anthony mattox new media art & design

Website for Rachel Verhaaren

I’ve just finished a website for this cute girl I know, Rachel Verhaaren. She is a photographer, and a student here at MICA. Her work has really fantastic colors and textures (two of my favorite things), especially her large format photographs and often focus on optics and perception.

Most photographers seem to want the most minimal of sites, a white or dark grey page with their work in the middle. I felt it was more appropriate to give it just a little bit more color and give visitors a good impression of Rachel’s work as soon as they open the page, something few photographer’s sites do. WIth that in mind, her portfolio is on the front page with large images linking to sets of images.

www.rachelverhaaren.com

Some nice javascript touches are built with jQuery and the site is powered by Wordpress.

WikiWeb Version 2

WikiWeb is a piece created in Processing which creates a live, interactive visualization of Wikipedia. I’ve rescripted aspects of the code to make it run a little better and also added a better user interface, hopefully making it easier to use. The new version includes a toolbar of possible actions and a help and reset button. Any feedback on the changes or the project in general is very much appreciated.

Wordpress

If you don’t know already, Wordpress is kind of a big deal, and it’s about time i give it some credit. Wordpress is a completely open source content management system. Being open source it is not only free for anyone to use, the source code is also visible and unencrypted making it easy for anyone which a little scripting knowledge to customize it, or use parts of it elsewhere. A content management system (cms) is a web interface which allows users to manipulate the content of a web site without having to write any code. Even for people who do know what their doing as far as building web pages this is a far better system than manually trying to write each page. I use Wordpress for this website and for a few other pages I’m working on right now.

In addition to being free, the system is also very easy to use, and most importantly very well designed. Through the interface I can add or modify posts on my blog, upload images, create pages, manage my categories and links, comments, designs, and just about anything else the average blogger could ever want to do. There is even a visual editing mode (wysiwyg) allowing users to style the content of posts and pages without writing any html. Since Wordpress is installed on your own server, although they also have their own hosting service now, you don’t have to worry about annoying ads and logos and a silly looking sub-domain as you would with a service like blogger. read on »