Colorado Columbine

A view of the Space Needle from out on Puget Sound

A few photos from Pike Place Market.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to work as a beta tester for the newest product from EllisLab called MojoMotor! The product just launched, so I wanted to give a few thoughts on this cool new web development package.

What is MojoMotor?
MojoMotor is a web publishing engine that, in my opinion, bridges the gap between a tightly hand-coded web site and a template-based CMS that’s easy for a non-programmer to update. It has a back-end interface that sits “on top” of your website so, when logged in, you can basically just type directly onto your web page and save the changes. This is particularly appealing from a designer’s standpoint because you don’t have to have a lot of web knowledge to update the content which fits the needs of a lot of clients out there. You could set up the site and hand it off pretty easily. That’s not to say that, as a programmer, you give up control. You can still edit the html/css files and can have full html source editing on every page for more exact tweaking. Here’s a link to their overview for more information.

What is MojoMotor not?
MojoMotor is a great tool for setting up small to mid-sized brochure web sites. It does have a database running behind the scenes, but it doesn’t work as a blogging engine. That being said, it would probably handle a large percent of the web sites out there. You could also easily integrate it with a service like Tumblr to add a blog. They’ve also provided an export function to migrate the site over to ExpressionEngine if the site grows beyond what MojoMotor is capable of. In their words:

MojoMotor does not strive to be a full-powered, high-end Content Management System such as ExpressionEngine. It does not have categories, dynamic entries, conditionals. It does not have search, date-based input or logic. MojoMotor is simple, clean, and straightforward. It is not ExpressionEngine lite, it is ExpressionEngine junior.

What does MojoMotor look like?
For the sake of beta testing, I started up a website for my wife, www.anniegnojek.com (still in progress) who is a musician and flute educator. She had been wanting a site that was a few simple pages, contained some audio clips and that she could go in and edit when needed.

After mocking up the site in Adobe Illustrator, I started coding the site like I would with any other hand-coded website. Basically, I created a one-page template and got the CSS on solid footing. From there, I added a few CSS tags to the content areas which tell the program what to make editable. Then, I used the import feature to pull the template into MojoMotor. It was really that easy. I then added some pages (which can be ordered by dragging and dropping) and started plugging in content all within the user interface. You can also have separate templates for different pages, so it’s pretty flexible.

click to enlarge

Once you log in to your site, you’ll be looking at . . . your site, with the exception of a small pull down tab at the top. This lets you toggle the editing mode on and off, so if you navigate to a page and pull the tab down, you will see the content area highlight allowing you to go in and edit the content. Hit save and the content is permenantly changed and shows up live on the site. You can also set up different users so certain people can only edit content while others can update the admin settings.

This is the content area highlighted and ready for editing.

Here, the content area has been made editable and it’s just a plain WYSIWYG editor with the option to view the source. Once I hit “save” the edits are made straight onto the live website.

Final Thoughts
As a designer, I think that MojoMotor fits the needs of a large portion of my clients. It’s simple, clean, easy to update and operate, yet flexible enough that I can make something unique and meaningful. It’s a great product that I think deserves a look if you’re a designer and content provider on the web.

I took a handful of photos on a recent trip to Washington, DC so I thought I’d post a few. DC is a really fascinating place and I think it would benefit anyone to go and visit at least once. The museums are really amazing (and free!) and there’s nothing quite like standing in front of the actual Declaration of Independence. It will give you chills.

I didn’t expect the monuments to be as powerful as they were. It’s a well spent afternoon to stand in the same spot as Martin Luther King did in 1963. Just standing in front of the White House was quite the experience, too, when you start thinking of all the people who have lived there.

Other highlights of the trip were the Holocaust Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the Allen Ginsberg photography exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives, Ford’s Theater, the Museum of Natural History, and lots and lots of great food!

I also did a little post-trip reflection over at our work blog about finding storytelling inspiration in museum design.

Hott Sheets Art Exhibition
When: Friday, June 25, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Where: Wonder Fair: Art Gallery, Shoppe and Studio, Lawrence

I’ve been thinking about starting a series of flat, graphic African masks since I really love working with the shapes, colors and emotion. This piece is an initial exploration of this concept, painted in acrylics.

This piece is based on the nursery rhyme:
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

There are some very colorful explanations of what this nursery rhyme means, so I thought I’d work that into the piece as well! I also wanted to work on some drawn type, so this seemed like a great place to experiment with that.

However, I’ve done a little mental restructuring and I think I’m on the right path! I’m going to be using this blog to showcase important design work, studio updates and design-related writing that deals directly with the Designojek end of things. This will definitely remain the primary blog, but I don’t want to distract people with external links if they don’t want them.

