This ad says much less “Start your career in music and audio production,” and much more “Start your career in stalking and general creepiness.” Of course, some of the engineers I’ve met over the years probably fall into both categories.

Ways Not to Do Things

Because there are so many different way to organize folders, it’s tough to jump in and finally decide on one system. I have had a number of folder systems since leaving college. Each one was a little better than the last, but none have been truly efficient. I have projects from college organized in a totally different struture than I use today, so I decided to leave all of those previous projects in place as is, and start fresh from here forward.

Web designers and developers will have slightly different structures than print designers due to the folders necessary for HTML development. Since I do both (and often for the same client), I tried to find a way to share at least the upper-level folders. Previously my main root folders were art, docs, print and www with clients names in each. As you might guess, I would have a “client xyz” in four places. This created many more folders than necessary and didn’t help much when searching. This model was also a nightmare when creating test servers for web projects. I would receive errors that a site root already existed, or a project was nested within another defined site. There had to be a better way.

Starting Fresh

I began by making a list of common folders for any given project, and the different ways those could be labeled.

As you can see, there are a lot of different possibilities– from files provided by clients, to estimates, invoices and contracts (docs) all the way to video work.  Also, there are multiple ways to label the same folder (art/work in progress/source/working files etc), which depends entirely on your preference. Each project isn’t going to require all of these folders, but it’s a safe bet that a number of these folders will be in the structure. Knowing this allowed me to create a blank skeleton that could be copied at the onset of a new project. My initial structure begins with a folder called “Projects” (this is of course up to you), from there I separate client work from personal work. Here is what I’ve created…

Projects/clients/<client name>/<date_or_jobID>/

Projects/personal/<project name>/<date_or_projID>/

(the brackets in the above example indicate this info would be unique.)

I keep a folder in place that is generic (as above) so I can always just copy and paste this skeleton to save time. Inside of the projID folder are five additional folders

• docs
• print
• source
• reference
• www

• docs contains estimates, invoices, project scope, client communications, etc– text and word documents.
• print contains InDesign files, packages and other final files that would go to the printer.
• source contains art files such as concepts, scans, photos (personally shot, stock and client provided), working files.
• reference is the research phase of the project– mood-boards, color-palettes, examples, etc.
• www contains all files for building the site.
• Folders inside www include, but are not limited to: css, img, scripts/js, media, includes, docs, xml.

As you can see, at the same level as Clents and Personal I have a folder called Assets. Assets contains global files that are used on almost all web projects. These file include generic .htaccess files, global CSS reset files, and common scripts (latest JQuery and the like). This folder is just below my server root folder, so referencing them in every project is easier. Also, If necessary,  I have one place I can drag those global files from, into the client’s www/css folder.

File Naming

I’ve named files many, many ways, and version control applications can certainly help keep files straight, especially when multiple designers or developers are working on a project. Generally when working alone, I include the date in the file name as a personal housekeeping measure, along with a descriptor (such as aboutus-011010.psd – I avoid spaces in file names as a general rule, especially for web folders and files). I don’t need to identify the client in the file name at this point because everything has been grouped by client, then by specific project. This has helped ease confusion greatly. When I reach a high number of files in a directory (such as old concepts and previous versions of files), I tend to move them to a folder on their own to keep things a little more organized. This folder is typically called something like old (original I know).

Conclusion

While there are hundreds of ways to organize a folder structure, this is the way I’ve found to best keep things organized for the time being. I hope this article has given you some ideas on how to wrangle in your project files and keep things more organized. I would be very interested to hear how you manage your folder structure, maybe my process can be cleaned up some. Post your structure or process in the comments section. If you have comments or questions, or know of a related article, please don’t hesitate to post a link.

Every year it seems, we wait longer and longer to take our annual family portrait. This year was no exception. We planned the shoot back in November, but didn’t get it set up until about December 19th. If we’re not careful, we’re going to miss the holiday season altogether next year.

We decided to take our portrait in a different direction than in years past and this was the result. I had planned on growing a mustache for the shoot (or if what little facial hair I can grow there is even considered a mustache), but had a formal event to attend a few days before the shoot and had to shave it.

Since a photo is worth a thousand words, I’ll end this post here. I plan to blog often while on winter break, so I look forward to getting back into the habit of writing regularly.

Happy holidays everyone!

