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!

Car #8255 is a Diesel-Electric from 1951.

Car #999060 is the red caboose there and it’s from 1967.

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!

Click the photo to see a larger version of the image (you may need to click it once more to blow it up within your browser window).

I was looking for an excuse to try Photoshop’s photomerge function and was pretty impressed with the job it did. Not flawless by any means, but it found and blended the content as well as I ever could by hand. My only complaint was that it was a 360 panorama, but I wasn’t able to tell it where I wanted the center point to be. This is probably a better tool to use for compositing 2-3 photos together within a smaller viewing angle.

This was just a silly t-shirt design I whipped up for my brother who lives with his roommates with 2 guinea pigs and an occasional rat in Chicago, IL.

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!

I just got back from a trip to Chicago last week, so I thought I’d do a quick recap of what all I did, mostly as a log of the trip for myself. It was my first time to Chicago and I had a great time seeing some of what the city has to offer. I didn’t shoot a ton of photos, but got a few I thought I’d share here.

These are two of the fellas who I went to visit and who showed me around while I was there! Lots of crazy fun, so thanks, guys! I started out the trip by arriving at Midway airport (smart move) in the evening. We went right over the the Green Mill for some great gypsy jazz by Alfonso Ponticelli and Swing Gitan. I guess it was Al Capone’s hang for a while, so the vibe inside was straight out of the 30s.

The next day we ate lunch at Cosy Noodles and Rice which was amazing! Then we headed over to see the Chicago Lyric Opera perform Carmen. Tragic stuff, but beautifully done and the set design was incredible! Sadly, I didn’t get a photo, but it was like watching a moving painting.

From there, I headed over to the Chicago Art Institute since it was free admission that day! Anyone who’s been there knows what an amazing place it is and I could go on all day, so I’ll just say, if you can only make it to one place in Chicago, go there!

After that, I went and saw the Chicago Symphony perform Petrushka (1911 version). There’s a reason it’s known as one of the best orchestras in the world and they completely nailed it.

The next day was spent downtown being a little more touristy. We started off at the Field Museum where we spent a lot of time at the Jade collection, Tibet and Pacific Island exhibits, and of course, the dinosaurs! Then we walked up Michigan Ave. and checked out Millennium Park complete with the crazy mirrored “bean” which really is an amazing thing to see in person. Right across the street was the Chicago Cultural Museum where we saw Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer, an exhibition of New York and Chicago street photos taken by a self-taught nanny, Vivian Maier, over the course of her life. It’s an amazing story and the photos are the real deal. I thought they were some of the best street photos I’ve ever seen!

We then walked up further and checked out some of the amazing architecture of downtown Chicago, ending up at the Hancock Tower. With NO line and a quick elevator trip up, we were able to see 360 degrees of Chicago from 94 floors up! Very impressive.

We watched the KU game that night at a bar with a $10 all-you-can-drink special. Enough said about that . . .

The next day we were gearing up for a big taco party that night, so we only had time for one destination, but it was one of my favorites of the trip. We drove out to Garfield Park Conservatory which is an enormous greenhouse that has several different rooms that mirror various climates from tropical to desert. The conservatory is run by the city and has free admission. It was a real feast for the senses with lots of warm, moist air, lots of oxygen and as many colors as you can imagine! I couldn’t help but shoot some photos there:

The morning that I left, we had an incredible brunch at The Chicago Diner, which is an all vegetarian/vegan place that had about the best brunch I’ve ever had. Even if you’re a carnivore, I highly recommend it. We also stopped by the Robot City Workshop, which is an all toy robot store! You can even build your own there and they have a great collection of vintage robots from the 1980s, too.

I can now add Chicago to my list of great cities that I’ve visited. It’s a very cool place with easy mass transit, big city attractions with a more laid-back, Midwestern feel to it. I definitely hope to head back soon!

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!