theology&geometry

(Cross-filed in the shameless friend promotion cabinet)

Check out these sweet page designs featuring Shane McDermott’s artwork. The Facebook page is my favorite, even though Shane had to bust ass to get it done on deadline since his original sketch was lost to the ether thanks to some kind of shitty Illustrator-related technical glitch. Shane, when he reads this post, will probably leave a comment saying that he likes the Facebook illustration, just not as much as the original one he did. And then he will sigh heavily.

I should really stop redesigning my blog at 4 in the morning, but I can’t help it! I was checking up on all the Memphis blogs today — clicking through, not using my reader — when I noticed the lovely Ms. Lemonslush‘s snazzy theme and got serious theme envy. It is rare that I find a WordPress theme that I really, really like. And yet Bueno seems to be a solid, well-built, FREE theme with lots of customization options. WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE. Designy bonus: These awesome Photoshop brushes.

I am considering installing new headers when the mood strikes. Kinda like Dooce does it, only amateurishly and without humor.

I’m still working out kinks, obviously. I’m not 100 percent sold on the Rockwell ChunkFive. I mean, I like it. But it’s the theme default, so I have a hard time letting it be the boss of me. ALSO, and this is a dealbreaker, it does not seem to want to let me use apostrophes or slashes in blog post titles. !!! and ???. There is a fix for this, but I can’t access it because I didn’t pay for the theme and therefore can’t get in to the Woo forum. Bollocks. Anyone know of a good fix? I am totally willing to ditch Rockwell if that is the issue. UPDATE: It was a cufon issue. And since I just learned what the hell cufon even means, I decided not to try to mess with fixing it and just disabled it.

I’ve got to give some TLC to the sidebar, which looks way more cramped than the proto version, since I expanded the main content area to be able to accommodate my HUGE FUCKING PHOTOS. I may need to take the entire content area wider since there is a lot of padding there on the left hand side. The sidebar just feels dumb when it’s this skinny.

I went through a brief but terrifying moment of panic at about 3:30 when, in the midst of FTPing the new theme via Filezilla, the blog starting giving me database errors and wouldn’t let me log in as an admin at all. Having accidentally killed my blog via Filezilla before, I was ready to vomit everything I had ever ingested. But, before I knew it, things were working again. Server reboot? Yeah, we’ll go with that.

So, sayonara, latest version of T&G with the hand-colored lettering. You were cute and quirky but you were built on a template I never could really get a handle on.

Let’s see what we can do with this one.

Completely forgot to post these back in December. Oops.

It’s a pretty remarkable story, especially when you consider it’s about a young lesbian of color. How often does a story like that make it into the paper?

And check out this little explainer video about the series, which was featured today at the annual H.F. Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America in New York:

The CA has nominated the series for a Pulitzer.

Part two of the True Crime series rolled out on Sunday. The story chronicles the Clementine neighborhood, which is statistically the most violent area of Memphis. Some pretty incredible journalism here.

Part one’s layout is here.

Nine pages of news-design goodness. Next installment hits the streets Oct. 18. (Please ignore the wonky spread alignment here; were I smarter, I would have tweaked the spreads before uploading individual pages, but I am very, very dumb sometimes. Rest assured that the folios printed in alignment. Or should have.)

Every now and then I get to head up the design on a special project at work, and for a couple of weeks now I’ve been wrestling with this behemoth True Crime special section (will post images as soon as I can get my hands on them; the front-page teeze is at left). A lot of hours and eye twitches went into this section, and I’m really grateful for my co-workers for stepping up to cover so much live design while I was busy trying to pull everything together from multiple sources (lots of reporters and photographers worked on the story, and we farmed some of the graphics out to an intern at another paper) while tons of editors kept close watch and had intense debates about headlines and display photos and what it all meant. Anyway, it was fun to work on, if not completely fucking stressful. Check out the web component here. This is the first in an occasional series. I’ll post the others as they roll out later this year.

I’ve carted this poster around with me for years. I love it. It’s for a photo exhibit that was at MSTU’s gallery. Margaretta Mitchell was the photographer. I didn’t see the exhibit; I just wanted the poster. It’s beautiful.

[Project 365]

One of my fabulous birthday gifts this year was a mouse (a wireless Mighty Mouse to be precise), which means I can finally get back on a proper design horse rather than the rickety little pole-with-a-mop-on-top I’d been using as a horse since I got this laptop. I don’t know about y’all, but I can’t design for shit using a trackpad. I mean, it’ll do in a pinch, but I’m kind of a mouse girl. Is that unevolved? Meh.

I think I’ve promised several people I’d help them with their blog designs and now I can finally make good on that. Uh, eventually. When I get a spare moment. [Insert sheepish grin and comically shrugged shoulders here.]

So anyway, I’m still dinking with this template and I’m sure I will be until I get tired of it and pick a new one. Despite my admitted love of all things tacky and loud, I have toned down the colors quite a bit, in part because I’ll be resurrecting Project 365 in 2009 and I want the photos to pop against a subtle background. And also I want people to think I’m sophisticated for long enough to read until the first F-bomb.

Click to embiggenate

Many days, I like to snort a big fat line of newspaper nerdery and check out the day’s front pages at Newseum. And some days, I notice that The Tennessean‘s page is all wacky, like the file got corrupted or something during its trip from the Nashville office to the Newseum office in D.C. Today was no different, except that I found the Nashville paper’s design to be delightfully trippy and abstract and, I won’t lie, totally fun to look at, like the whole thing took a hit of raunchy LSD. I especially love the nameplate, which features an approach that de-emphasizes the brand and instead lets the letterforms act as art … haha, I’m just kidding. The PDF is just fubar, that’s all.

Those crazy pixels!

How nerdy is it that I lust after book covers that I can’t have?

For instance, I FINALLY got around to buying the new Jeanette Winterson book, The Stone Gods, and I was Googling the book to pull a jpeg of its cover for my sidebar down there, and lo and behold what do I see? A much cooler cover that is probably for the UK version of the book (at right). Bah.