The Bloated Penguin

Next Monday will mark the kick-off of another project here at the exclusive computer nerd-labs of my work. Yes, alright – I could be exaggerating about the “exclusive computer nerd” stuff, but us introverts need to generate self importance some how right? Anyways, Monday we will be kicking off a brand new digital campaign that will be %100 Wordpress generated.

I know what most of you are thinking, “Dude, Wordpress is like so 2006!” well, to give you all some insight, Wordpress is like a foreign language here and for us to even make the decision to use the system was a HUGE step. So instead of writing how Movable Type or Drupal are much better systems (or to build our own), for the sake of argument I’m going to deem Wordpress as a step in the right direction.

Over the course of a month the crew here will be learning about blog design, writing, voice and tone and most of all, the power of unique and consistent content over this thing we call the Interwebs. I have a lot of confidence in the Scooby Gang here, but as with all projects, I’m expecting to fail a few times before we get this right.

Thanks for the good luck wishes in advance!

My adventures into Wordpress and CSS are finally coming to fuition as my refreshed new portfolio is “almost,” complete. I only say “almost,” because this is one of those things that’ll never actually be finished. I’m at a stage where I’m simply inputting content; which for me, is really the home stretch. I’ve gone through multiple revisions and come up with something that I can live with. When working on personal projects such as this, you really do have to bite it and say, “screw it, it works.” Usually I’m an extreme perfectionist, but this is more of a situation where I’d rather just get something done and worry about being proud of it later on.

Here’s a preview of the logo Woojin Cho made for me.

So if you’ve been following my adventures into Wordpress and the creation of my new portfolio then you probably already know the reason why I’m trying something different. Well, I spent a lot of last night trying to accomplish this and I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t stand my own decisions. It doesn’t take genius to figure out that one of the most repetative things someone can do is try and define themselves. Depending on the day, different things in this world represent different characteristics. For me, sometimes its a pen, other times its a keyboard, and so on and son on. Basically my problem is I have different ideas on different days on how to set this whole thing up. Like I said before, I made the decision to let someone else create a logo, but I’m thinking I should have just let someone else come up with the enitre idea and go from there.

Sure it would be a strange relationship. I would hire someone making me the client, then have them brand me with me knowing exactly what I want and then eventually just changing it all in the end… GAWD this SUCKS!

Alright, back to the task at hand. Back to CSS. Back to Photoshop. Back to an idea I had 3 days ago. Then back to the idea I had this morning.

No sympathy required, just know that frustration is kind of my new “thing.”

As I said last week, I’m finally giving my portfolio a bit of a refresh. After looking through some of the stuff that’s out there and figuring out how I want to position myself as a brand, I’ve decided to take the entire thing in a whole new direction. The first thing I did was decide that I was going to build the whole thing in Wordpress. I blog a lot for a lot of different clients, so the interface is as easy as pecan pie. The problem was finding an appropriate template to frack with. Good thing I had the help of One Night Site who found me a layout that I really like. It’s simple, it’s kind of funky, and it allows me to really screw with the original without breaking the backend (too much).

So once I decided on all of that I went to work on trying to figure out my own visual style – or at the very least something a little bit more tantalizing than my name and title in bold courier text. After a few long nights of struggling through photoshop I landed upon a conclusion that I’ve known for… ever. I suck at design. I hate whatever I make , I can never fully decide what I’m looking for and I like to sit there and think about things for way too long. In terms a lot of you can relate to, I’m the worst client in the world. But once I discovered this I was able to let go and I think I made a good decision in doing so. I asked for the help of a real designer, someone who understands the artistic world a lot better than I do and enlisted the aid of one Woojin Cho. Interestingly enough, Woojin is building his portfolio at the same time.

Woojin sent me a few samples of what he was planning for his own logo but wasn’t pleased with his outcome thus far. As for why he sent them to me for review is beyond me as he knows I have about the equivalent design knowledge of pineapple. Anyways, the good that came out of all that was that he asked if I wanted any of the samples for myself. Heck Yes Please! Logo problem solved and Woojin sent over what he made. I’m pretty happy with it considering I can’t do this myself and it actually fits with my personality a bit.

Onward and upwards now – back to the grind.

Oh yeah, here’s the logo.

