It should be a great concert and the LCO is in the midst of making some big slashes this year, so come on out for an evening of great 20th century music!

I’ll get the technical stuff out of the way first: The site is coded in HTML5 and uses the media queries in CSS3 to detect the screen size. ExpressionEngine is powering the backend and is actually drawing content from across multiple websites using the multi-site manager. It features a Vimeo widget on the front page to display the latest videos and a custom Google Search.

Here is a quick rundown of the various screen sizes (click the images for larger versions):

At the largest size, 1200+ pixels, the layout has 3 columns. The idea was to make the coming events prominent and have the featured video feature prominently in the center of the screen.

The medium size is the primary size for most desktop computer screens. The thumbnails of past videos move to the bottom since they’re the third most important piece of information. The two column layout works well with the content with a submenu on the secondary pages.

The iPad or tablet size takes the layout down to 1 column and boosts the text size for the smaller device. That is a main complaint I hear with websites on mobile devices – the text is too small! One of the coolest parts of CSS3 and responsive web design is being able to address and fix issues with the viewing platform with respect to the content.

The iPhone or phone size continues using the 1 column layout and larger text. However, the menu for past events and presenter bios moves down to the bottom of the page because we felt that most people that come to the site on a phone are looking for the upcoming events and we wanted that to show up first.

I’m really excited to continue working with responsive design on the web! It makes a lot of sense to me since the web is a flexible and adaptable medium to begin with. For more information on responsive web design, check out this article on A List Apart.

So, go ahead and try the site out! On most modern browsers, you should be able to just resize your screen to see the different sizes take effect.

UPDATE: I wrote an overview of responsive web design over at the Stratepedia blog if you’re interested in some other examples.

I recently completed a program book and advertising for a celebration of Franz Liszt in honor of his 200th birthday. The events are free and a schedule of events can be found here!

These are a couple of spreads from the inside of the program book.

Note: I didn’t design the website (although it looks great!) The main site is behind a password system, but here are a few screenshots of the slideshow in action.

You can see some other photos from a past photoshoot that I did for Fossick here.

This is a new business card I painted and designed for Kansas-based author and good friend, Julie Tollefson. In addition to her own work, Julie also writes for Lawrence Magazine and is a phenomenal copy editor who has saved me from grammatical embarrassment on countless occasions!

I just finished a new logo for a custom french horn maker, Sorley Horns. It was a lot of fun to work on and it’s fascinating to look at those instruments and think about making one from scratch! These guys do amazing work and it was a real pleasure to work with them.

I rarely do product/studio photography, mostly because I prefer a most candid style of shooting, but I recently was asked to do a shoot for a jewelry retailer so I gave it a try. It was really interesting to work in such a controlled environment and be able to focus so much on composition and color (as opposed to the “shoot what you can get” approach in street photography). The client was pleased and I really liked how they turned out!

This is a new poster for the upcoming KU Wind Ensemble concert featuring several works for french horn. Lots of twists and turns in that instrument, but it’s beautiful when played well!

One of my best pals and programmer extraordinaire Greg Aker asked me to come up with some monster illustrations for the header of his web site. It was a lot of fun because it’s not the kind of thing I get to do often. We had talked a while back about doing a “seasonal” header to help keep his design fresh year-round and so I’ve been slowly cranking through them for him to use! So far, I’ve got Winter, Spring and Summer.

If you have an interest in web development, CodeIgniter and CMS systems like Django and ExpressionEngine, you need to check out Greg’s site. He’s a total master!

I also did a couple of crazy monster Twitter birds for him to use and he even did a mouseover animation on them!

When we first started out on this, we used it as an excuse to try out the now-defunct Google Wave tool for collaboration. It worked OK, but was ultimately more trouble than it was worth, mainly because it involved sending an email to let each other know there was new content up. That totally defeated the purpose, I think, so no real surprise that it didn’t work out. Below are a few of the initial sketches that we tossed around on that wave:

Site layout ideas.

Refined layouts.

Crazy ol’ Twitter birds!

This is a poster I did for the latest KU Dance Company performance coming up in April, 2011.

A quick illustration I did for a presentation talking about the “Belief Window”. It’s essentially the idea that people (in this case, kids with learning disabilities) tend to view the world through their own experiences. For example, if a kid sees a cat for the first time and it scratches him, he’ll think that every cat is mean and will scratch him. You have to understand that and work within that reality to help change people’s perceptions.

This is a poster I did for a jazz/wind ensemble concert that featured the new tenor saxophone concerto GO! by Bob Mintzer with Vince Gnojek on saxophone. The concert also featured a new Dan Gailey arrangement of Radiohead’s Knives Out as well as one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, Hang Gliding by Maria Schneider.

My loose inspiration for the poster was the artwork for Dexter Gordon’s incredible jazz album Go . That album, besides being one of the great jazz recordings in history, was designed by Reid Miles who did several classic album designs for Blue Note records. I hope at least a couple of people picked up on the “Go” connection!

Design by Reid Miles

Below is the premier performance of GO! (3rd mvt.) featuring Bob Mintzer with the University of Kentucky Wind Ensemble. It’s a difficult piece that is a nice blend of jazz elements with wind ensemble writing. It contains some altissimo lines that are crazy hard!

I was very excited to be asked to design the second album for Allégresse titled Fresh Ink. The album contains 3 brand new works for flute, oboe, and piano by acclaimed composers Ingrid Stölzel, Kip Haaheim and Gabriela Lena Frank as well as a 20th Century work by William Grant Still.

Here are just a few of the ink spots I came up with in search of the “right ones” for the artwork. For most of them, I used an ink wash and a straw to blow the ink around the page. It’s still pretty unpredictable that way, but at least you can give it some direction.

One major goal for the design was to move towards a modern feel since it’s all new music. In addition to the literal depiction of the title, the ink spots reflect the new works making a splash in the existing canon of chamber music for flute, oboe and piano. I like the spot on the front that loosely resembles a dancer and the half-circle spot on the disc face which reference two of the new works Canto y Danza and Halo respectively.

It’s always exciting anytime new work is commissioned and beautifully executed and this album is certainly no exception. Here’s a great review of Fresh Ink that gives a much more eloquent description than I can give!

Visit the Allégresse website for information on purchasing this CD.

I just launched a new identity and web site project for a music organization in New York City called Ars Viva Music. Ars Viva consists of 3 main parts, a private music studio, small chamber music ensembles for special events and commissions, and a larger chamber orchestra. I love doing graphic design for classical musicians, so this was right up my alley!

Above is just a snippet of the sketching I did before doing a few refined logo sketches on the computer.

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I’m excited about this site, in particular, because it represents my first efforts in coding in HTML5. It really just takes advantage of the new semantic markup which I really like. I think it’s going to make for a much cleaner and easier to read web someday. I also think HTML5 will be great for people who rely on assistive technology to surf the web (like screen readers and such). I’m looking forward to the audio and video portions of HTML5, too, so I hope that technology becomes more mainstream soon. For more information, I found Dive into HTML5 very helpful as well as HTML5 for Web Designers.

View the Ars Viva web site online!

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