In addition to this, I’ve set up a Tumblr site when I can do a little curating and post links to interesting things that I find online, quotes that I think are relevant, and some less important personal photos and design bits that I think you, dear readers, might enjoy! I’m looking at customizing my theme a little, so pardon the dust.

So, the relevant links are:

• Designojek Tumblr: http://designojek.tumblr.com/ and its RSS Feed
• This blog’s RSS feed.
• If you’re interested, you can check out my Delicious Bookmarks or follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

So, what do you think? Too much, too little or just right? Most importantly, I hope to inform people about the work that I do and some of what I think is important happening in the global and local design community. Plus, I love hearing from people and having fun with my work! Thanks for your support!

I just finished up a children’s CD with percussionist Cory Hills titled The Lost Bicycle. The album consists of several fun, original works for percussion and storytelling including The Lost Bicycle, Tikki Tikki Tembo, and The Turnip. For the project, I did all the artwork, layout and photography. For more information on the CD or to order yourself a copy, contact Cory at his website.

I recently took a trip to Holland, MI to do some art direction for a short video documentary. I stayed in a cool hotel while I was there, so I thought I’d share a couple of shots I took. The hotel is City Flats and it’s the first hotel in the Midwest to achieve LEED Gold Certification. It’s an eco-minded hotel with really nice interior design including bold colors, clean lines and high ceilings.


Here’s the hallway by the elevator.

A view of the bed which was REALLY comfortable!

I loved the sliding door that covered the bathroom and closet.

It was nice to see some non-typical hotel artwork on the walls!

View of the bathroom…

… and walk-in shower.

I had a great stay there and the environment was really classy!

The city of Holland is a couple of hours outside of Chicago and about 35 minutes from Grand Rapids, MI. Lake Michigan is about a 5 minute drive to the west. The population is about 35,000 people and it was recently named the 2nd happiest city in the U.S.!

Every year, they have the Tulip Time festival which is the largest tulip festival in the U.S.

There are tulips EVERYWHERE and it’s really beautiful.

I recently did a poster for the University of Georgia that centered around a musical piece called The Here and Now by Christopher Theofanidis. The work is based on selected poems by the Persian poet Rumi and uses the powerful and mysterious qualities of band and choir. They wanted it to have a decidedly Middle Eastern/Turkish feel to it and so I thought it would be the perfect chance to try doing some hand-drawn calligraphy.

I should make it clear that I drew all of the type in Adobe Illustrator and didn’t actually get out the calligraphy pens (mostly due to a tight deadline), but it was a lot of fun to do and I hope to do more things like it in the future. My apologies to the purists out there!

Here’s a quick pencil sketch that I used as a starting point for the illustration.

And here’s the final type!

You can hear some audio clips of the piece on Amazon. It’s pretty powerful classical music written for band and choir.

Update: Here’s an interesting article about Arabic calligraphy and digital fonts.

This is a poster I did for the 2010 KU Jazz Festival, taking place on March 5-6. This year’s festival will feature Kenny Garrett (one of my favorite alto players) and his quartet. Here are a couple of older videos (like this little tune called Giant Steps) that I think explains it all. If you’re a music fan, definitely head down for both nights of the festival!

This poster is just one of many reasons for the slow blogging schedule these days. Sorry about that. Lots of work, but little time to show it!

This is a poster that I designed and illustrated for the University of Georgia Band Department. Several pieces on the concert are sea themed, so that definitely informed the design process.

First off, there is now a Facebook page for Designojek and I’d love to see everyone on there. Feel free to drop me a note or post something interesting for everyone to see. Of course, you can do that in the comments on here as well.

Also, I’ve started up a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/Designojek. Lots of daily quirkiness, so feel free to follow along.

In my last post on color slide film, I showed a few images that I had shot about 5 years ago. Here are a few more from that series and it’s made me want to go out and buy some more slide film and give it another whirl.

I recently came across a series of photos that I shot about five years ago and used a couple years later for an improvised jazz piece. They were all shot on color slide film (Kodachrome, I believe) and when I pulled out the slides, I was pleasantly surprised with how they looked! They are more along the lines of the type of photography I’ve been wanting to shoot lately. These images are pulled directly from the scanner with no image altering at all. The colors are really amazing and there is definitely a quality there that you can’t get with digital. I’ll post a few here and a some more in the next few days. Enjoy!

This is a poster for the upcoming Lawrence Chamber Orchestra Young Artists Concert on Sunday, April 26th and 2:00 p.m. The concert will feature the very talented flutist JoAnn Doll performing the C.P.E. Bach Concerto in D Minor for Flute and Orchestra.