I have to be honest, my portfolio is sooooo 2008. I really appreciate the work the Normal Design Group did with it last year, but I think it’s high time for a little upgrade. Nothing too major, but I want to upgrade the freshness of it all and seeing as I’ve done a ton of work since the last time I updated, I’ve decided to rethink the whole idea. Couple that with the fact that the group over at One Night Site have agreed to help me make the transition to Wordpress and I’ve decided to go ahead and start from scratch.

*Please note that Normal Design did an amazing job with branding me and my company last year and I would recommend using them to anyone, but a great opportunity with One Night Site has come up where they are going to guide me through the process of making a Wordpress portfolio. As much as I love the work Normal has done, I made the decision based on the ability to update faster.

The main reason for the refresh is that I want an easier, more accessible way to upload new content. In my line of work I have the opportunity to lend a hand on a lot of different kinds of projects and having a standard html site meant I would have to spend evening upon evening physically making new pages. I found that because of my lack of development knowledge, I would often be pulling out my hair over the smallest things.

Over the years I’ve become accustom to the Wordpress interface and even somewhat familiar to how it works behind the scenes. I’m slowly learning more about customizing templates and such and I’m a bit of a college freshman when it comes to plugins – meaning I’ll try anything once… Anyways, I’ve decided to go with a Wordpress generated portfolio. I know it sounds a bit strange, but from a comfort level I’m going to enjoy adding to my new portfolio a lot more than I ever did before.

I’m like this writer guy with tons of ambition and a ridiculous imagination (shit I should put that in my Twitter profile…) so from a visual sense I don’t actually have a ton of sexy work. Knowing this I’m constantly looking for ways to make my port more appealing. Sure I’ve got a few names that I can rely on with regards to clients, but I’m mostly focused on describing exactly what my role is on a project. I’m not like a designer where I can make something awesome and simply put it up and say “Hey, look what I designed for Client X.” Instead I rely mostly on my relationships with clients and what exactly I have done for them with regards to narrative experience, brand language, interactive story telling and writing. Basically the sexiest thing I would be able to show would be a series of documents… Lame.

So moving forward I’ve decided to go with concept of building small case studies that explain my role on each project and what exactly I did for the whole experience. I’ll post a few images per study, but the focus is going to be explaining what I did and how I did it. Hopefully this won’t fall on its face.

I’ll let those of you who read this know when it is fully launched.

Bye for now.

Flipped out the template image from Wordpress and uploaded one of my own. It’ll do for now, but I plan on changing it up later on I think. This is a small collection of toys I’ve collected over the years. Although I’m much older – my maturity level remains to be that of a 12 year old. From left to right the toys are as such:

Band-Aid version of Kozik’s Smoking Bunny – Got this while traveling Asia a few years back. I like it because he’s broken but he continues to do what he loves.

Behind the Kozik is a tiny version of one of Godzilla’s villains. Still unsure what his name is, but I like him cause he’s basically a spiky turtle out to wreak havoc.

Next to the Kozik Bunny is Gaz, younger sister to Dib from the famous cartoon Invader Zim. This is from the Halloween collection where Gaz dressed up as a chipmunk. She’s pretty much the only good animated version of an emo kid.

Standing front and center is the Bloated Penguin himself. This was given to me by a designer by the name of Kurtis Whitelaw. Kurtis and I used to work together and along with designing for the company, he also taught design at Emily Carr. He would always hand out tiny “gold star” like things to his students that performed well and after a project Kurtis and I worked on together he handed this to me.

To the right of the penguin is a Fat Cap I picked up from Kid Robot a few years ago. I like this one in particular because he’s a white marker used for tagging.

Finally, on the far right is either Kang or Kodos from The Simpsons. I’m not sure which one it is considering they are identical aliens. This toy in particular is from The Simpsons Halloween collection where the family discovers that Maggie is actually half alien.

So there you have it, the header image of the Bloated Penguin explained. I’ll make sure to do a commentary track when the DVD is released…

Out.

Notice anything different?

Yup, it’s a new theme to the Bloated Penguin. You can store this away in the “Who cares drawer,” of your brain if you want, but it’s pretty exciting for me.

I liked the old style, but 1 person (which makes up about 50% of my readership) said that they would like to be able to see more of the older posts.

I was also getting a bit tired of the green on black theme I had in here before. I call that color scheme Ninja-Kermit.

So onto the new and a few changes should be expected. I’m going to start using smaller images and smaller sized video clips. As a writer I like to garner as much attention as possible to the writing. Of course there will be exceptions…

Later.