First, A little about Serigraphy

Serigraphy is the fine art of screen printing and has been around for probably 1,000 years, though popularized greatly by Andy Warhol in the 1960′s. There is no difference between “screen printing,” “silk-screening” and “serigraphy.” Silk-screened shirts are technically “serigraph prints on fabric,” only no one calls them that. The process for printing on clothing is the same as printing on paper, though you’ll usually use a different ink type (one that is cured using heat, so that will make it through the wash). The process is fairly simple and starts with a screen, (which originally made from silk, but now is usually made of nylon or polyester) stretched onto a wooden or metal frame. The great thing about these screens is that they can be used multiple times. Here are a few shots of mine, you can see a stained “ghost” image from older prints.

Once you have your screen, you need to coat it with a light-sensitive, or photo emulsion to fill in all the tiny gaps in the mesh and allowed to dry (in the dark). Once the screen has been coated and dried, you’ll need artwork. The image you’d like to print can be painted, drawn, copied or printed onto a clear film, piece of glass, or directly on the screen (it just needs to be transparent where there is an absence of artwork – you could even cut out shapes of cardboard or thick paper instead of drawing if you wish). Once this artwork is on top of your screen, expose it to ultraviolet light (we used a machine for this, but setting the screen in the sun works too). Once the screen has been exposed, the areas in the sun will cure and become hard. Washing the screen with water will remove the emulsion that was blocked by your artwork. The ink will now pass through these areas (you can refer to the picture above, the dark green areas are blocked while the light allows ink to pass). Pouring ink at the top of the screen, and pulling a squeegee down through it transfers your image to whatever you’ve place the frame on. Viola!  A screen print.

Multiple Colors

Multiple colors involve either multiple screens, multiple exposures, or blocking off sections of the screen for each color (refer to the images above, you can see a few image areas). We had a hinged “C-clamp” contraption that allowed our screens to be raised and lowered, like a laptop lid, so we would have consistent placement.

Registration can be tricky between passes, but the way I’ve found best to maintain decent registration is to tape a clear piece of film above my previous print and lay the second color on top of it. Adjust the paper underneath to line up with the clear sheet, then remove the film and print on paper.  Sometimes it’s a little off, which can be ok, other times, it’s good to run many, many initial prints and have extras, just in case. It takes practice.
OK enough of the process, on to the projects.

Houston, we have a Problem

The title of this piece, the famous Apollo 13 quote, was used due to the subject’s t-shirt which said “Astronaut” on the front. My friend Brad volunteered for this shoot. The group of designers and illustrators that I hung out with in college were always happy to help out and model for reference photos, production shoots, and whatever else we came up with. In fact, I was in New York recently and saw an illustration I posed for on another friend’s refrigerator; I believe I was the Tooth Fairy in that illustration…. Anyway…. We sat up and shot this all at once.  The gun photo was obviously shot separately (I don’t like pointing guns at people). In the background are excerpts from the Unabomber Manifesto with specific words set off in a darker color.

Taking your Last Breath & Self Control

Taking your Last Breath contains a shot of me in a shirt and tie. The other half of this diptych has a portrait of Scott Kaufman (not displayed here). We played with the contrast of the dark tie on white shirts and liked the way it turned us into “lollipops”. Superimposed  on the body is a set of lungs with the title of the piece below, with a somber woman looming behind.

Self Control turned out to be a “prototype” of sorts for an album I would release later in the year under the same title. The print shows a woman’s hand drenched in blood as the heart of a desperate man had been ripped out. …Nuff said.

I hope you enjoyed seeing the process and ideas behind these new pieces. Dragging the screen out of storage and revisiting these have given me another itch to start producing prints again.  I think it’s time to do some posters!

Do you have prints you’d be interested in showing or trading?  Do you have more information for DIY screen printing? Please share with me, others and please comment below. Also: retweet, retweet, retweet! Thanks!

You may have noticed some new functionality to blog posts and portfolio projects around here.  Yes, I added a “Tweet This” link.  This has become very popular on blogs over the past few years and increases the relationship between bloggers and their audience. The main point of adding a “Tweet This” button is to spread the word about articles and projects further than your direct audience. When your Twitter contacts re-tweet to their followers, the word is spread to an indirect audience, which will (hopefully) persuade them to visit your site and follow you. Here, for instance, the Tweet This function is simply a text-only link with an icon. There are a number of other feature-packed widgets and plugins that not only create a shortened URL link, but display how many times your post has been re-tweeted, digged (dugg?), linked, etc. Herein lies the issue.

