The design was arrived at through a couple of meetings with Alison where we discussed the importance of her being able to control the content of her portfolio on her own and broad ideas of how to divide that content into logical, digestible sections. From that point, I went into my lab and started creating.

From a design standpoint, my minimalist leanings and the current cleanliness of the site design pushed me toward creating a grid. We had decided on a three level hierarchy, landing page, project overview, and ending at project details. After a bit of playing I found a natural progression where as detail increases, the block sizes decrease accordingly.

From there, I did a lot of research into image gallery plugins for WordPress. I was looking for something that had a lot of features and flexibility, particularly in terms of establishing albums and galleries visually, as well as image resizing, but more importantly, I was looking for something that was easy to use for the average user. I ultimately landed on the NextGen Gallery (which I was initially skeptical about because of the somewhat goofy name), which provided most of these features out of the box. After playing with it for a while, I ended up making a few customizations to the plugin to simplify the workflow for Alison, and wired it up to the designs I had created.

Overall, I think that the design works really well with the site and gives Alison a lot more flexibility to define which of her many amazing projects will be featured on her site at any given time.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

The focus with this design was to get something clean and functional and to get it done quickly. I drew out a design on Friday afternoon and spent Saturday afternoon getting the design into code. Since it was meant to be a simple portfolio website where people could come and watch some of Catherine’s amazing work, I made an extra effort to ensure that no matter how you came at the site, whether it be iPhone, IE6 or with Javascript turned off, you could still get at the videos, while providing a cool viewing experience for the majority of users.

I also wanted her to be able to add new work to the site easily so I added a WordPress backend to it and a few plugins and techniques that I learned recently while deep into the WordPress codebase for several other sites, my own included. Of particular usefulness is the Custom Fields Template plugin that allows you to easily setup a set of fields that are easier to use for the average user than the completely opaque default WordPress custom fields thing. I also used the post thumbnails feature, which is brand new in the latest release of WordPress.

I’m pretty happy with the end result and I think Catherine is as well, which was the goal. As a fan of her work, it’s cool to get the chance to turn the tables and get her to be a fan of mine. Hopefully it helps her make connections while she’s at Sundance and beyond.

There are a few projects that I plan to continue or start up this quarter across the board in web, film and photography.

Web

There’s a massive number of improvements and new features that Ryan and I plan to incorporate into tiffr.com, to hopefully one day turn it into the de facto standard for simple event scheduling. We’ll also be looking into priming the pipeline on several of the hundreds of ideas we’ve brainstormed over the past few years, in the hopes of bringing more simple and clean solutions that save people time and frustration. We want to incite curiosity and unlock potential in our audience.

Film

I currently have two short scripts in the draft stage that I hope to produce in the coming year or so, and I’m building collaborations with a lot of amazing people in an effort to assemble a powerful team of creative professionals to ensure that these productions are realised to their full potential.

I’m also going to be working toward finally getting the footage from Jamaica edited into several pieces, probably some short teasers and a short documentary based around our visits to Nine Mile and the people who live in that community.

Photography

On this front, I’m keeping things simple, planning to organize and share more of my backlog of photos, as well as finally making prints of the better shots in my archives. I think that through the pre-production stages of the film projects I will be producing some amazing images that I’ve dreamt up over the past few years.

Montage

This probably could have gone under film, but it’s big enough to be on its own as well. We’re going to start planning a fall & winter slate of Montage events, showcasing more local filmmakers, with fresh, new art installations and potentially a newer, bigger venue.

Stay tuned.

How It All Started

The major precursor, in my mind, to the whole Facebook experiment was Friendster, of which I was an early adopter and proponent, and which has now deteriorated to a site where spammers and pornographers try to spread their seed. The main problems with Friendster was that it wasn’t very easy to use, it ran slowly, and didn’t provide enough of an immediate reward for using it. So all of the early users who decided to give it a try slowly gave up on it one by one, leaving me jaded against these types of social networking experiments.

In late 2006, when Facebook opened up to anyone over 13, there was a sudden frenzy of people signing up. You couldn’t have a conversation in Toronto for a good two months without discussing Facebook (In fact, Toronto had the largest Facebook community in the world for a period). Remembering the pattern learned from Friendster, I decided not to join the bandwagon, figuring people would get tired of Facebook once the fad was over and the zeitgeist had passed, and we wouldn’t hear about it anymore. At the time I was also going through a very difficult period in my life and I really felt I couldn’t handle the distractions, needing more real connections and less virtual ones than ever before.

The Holdout

Facebook wouldn’t give up and people kept talking about it. I kept waiting for the hum to fade but it never did. By the end of 2007, Facebook was almost a de facto method of communication among many of my peers, even above email, which astounded me, and often left me in the dark. The difference, I was told, was that Facebook was easy, it just worked, and, the worst and best argument of all, everyone else was on it anyways. I took a look a few times and saw an application that was incredibly well implemented, highly responsive to its users needs, with a good understanding of how the average Internet user would want to interact with others. But still, I did not join.

My reasons had changed somewhat but the result was still a decision not to wade in those waters. The first and main reason remained to avoid a distraction I felt I did not need and that wouldn’t provide enough benefit to outweigh the possible time vacuum it could create.

