I realize I use up a solid 25 characters or so per post apologizing for my delinquency in posting. Again: I’m so sorry, it’s been too long.

If I could afford a therapist I think she’d say that perhaps I’m just not that into you, blog. But I’m not sure that’s it.

I think it’s the winds of 2010 blowing in my mind, causing me to consider future life options and sending me down extremely ornate roads of procrastination. For example: what to have for breakfast?! That one alone can account for an hour or two of waffling. And not the tasty kind.

Let me tell you about my breakfast conundrum, and perhaps you’ll understand why I’ve been so horrible to you readers.

I have tried a whole host of different breakfast foods; I want the perfect hunger satiation, with a kick of energy. No sleepyhood, no guilt.

First I did hard boiled eggs. But then I read that eggs have lots of toxins. Then I did a handful of granola. But there was secret sweetness in there, and it turned into six handfuls of granola. Then I did fruit. but fruit is too expensive and I was still hungry. Then I did almonds. Then I realized that almonds have more fat per serving than an order of mcdonald’s french fries and I was having like three servings.

So this morning I had roasted red pepper soup with pesto and truffle oil and swiss cheese as a garnish.

And now I’m ready for a nap. But no!!! We must blog!!!!

And it’s actually going to be a very good one. You see, I redesigned and relaunched my own portfolio site recently, and I worked with the wonderful James Muspratt to make it happen. So here is an interview with the fellow.

(here are some screen shots first, so you know what the hell we’re talking about):

Here we go.

–
Hallo James! Thanks so much for making my website a work of art in itself. As you well know, I found your work through Lisa Kereszi‘s site. Tell me a bit about what you made for Lisa- how did that come about, and what was your thinking there?

I was a student in graphic design at the art school at Yale, where Lisa teaches photography. She asked Pamela Hovland, a design critic there, to make a logo for her, and Pamela brought me in when Lisa decided to expand the design work to a whole website. In some ways it was a similar project to yours: we all wanted a relatively straight-forward presentation of images, grouped into thematic sets.

We decided early on that large background images had a nice way of emphasizing Lisa’s focus on flat surfaces and fields of color or texture. (I particularly love the vivid orange in the water fountain photo on the reviews page, and I now have the Governors’ Island theatre doors hanging over my desk in my home office.

Do you enjoy working with photographers, how is it different than other design work you’ve done?

Doing photo-centric sites is always fun, mainly because the raw material already comes with an inherent beauty, or at least a visual intensity. A lot of web design work doesn’t work that way: you’re given a scattered array of texts, images, and graphics, and it’s your job to wrangle them into something coherent with a sequence or hierarchy that people can understand. More generally, I think photography as a discipline has a really interesting relationship to the web when it comes to issues that tend to recur over and over: voyeurism, nonlinear narratives, mass communication, etc.

I wanted to work with you to create a site that worked particularly well with my narrative type of imagery, and I think your solution of having the images appear in groups, and then have them show at the edges was particularly brilliant. Have you used those techniques before?

(As you know, there are many template sites available for photographer sites now. I wanted something special and particular, though I am definitely a fan of Arlosites, Indexhibit, Livebooks and Photoshelter-do you recommend any of these especially? What’s your thinking abouttemplate sites, and what do you think the future will hold for them?)

Although I’m not an expert, I do think that template sites have come quite a long way in the past few years, and that that’s a great thing for visual artists. They allow anyone to throw up a portfolio on the web at very little cost and yet have their site be well-organized and easy to navigate.

On the other hand, they’ve certainly caused something of an identity crisis for certain strands of web design: if you really believe that the sole purpose of design is to “show the content” and stay utterly invisible, I think you would have a hard time justifying the value of your work in the face of a project like Indexhibit. Although my first forays into web design came from the “pure usability” philosophy, I
changed my mind pretty soon after I went back to grad school.

While there’s nothing particularly wrong with using a template site, I now think of a website as an opportunity to frame a photographer’s work in a particular way, preferably one that harmonizes with or reveals something about it. That doesn’t have to mean graphic pyrotechnics or Flash widgets: ideally it’s just a series of choices that have some meaningful consequences for the way a visitor will view the work and move through the site. For the same reason I would never want a world where all books were designed with the same size and typefaces, I wouldn’t want a world where every photographer used the same site design. And while it’s a business cliché to talk about a website as an “experience”, I really believe that a custom design has the power to make the work more memorable.

I guess the larger point I would make is that while “simplicity” and “usability” are often touted as crucial to web work, they actually make lousy starting points for a design process. With your site, we talked early on about your editing work, your obsession with culling and sorting images, and the influence those habits had on your photography. That conversation led to the idea that we could emphasize
the narrative qualities of *sequences* of images. Of course, the particular technique we used to make that idea visual — ghosting the previous and next images at the edges of the screen — had to be tinkered with to be as straightforward and transparent as possible. But that doesn’t mean that your site’s design would fit every photographer, or that it’s somehow “usable” in a universal sense.

Tell me about your own photography- you have some pretty wonderful work. Is that just a sideline for you, and how did you decide on this type of online showcase for your own imagery and design work?

Thanks! I started posting photographs to the web when I got my first digital camera in 2002, when I lived in London for a year. It started as a way to share photos in the pre-Flickr era, then turned into a more diaristic photoblog in the following years. I don’t have many thoughts on it other than that I enjoy recording where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. I tend to gravitate towards architecture and
signage, which are nice resources to have for design projects.

What’s your background in design- I know you did the MFA program at Yale- where do you ideally see your career going, do you have any dream projects?

Good question. I’ve just started working at a technology-driven studio here in Nashville, which does a fair amount of motion graphics and screen-based exhibit work for schools and museums. That’s going to be a lot of fun. I’ve always enjoyed working in different media– tech challenges are a nice break from design challenges, though they often go hand in hand –  so I’ll probably continue to look for opportunities wherever that’s possible.

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Thanks, James! In the spirit of things continuing to be about me, I will now post my favorite images of 2009. Nine for ’09.

1. dive

2. ride

3. Maine sun and paddles

2. sausages

5. david and henry get dressed

6. grandma has a heat lamp

7. the abs diet (apparently effective for other people)

8. mom disturbs the birds

9. blinds

wooo time for lunch.

see more of my work.

see more of james’ work.