Popularity vs. Credibility

Displaying re-tweet stats can be great when an article has seen a lot of action. I’ve seen articles that have been re-tweeted hundreds of times, some even thousands. It shows potential readers that a lot of people have felt this to be worthy of reposting and passing along to friends and colleagues. On the other hand, what if an article post isn’t re-tweeted? Is the big “ZERO TWEETS” image keeping the article from being re-tweeted?  I think it might.

Remember when a majority of websites had “hit counters” prominently displayed on each page (or at least the home page)? And that the counters were more often than not ridiculously low?  Should anyone be bragging that their website has received 38 visitors since 1999? Displaying a stat like that is rather pointless and only serves to show how few visitors the site had. Part of this could be poor counter development, not logging visits correctly, other sites simply suffered from lack of traffic. At least started the counter at higher arbitrary number, even if  just for show. That would potentially make people think the site is somewhat-established. I think the higher number of visitors, re-tweets, link-backs, etc has a subconscious effect on the reader’s perception. Does popularity have an effect on credibility?

Read, Comment, Re-Tweet, Repeat

It’s tough to get that first comment, re-tweet, etc. Seemingly, after someone has paved the way with a comment, rebuttal or response, others follow.  No matter how knowledgeable, important, or profound an article is, if it’s not circulated, it may as well have been a “Dear Diary” entry. This is why I say there is a relationship between popularity and (perception of) credibility. We all know that popularity has no real bearing on credibility, but information and ideas need room to spread their wings, and it’s not always the correct information that flies the furthest.

This leads me to why I placed the re-tweet button on my site in the first place.  I really would love to see my portfolio pieces and blog articles circulating furiously, while stretching to the far corners of the net. I’m not, however, displaying how many (or few) times my articles and projects are being re-tweeted, linked etc. I felt that until my numbers start increasing regularly, showing that stat would only inhibit interaction. Also, with Google Analytics and other statistical apps, content and traffic information can be monitored behind the scenes (where it should be). I am interested to hear your thoughts on this, because there is a lot I haven’t addressed.  Please share, re-tweet and respond in the comments. You can follow me on Twitter here, and comment below this article!

A week after launching my first portfolio site update in over five years, and I have to say, I’ve been very pleased with the response. I don’t know if you’re like me, but for some reason, the minute I finish a project (be it design, writing or music), I start thinking about revisions, redesigns and how to make it better. Chalk it up to feelings of inadequacy or just plain neurosis; it happens almost every time. I try to tell myself, “I just constantly strive to be better”, but I think this is a pretty common feeling among designers.

Though the occasional tweak is unavoidable (as visual issues pop-up in new blog posts such as this), I will fight the urge to radically revise and redesign; for a while anyway. Time to focus on drumming up press, support, work and contacts with the current site.

I submitted this update to a number of design showcases, and the ever-popular CSS web galleries, and have noticed a definite spike in traffic because of it. I’ve gotten some nice notes from people and wanted to give them links, since they’ve been kind enough to add me.  Please take a gander at these sites for some design inspiration when you are feeling stuck!

In no particular order, the newest galleries:

• cssmania
• css-design-yorkshire
• mostinspired
• cssstar

As I receive word about new galleries that link here, I’ll  post links back to them to say thanks! If you have galleries you like to submit your new web, print, branding, etc work to, please post them in the comments and we’ll have a good, old-fashioned link-exchange.

In July, 2009, I decided that I was going to seriously redesign my portfolio.  I had always had a website, but there was no dynamic content, nor was there any updated work, nor was there any real reason for people to visit the site.  The last time I redesigned my website was when I applied for my current job (which was over five years ago….yikes, has it been that long?). Chalk it up to being too busy, or too lazy; I could never get around to working on it.

I’ve always sought freelance work, and have always been as busy as I wanted to be.  If a client wanted to see samples, I would simply send links to the dev directory on my web server, which worked well enough, but was far from professional. The final straw was when I went to talk to a friend from college at the design firm he works at in KC. Of course, they wanted to see my work, so the night before, I did a ‘quick and dirty’ redesign. This was passable, but not the caliber of quality I strive for.

The main features I had in mind for this new site were:

1. Updatability
2. Accessibility
3. Expandability

Seems simple enough; but after I finished the design work (conceptualization, mock-ups and revisions), I realized I had only just begun.

