jonathan stegall

So, at long last, I have taken a couple of tentative steps in designing my own website. Yes, this website. http://jonathanstegall.com. Typically, I don’t blog about projects until they are finished, but I’m thinking I’d like to blog my way through this one. To encourage myself, and document the reasons that I do certain things and do not do certain other things, and so on.

History of jonathanstegall.com

This site has existed since I was in art school and had to create a portfolio for myself. I did so. It was not one of my best sites. It wasn’t a horrible site, but it certainly wasn’t very good. The best part about it was the fact that the entire thing (a Flash site) was controlled through ActionScript: the colors, background images, content, animation, etc. Which was fun.

Anyway. When I moved to Atlanta and got a job, I didn’t see the need for a portfolio. I don’t have a whole lot of free time, and typically I have a lot of things that I would like to be doing and don’t have time to do them. Thus, freelance isn’t a high priority, and I don’t have a whole lot of need for a portfolio. So, I turned http://jonathanstegall.com into a blog.

I enjoy blogging. I have opinions about almost everything, and I like to share those opinions. It helps me think, it helps me grow, and it even gets me a bit of random traffic from Google and Technorati and so on.

Where to go from here

So, this site is currently built in WordPress. I like WordPress. I used it a bit in art school, and have used it a bit since then on other sites. I enjoy building themes, and working with the code. I know php well enough, and enjoy it well enough, to do what I want with it. It’s extremely customizable, and extremely powerful if one knows how to make it powerful. At this point, the site is using the default WordPress theme. I haven’t changed it, mainly to motivate myself to, whenever there was time, get busy and create something for it.

Here is where it gets difficult. Designers are often their own worst clients. I have had some odd clients, but I have to agree: I am the worst. It takes me forever to know what I want, I’m rarely satisfied, and I always think I could do better. This is also part of the delay, and it’s part of the reason I want to blog my way through the process. I want to see if I emerge as a satisfied, or even close to satisfied, client of myself.

First steps

I started in a sketchbook. I like to begin websites with a sketchbook. I sketched out a basic layout and structure, and a small navigational structure. When I design layouts for WordPress, I do not treat them as though they are WordPress layouts. They are websites. They don’t need to look like they are made in WordPress, necessarily.

Then, I moved to Photoshop, and started a grey box layout. So far, so good. But then I started playing around with some colors. And that’s where I started to be a bad client. I’m not yet satisfied. We’ll see where this goes.

To give a little perspective on this post, I began creating websites in August of 1997. I was 14 years old. Back then, knowing how to make a site with frames made you look really cool. Yahoo! didn’t own Geocities. Google didn’t exist. AltaVista was a big deal. Netscape was fighting hard against Internet Explorer.

User generated content, for most people, boiled down to hosting a free guestbook where people could leave comments about the whole website. Commenting on individual pages? Users collaborating to create high quality content? Didn’t happen, for most of us.

For the entire time I’ve been creating websites, I have been intrigued by the possibilities that come from the web, and from design as it exists on the web. Possibilities of expression, exchange of ideas, open communication, and any number of other things that, although I knew they were cool, had potential that I didn’t understand back in the days of free hosting on Geocities.

Since I was in art school, I have been increasingly interested in the ability of design, both on the web and in general, to encourage change in society. Web design is interesting because it puts a bunch of different parts of a bunch of different media together. There are concepts of various kinds of graphic design (posters, magazines, newspapers), architecture, and any number of other things. This is part of what makes it exciting. All of these media, including web design in itself, have ways of presenting messages to society in powerful ways. Ways that connect with people.

Sometimes, the job of good design is to get out of the way. To keep the user from paying attention to it by avoiding flashy kitsch and overall busyness so they can really pay attention to the content. Sometimes, though, the job of good design is to work with the content. To be a part of the content. These are the best websites. These are the ones I want to create. This is why design, in and of itself, began to grab me as a real way of engaging with and challenging society, to bring about change in individuals and push for change in societies.

