Sunday, January 17, 2010

Kirstenzirngibl.com is LIVE! Check it out!




In this past 5 days or so I worked pretty hard at designing this site and getting the content together.  I had never really done an actual, functional website before, short of the rinky-dink projects in early High School.  I wanted to "do it right the first time" so that I wouldn't be tempted to go back during this semester (or a year or two from now) to develop/overhaul it again.  I originally had this super-complicated idea, and almost went with flash (which I haven't even tried yet), but I'm glad I used a more conservative layout and HTML.  I think it's faster and just easier to get to the work.  (Google likes it better anyway, and I hear art directors actually want to be able to download images so they can keep your work in a folder for future reference.)

I still need to fix some stuff in my bio and add some better titles/descriptions to the pieces, but for the most part I'm going to call it done for now, though I hope to update it with new work regularly.

Anyway, my site also represents the visual "brand" I plan to use in marketing myself.  I wanted something kind of quirky, with structural forms in an organic layout.  I wanted something that could somehow communicate versatility and detail-oriented, complexity-driven style.  I wanted to enhance that message by making it look both new/futuristic and historical (kind of steampunkish?) at the same time, hence the color, texture and choosing serif font).  I hope I at least somewhat succeeded at this.  (By the way, I just realized not so long ago that this kind of reminds me of conceptart.org.  If you thought that too, just know it wasn't intentional, and when you compare them side-by-side they look pretty different.)

(And major thanks to my dad for helping with the code.  While I did some HTML/javascript/CSS back in High School and have a basic understanding of it, it probably would've taken me a week to look up and relearn how to do what my dad hammered out in half a day!  He also had some valuable web design advice that I'm glad I listened to.)


Anyhow, I'd love to hear your comments/critiques about it.  If there's anything easily fixable that you think would be better fixed, I'm open to going back in before I start getting busy.



Finally, make sure to check out the "links" section.  I've got some well-known artists, but also some less well-known ones as well listed there, as well as some cool resources.  And also, if you know me at CCAD and have a personal site of your own, I've probably linked to you.  (And they're not in a particular order, just as they popped into my head.)

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