Slowly over that first year I also watched as others vacillated between obsession and disdain for Facebook, this whole new type of relationship, not with the people it connects you to, but with the software itself. Real relationships in the real world were being really affected through the nuances of the software, from learning your girlfriend is no longer your girlfriend through a status change, to allowing you to vet your new crushes’ friends, to straight up stalking. Conspiracy theories started to surface about how Facebook was actually the perfect government program to monitor citizens from around the world through legal means, which were amusing, particularly since they sounded so plausible. The ugly side was showing.

In fact, Facebook caused many people to even question the very notion of friendship, since the term ‘friend’, in context of the application, was often being conflated with the concept, and emotional reality, of friendship in the real world; a sort of malapropism between a real world friend and a ‘friend’ in the Facebook world. This set off many Facebook haters who would try to point this fact out to anyone who would listen and disparage the whole enterprise as frivolous, deeming any relationship formed through the site as resolutely unreal.

And then, personally, and on top of all of this, there was also the seemingly trivial, but definitely relevant, streak mentality, dictating that since I had held out to that point, why stop now?

Doubt Sinks Her Teeth In

I was pretty content to stay clear of the fray, even taking some pride in it, which would engender a feeling of solidarity with my fellow non-Facebookers, whenever we would come across one another. We would congratulate each other and discuss our relative reasons for not getting involved. Yet.

There was often a “yet” in there because many of us were beginning to understand that the new reality was that staying off Facebook could actually end up costing you in your real life; relationships, jobs, commonalities. Particularly when you’re single, those are the three things you need the most if you want that situation to change.

The Pros

And it didn’t stop there. After returning from a summer of travel, I began establishing fightingtheboss as an independent web development and media studio. I quickly started to realise that if I wanted to purport that I was plugged-in to the online world, that I understood the needs of clients and the consumers of their content, I would need to at least appear that I, myself, am plugged-in and accessible. At the lowest level, it became quite obvious that, like Kanye, I needed to promote myself by any means necessary, including, and possibly particularly, via Facebook.

I was further swayed recently by a timely article by interaction design guru Khoi Vinh, where he made the argument that to ignore these types of social networks as a web professional was to be lax at your job, to not do your homework, to be just plain irresponsible. In some ways, I agreed with his assertion, from the standpoint that Facebook defines, completely, in some cases, how a large chunk of people interact with the web, and being ignorant of those trends could both doom me to repeat any of their mistakes and deprive me from learning from their innovations.

Can’t Beat ‘Em?

So now I find myself standing at the precipice, facing Facebook and the void beyond. It’s like that part in the movie Cliffhanger, where Sylvester Stallone is hanging by one hand off the edge of a cliff and Janine Turner yells: “Don’t Fall!” Like Sly, I don’t need to be told the obvious, but holding on isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Or maybe Janine Turner is the multitude of Facebook haters and letting go is really what I need to do?
(Who knew that movie was so rich with metaphor?)

I’ve never had a beef with Facebook, but I often got a kick out of being on the outside of the whole thing. I was waiting for that caché to pay off, but it looks like it may never happen, leaving me out of the loop and out of touch. Maybe ultimately the old adage is right: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

After wanting to get a portfolio on the web for a long time, Mike was finally driven to do something about it after being nominated for a best music video award at the Plus Camerimage Film Festival in Lodz, Poland, a festival geared toward the art of cinematography, for the “Our Hell” video. It’s a super cool video you can see on his new site that he shot using infrared film and some military camera from the States.

Mike wanted a very simple site, nothing too distracting and made a layout in Photoshop for me as a template for the site. I coded it up based on the template, adding interactivity and giving suggestions to make it more usable and appealing. The overall result is a simple, clean, one page site that focuses viewer attention on his body of work with very little clutter.

Considering it only took about a full day’s work in total to get it together (aside from encoding the videos, which took Mike a really long time because of an underpowered computer and a quest for perfection), I’m quite pleased with the outcome. Hopefully he’ll go out there and meet Roger Deakins, Christopher Doyle and/or Janusz Kaminski and get them to check out the site, where they will fall in love with the simple aesthetic and seek me out for their online presences.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Mike was the cinematographer on my last film Regret, and did a fantastic job, above and beyond what should really be expected of him on set. He kept things positive and moving along, and I don’t remember him ever doubting the feasibility of anything I would ask him for, which was very reassuring for me at the time. A great guy to work with, to be sure.

As opposed to the previous incarnations of this site, which, directionless, suffered from a dearth of updates for long stretches of time, the new fightingtheboss will be updated frequently with videos I’ve made, stories I’m writing, photos I’ve taken, links to sites of interest around the interweb and new and exciting information about film, photo, community and web projects on the go. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bunch of movie reviews and recommendations for people who dare take my word on those matters, either.

The site is going to be evolving indefinitely, with new features and fixes being introduced periodically to enhance the experience and make it easier to find and, hopefully, enjoy the stuff that goes on here. The first changes you should see in the near future are the addition of the Projects and Photos sections of the site, which are in development now. The Projects section will be a portfolio of sorts, highlighting past, present and future projects in the fightingtheboss universe. The Photos section will be a gallery of selected photo works posted to this site and links to external fightingtheboss materials on the web.

The old content, which dates back to 1999, will take some time to appear, as it all needs to be scrubbed to conform to the new layout, broken links need to be repaired, etc. I may just cherry pick the worthy posts from the past to keep the content on the site focused and relevant, since a lot of that stuff from the past already feels like it’s from a previous life.

So take a look around, get comfortable, hit that bookmark button on your browser and come back often to see what’s going on in the fightingtheboss universe.