I’m dissatisfied with every record the Beatles ever fucking made. There ain’t one of them I wouldn’t remake… including all the Beatles records and all my individual ones……But you play me those tracks today and I want to remake every damn one of them. There’s not a single one… I heard ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on the radio last night. It’s abysmal, you know. The track is just terrible. I mean, it’s great, but it wasn’t made right, know what I mean? But that’s the artistic trip, isn’t it? That’s why you keep going.
- John Lennon, Playboy Interview, 1980

I’ve been working on a web site for a photographer friend of mine.

She would like to show her photos in a nice slideshow with fading effects and thumbnails.

To minimize the maintenance effort, I need a simple web app that would do most of the work for her so she won’t need to touch the code at all. Ideally, she’d just dump a bunch of pictures to a folder, and voila! the slideshow is populated with the new pictures.

The Smooth gallery 2.0 by JonDesign looks promising.

I’ll give it a try and report back.

A t-shirt design based on a painting titled “Miss Sarajevo” that was inspired by U2’s song by that same title.

That song is about the act of defiant in the midst of ugly adversity. Not letting ugly situations/conditions caused by evil-minded people kill the beauty in our soul.

We need to fight to let that beauty shines through darkness.

A portion of the lyric that is displayed on the t-shirt:

Dici che il fiume
Trova la via al mare
E come il fiume
Giungerai a me
Oltre i confini
E le terre assetate
Dici che come il fiume
Come il fiume…
L’amore giungerà
L’amore…
E non so più pregare
E nell’amore non so più sperare
E quell’amore non so più aspettare
–from “Miss Sarajevo” by U2

This t-shirt is customizable (color and material) and available for men also. You can purchase this t-shirt at my online print/poster store.

Here’s another t-shirt design based on a painting that I did.

As always, you can customize the t-shirt by picking different materials and/or colors.

The product shown here is available for $31.45 at my zazzle store

Research from Jakob Nielsen about reading behavior of web user.

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

I knew this all along, from usability, eye tracking and my own behavior, but seeing the number is very eye-opening.

An idea for a method to test out the scannability of the content on your page is to ask a person who’s not familiar with your site to read what he sees on the page out loud as fast as he can within 5 seconds. Most web users only stay for 2-3 seconds, but we need to add the extra 2 seconds to accommodate the time needed to do the reading.

Link to article:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

A series of 3 connected paintings that depict the struggle of a young lady to overcome a destructive lifestyle controlled by addictions.

Each panel is 24″ x 30″. All done in acrylic on canvas.

These paintings were completed on 05/03/2008.

They will be auctioned off at a fundraising fashion/art show in Downtown LA this Thursday 05/08/2008. For more info about this event, click here.

The prints for these paintings are available on my online print/t-shirt store.