From time to time, I run across organizations and opportunities that exist to promote design as a way of enacting social change. I try to keep up with and learn from these. One of these is Design Can Change, which does multiple things. It brings together designers who care about issues of climate change and the environment, and it also serves as a poignant and beautiful message that pushes for action.

There are also Centers for Sustainable Design, combinations of theology and technology, beautiful responses to human crisis, and any number of other things. I want to continue learning about these kind of things.

From the Internet Explorer team blog:

…I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics.

Wonderful news. Web designers and developers everywhere agree with me that IE6 is the bane of our existence. There’s no need to discuss this further. IE7 is a massive improvement, and in general I’m pleased with the direction that the team seems to be taking for the future.

Acid2 compliance is, for me, an unexpected leap forward. Currently, Opera and Safari are the most widely used browsers that have achieved this milestone. Firefox 2.x does not reach this level, although Firefox 3 (which is in beta and, I’m sure, will be released well before IE 8 is) does.

This post is largely for me to consolidate some of the resources I’ve gathered over the years, and will exist in the hopes that it might prove beneficial to others looking for color resources.

First of all, color on the web is largely in a dismal state. Too many years of browsers only supporting 256 colors (and different ones, depending on what operating system) started us off worse than we could wish. On top of that, we have the abyss community that is MySpace, with the illegible content masked by horrible colors. To that, add the lack of knowledge of color theory that many actual designers possess, and there is a decent idea of what is happening. Often, we resort to picking colors from whatever photos we are using, and feel like we’ve done a good job (I’ve done this, and I suspect most other designers have as well).

So. I’m not attempting to fix all the above messes, but to provide some resources that can help.

Tools

One of the sites I have found most useful is Color Theory for web designers. It has several great tools, and some good information as well. Most notably are the Color Wizard, Color Wheel, and Color Contrast Analyzer. Those with art school experience will recognize Contrast as a significant part of C R A P (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity).

Several months ago, Adobe released a color scheme tool called kuler. It can be used online in a Flash-based tool, or it can be downloaded and used with AIR.

And, one of my favorite little programs for Windows is called Pixie. Unfortunately, it does not run on Linux (or OSX, for that matter), and I have been unable to find a good equivalent. It is a tiny little box that, when it is open, shows you the pixel location where your cursor is on your monitor, and then gives you the HTML, RGB, and CMYK values for the color of that pixel.

Whether you are in a program, viewing a website, or looking at your desktop, Pixie sits on top of what you are viewing, and any color’s value is available to you. It has some nice keyboard shortcuts, as well. I use this program extensively, and will drastically miss it whenever my switch away from Windows is complete.

Also, those with a bit of a budget can try Color Schemer.

Resources

The web is full of resources about color, and some of them are very good. One is COLOURlovers, a resource that covers trends and news in the world of color.

Finally, a great starting point of an article for how to use color, and also a good source for other online resources, is Veerle’s article on Choosing color combinations.

So An Event Apart Chicago is finished. Several things were new to me, and several were somewhat familiar, but for me, even the familiar ones were very relevant. In a way, these are the parts of the event that stuck out to me. Many of them were part of my design education, but, of course, things that are not used are easily forgotten.

For a time during the latter part of my design education, I spent a lot more time programming than I did designing in school, and in various work projects I needed to use different methods of design than I often would have liked, or was taught to use. Many of the design theories and processes had been underused for a while, and it was wonderful for these to be refreshed and re-emphasized, and also phrased in different ways than the ways I learned them.

So much of design, and particularly design on the web, is as much about continuing education as it is about a base of knowledge. When I was studying the Bible and theology for my first degree, I had a professor that I’ve quoted here and to anyone who will listen, and he said that if a person were to earn a PhD in theology, and not read a book for six months, they would no longer be relevant. Their field would have passed them. Obviously, the web is younger than theology, and this idea works on the web at least as well as it does in theology.

An Event Apart - for people who make websites, will be in downtown Chicago at the end of this month. And, so will I. If you’ll be in the area and would like to have a coffee or something, post a comment. I’ve never been to a web related conference. Exciting stuff…

I haven’t had a chance to post on this yet, but the new version of the Underground Railroad went live last week, just before my wife and I left for Cornerstone (which, I hope to write a couple of posts about).

