Occasionally I do redesigns of existing websites. This one was for a small association that promotes networking between executive business women. It was a demanding project which involved a lot of integration and consolidation of various data sources. Membership information is synchronized to an external database via a XML/SSH pipe cronjob. Most of the legacy content had to be imported by hand, because it was originally entered into an unwieldy behemoth of a CMS called Midgard. I still don’t know what was wrong with it, but to give you an idea, load times of simple pages occasionally exceeded 20 seconds.
After tweaking the code and parameters for a month or two, I was happy that the fresh, new site was finally launched last week. The most interesting parts of the site are confidential and members only, but feel free to take a peek at the public side of the site… it’s all in finnish though. Props to Toni for his mad jedi skills and indispensable help. The ladies at Gaia are also a really nice and friendly bunch of people. I hope they like their new virtual home.
Posted by api at 13:25 - No Comments »
A designer friend of mine, Tuija Järvenpää, has come up with the idea of selling pictures of Christmas trees.
She’s been working with the concept of disposable objects of art for quite some time now. One of her earlier projects was a paper wedding dress. The works are dancing around in the gray area of ecological statements, conceptual art, household items and commercial products.
The paper Christmas trees are actually very large scale ink jet prints. They are 134 cm * 280 cm in size and can be stored in the shipping tube for the next year.
I helped her put together a little online store to make it easier for clients to place an order for the tree. Go ahead and mail her if you want one shipped outside of Finland.
Posted by api at 13:09 - 2 Comments »
I recently finished the production of a biofeedback based multimedia program entitled On the World’s Pulse. It is designed to promote the Millennium Technology Prize. The program shows six different image sequences to a viewer while simultaniously measuring the heart rate with a custom made Polar heart rate monitor. The sequence with maximum heart rate is automatically chosen for a further quiz about that particular subject. After the quiz there are a few info screens about the prize itself and previous winners. This year’s winner is professor Shuji Nakamura.
The Millennium Technology Prize
Professor Shuji Nakamura is one of the most significant inventors of our time. In 1993, he stunned the optoelectronic community with the announcement of very-bright blue GaN-based light emitting diodes (LEDs). In rapid succession, he then announced a green GaN-based LED, a blue laser diode, and a white LED. All these developments were things that other researchers in the semiconductor field had spent decades trying to do.
Professor Nakamura’s story is unique. Born in 1954 in Japan on the island called Shikoku, he received his master’s degree in 1979 at the University of Tokushima. He started his scientific and technological career outside mainstream Japanese technology, working as an engineer at Nichia Chemical, a small phosphor company in the countryside.
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My friend Janne has been busy with his favorite skunkworks project.. an electric sailboat aptly called “Hello, World”. I went on a little test sail a couple of days ago and almost caught boat fever myself. There is something unreal about the way the boat silently glides through water when the sails are down. Janne told me that people are often scratching their heads when he nimbly moors the boat. The potentiometer or “gas pedal” is extremely sensitive and the minimum propulsion is feather light like an invisible djinni’s hand.
While not sailing, she is powered by a set of 14 lithium ion batteries.
What is Skunkworks
A skunkworks is a group of people who, in order to achieve unusual results, work on a project in a way that is outside the usual rules. A skunkworks is often a small team that assumes or is given responsibility for developing something in a short time with minimal management constraints. Typically, a skunkworks has a small number of members in order to reduce communications overhead. A skunkworks is sometimes used to spearhead a product design that thereafter will be developed according to the usual process. A skunkworks project may be secret
EDIT: After this trip, I designed a logo and new web site for Electric Ocean as a favor to help them launch the business.. it’s a worthy cause, I think.
Posted by api at 11:13 - 2 Comments »
I recently finished a web site makeover for Helsinki Dance Company. One of the elements on the new site is a Quicktime intro video. It was a tremendous joy to be able to work on a project like this with a considerable degree of artistic freedom. I used layering, time remapping, motion paths and Live Type effects, all of which are standard features of Final Cut Pro. It is a marvelous, creative tool that really lets you get your ideas on the screen without drowning you in technical details. The kaleidoscope effect was made with a free plug-in originally programmed for After Effects.
On the front page there is a rolling feet video element which was a bit tricky to optimize, but finally I got it to work with the new alpha channel support of Flash 8. It helps set the mood and ambience without overpowering the page with excessive eye candy.
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Well, I’m just recycling my old junk here. It’s a flash thingie I did for Helsinki City Theatre when they merged with a childrens’ theatre. The accessories were photographed by an assistant and composited into one big Photoshop file. After that they were exported as PICT files with alpha channel information. They are hidden off screen and moved into the correct position whenever the words are clicked.
Posted by api at 10:22 - No Comments »
Udumbara is a ceramics company run by a friend of mine. She is specializing in kitchen ceramics and is striving for success with these patent pending wine coolers. I know how hard it can be being self-employed, so I helped her out a bit by redesigning her website.
Posted by api at 09:53 - No Comments »
DOCUMENT = record, evidence, proof
DOCUMENTARY = representative of real conditions and events
DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPH = photograph representing reality
In photography, photographs depicting reality have been known as documentary ever since 1928, when the film director John Grierson began to call fact-based movies documentaries. The documentary film was a contrast to the imaginary, fictional movies produced by Hollywood.
Like documentary films, documentary photographs often aim to record some societal phenomenon or development. The documentary photograph has its own tradition, its own style, its own methods and form. At times, a documentary character has been considered fundamental to photography itself, and this has given rise to whole movements based on documentary expression. Documentary photography is, indeed, one of the most enduring forms of photography, examples of which can be found in every decade throughout the history of photography.
The Docrom CD presents documentary photography of various periods and from six different countries: Finland, Sweden, Estonia, France, Great Britain and the United States. It is intended as an introduction to documentary photography for schools, for use within a 45-minute lesson, and forms part of an extensive international photographic event, photo.doc, which took place in the year 2000, which also included documentary photography.
Docrom was funded as a pilot project by the European Commission’s Culture 2000 programme. I worked as a technical producer and programmer for this project. The authoring was done with Macromedia Director. The source photographs originated from various sources including museums, the library of congress, photo agencies and photographers themselves.
The domain of the companion website is expiring soon and I decided to posthumously create a little “blast from the past” entry for this project here on the blog.
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