Updatability

The problem with my other portfolio websites was that of updatability. In the past, my work had been displayed in a static manner, meaning, if I added a piece, I  had to go into each page and add a link in the menu, add a new page for the work, add the work, then upload all of the files to the web server. All of this contributed to why I never updated my portfolio — It was simply too time-consuming. This had to change in order to maintain a current portfolio.

Accessibility

I wanted to be able to update sections of my site from about anywhere. Having an iPhone allows me to upload pictures to Facebook, update my Twitter status, and just about anything else that can be done from my computer. Why shouldn’t I be able to update images in my portfolio, update project information, or post a new story on my blog?  I needed a content management system that wasn’t machine-dependent. I wanted to update my site on any machine or device that could access the internet.

Expandability

Initially I wasn’t sure how many pieces I would add to my portfolio. I only wanted to add specific projects at first, as I’ve never thought it to be a good idea to show every piece I’ve created. I hate to say it, but sometimes a designer has to take on a project just to pay the bills, and will never be ‘portfolio worthy’ for one reason or another. Though I avoid this as much as possible, it does happen. I needed a system that will allow me to add a constant stream of work, which will help me lunch the website more quickly, while expanding sections later.

These factors and budget lead me to a popular choice, free blogging software. Many popular platforms can be manipulated to fit the needs of a full website content management system. While there are a number of great options, I narrowed my choices down to two: Textpattern and WordPress. Both are free, and both would fit my current needs.

Textpattern is free blog software that I have used in past projects.  While it works perfectly well, and has a relatively low learning curve, it isn’t as widely used as some of the other blogging software platforms. I felt that with the potential complexity of this growing site, the support system just wasn’t in place.  My ultimate choice was WordPress.

Seeing the countless forums, documentation, knowledge base, and contributions that WP developers constantly add, meant that there was a wealth of resources available. Also, a large number of designers have turned to WordPress, meaning that a lot of  plugins and functionality is available.

The single, most helpful resource I found was a developer by the name of Elliot Jay Stocks. His video how-to screen-cast on Carsonfied detailed how to build a portfolio website using WordPress. I had the design work finished, this was exactly what I needed to start the development.

His code is elegantly organized, modular, and easy to understand. His site, blog, and screen-casts were instrumental in the development of this site. I loved the way his site was organized and got a number of great ideas for my site from it. I urge you to visit his site, and check out his screen-casts. Thank you sir, for your posts. I definitely owe you a drink!

Photography

I am no photographer. I mean, sure, I can take a decent picture, but there are many nuances to photography that slip past me. If it wasn’t for my wife Holly, I wouldn’t have gotten very far. We set up a mini-studio in our dining room, where I compiled all of my work. I borrowed a tripod from a friend, and away we went. I started with my package design pieces, and made everything else feel similar. I liked the look of the package pieces so much, I thought shooting the web stuff with a camera could give an interesting feel while breaking out of the boundaries of the norm. I liked the new visual interst, angles it created and the screen patterns it added. Since everyone can visit the link provided on each project page I didn’t feel like it took away from the project.

This got way longer than I expected. I promise not to write as much on subsequent posts. There was just too much to cover.  Thanks again to Elliot and Holly! Hope you enjoy the site.

Hello and welcome to the blog at thisistwhite.com! All over this site you can delve in and find all the nitty-gritty about me, so I won’t bother going into that here, especially on my first blog post ever.

Actually I’m not sure what the future holds for this section of the site.  Maybe I’ll treat this like a series of really long twitter posts.  My initial intention was to discuss the profession of design. I’d like to write how-to articles on achieving certain effects in Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign etc, outline best practices of CSS/HTML and the like and talk about my favorite artists/designers/architects, but there are so many of those types of blogs already out there, I wonder if that would be productive? Why reinvent the wheel? Additionally, this blog is also going to serve as an online journal, which is why I developed the site in WordPress to begin with.

I think it’s going to be good for me to write on a regular basis.  Just as when designing [logos, websites, really anything], it’s good to get every idea down on paper.  Once something has been drawn or written out, you can truly let go of it and progress.  If you don’t jot/scribble/draw it somewhere, your conscious mind will continue to chew on it, and lot let you move forward. I will come back to this post from time to time, and re-evaluate the purpose of this section. Hopefully, I’ll see a progression in my thinking, writing skills, storytelling skills and communication in general. Yes, I think this will be good for me.