It’s important to note that this new site isn’t what you would call complete. New features are in the works for both long and short term development, and the site is built in such a way that it is easy to add new features and new content.

About the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is an organization that seeks to network ministries that work with underground and alternative subcultures. At this time, I know of connected ministries in the United States, Canada, and several countries in Europe. I believe there are also ministries in Asia and South America that will be added in the near future.

This illustrates the fact that underground culture is worldwide, and that God is doing things in the underground worldwide. Dissatisfaction with the mainstream is worldwide because something of a mainstream is worldwide, and there’s a unity that can be found in that.

About the website

The website of the Underground Railroad is something I’ve been privileged to be a part of since 2002, when a friend introduced me to it. This new version has been in the works for some time. Over a year, at least. For most of my time in college, I was married, working fulltime, and attending school fulltime, and didn’t have as much time to work on awesome projects like this. Since I finished college in December, my freetime went up a bit and I was able to finish the site.

In any case, I was responsible for the design and development of the new site, as well as some of the new content. Other parts of the new content are still pending, but believe me when I say it’s better that the new site be up with pending content than that the old one have lived through another Cornerstone.

As far as design and front end structure, I feel that there’s a clean, dark look for the most part, and that it’s somewhat minimalistic. Part of this is intentional, and part of it is due to the slowness that often comes with receiving graphical material from so many different sources. I intentionally avoided the use of a lot of generic stock photography, but I do hope to include relevant photos as the site continues to develop and receive input. Front end structure is generated by the back end system, and is written to be valid XHTML 1.1, with valid CSS. I’ve never done a site to the 1.1 specification, and thought I’d give it a try.

The back end is written in PHP 5, with a MySQL 5 database. As much of the PHP is object oriented as my knowledge allows, which I’ve found to be more than I thought it was. While I can’t claim that this is an MVC Content Management System by any means, I feel that it is a cleanly coded system. This is by far the biggest project I’ve done with PHP, and has proven to be quite the learning experience.

What now?

Now, there are several other projects that will begin to require attention. Some are ministry related. One of the most important to me is, again, designing this blog. Let’s hope that begins soon.

From A List Apart:

People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Let’s do something to change that. Presenting A List Apart’s first annual Web Design Survey.

For the last few months, I’ve been spending as much of my rare free time as possible working on the complete redesign of the Underground Railroad. If anyone were to click that link, there would be no need to explain the need for such a redesign. That particular design is several years old, and dates back to a time when I had little technical knowledge and even less artistic knowledge. Now, I have at least some of both, and I hope for good results.

Essentially, I have written a CMS for this site, which strives to be portable, robust, and secure to the fullest possible extent. This step is close to complete at this time.

Currently, I’m attempting to finalize the design scheme that is present on the site, and ensure that it

1. Properly represents the values, ideas, theories, and passions that lie behind the Underground Railroad
2. Does the same for myself, as an artist and a designer
3. Mixes the two in an authentic, powerful way

Generally, as a designer I’m a big fan of simple, clean, maybe somewhat minimalistic design. If something doesn’t have a purpose for being there, it shouldn’t be there. This fits artistically, semantically, theoretically, and in countless other ways. I love cork’d, a list apart, and countless other designs, designers, and ideas that present effective communication in an artistic way.

That said, I think there’s an extreme to which minimalism can go. <rant>I see this a lot among advocates of web standards, and I find that to be unfortunate for advancing the cause of standards-based design. The web is about content, but so is design. Form follows function, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any form.</rant>

Anyway. This redesign that I’m working on is not particularly minimalistic. As I’ve been observing this, I’ve been thinking about its implications. I think it’s somewhat difficult for sites that are based on black to be minimalistic. Movie sites. Band sites. Sweet Flash sites. I know there are exceptions that are done very well, but of all the minimalistic sites that are done well, there aren’t very many black ones; and of all the black sites that are done well, there aren’t very many minimalistic ones. So, I’ve decided not to worry about it.