with over the past year. The director of bands there has been a good friend of mine for several years and it’s been great to get to help advertise his efforts there.

Here’s a recent poster designed for a friend of mine in Indiana.

Just a quick note . . . I’ve just begun writing a series of posts for a KU Center for Research on Learning blog called Stratepedia. My goal is to write some general design tips that non-designers might find useful in their day-to-day work. I’ll be covering topics like printing, graphic file types, use of color, fonts, photography and an assortment of other design-related issues. For those of you interested in some basic design tips, you can find it at http://blog.stratepedia.org/ and you can click on my name on the right hand side of the page for a listing of the posts I’ve written.

OK, so one more non-design post before I get back to business . . . Last night KU defeated Memphis in an amazing NCAA Championship basketball game and the town of Lawrence went crazy! It’s been estimated that 40-75,000 people rushed downtown to Massachusetts St. for a party that even a torrential thunderstorm couldn’t stop. Congrats to this year’s team on a great season. It’s a great day to be a Jayhawk!
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