anthony mattox new media art & design

The List List

The List List is net art* piece I’ve been working on for the past few months. It is a collaborative list of lists, an open platform for everyones favorite superlatives.*the deacons of new media art might not agree as it isn’t ugly as sin and the concept isn’t unbelievable convoluted and yet meaningless.

On the site, you can create lists and vote lists and items within them up and down. The goal is just to build a collection of fun and humorous lists.

The site has been an enormous technical exercise in precisely executing a complex web page. Despite the apparent simplicity, it is one of the more involved sites I’ve built. Including a number of interactions with the database and an extensive collection of ajax scripts so that all the site’s functions can be used without reloading the page and with a flourish of sleek animations.

It’s very easy to get burned out on a piece with just a few details left to go. I did my best to polish every detail of the The List List, making every transition smooth and considering every graphic, semantic, and functional minutia.

I built the site using CodeIgniter, a php framework, and jQuery. CodeIgniter was probably not necessary, but it made laying out the foundation super fast. jQuery is of course great for animations and simplifying Ajax scripts.

Go have some fun with it.

Interactive Site

I began programming about a year ago, primarily working a language called Processing. Much of the programming I have been doing has be to create generative or algorithmic artwork. Such works involve writing a script to dynamically generate images based on a variety of systems and inputs. One of the thoughts behind this type of work is that a piece is not manifested as a single image, but in a method which creates an image. What is important is style, texture, motion, and the relationships between elements and colors. The particular composition is generated dynamically each time the piece is viewed. For the past year I’ve been documenting most of this work as still images in this site, a trail of my development, but not a full representation of the work.

www.anthonymattox.com/interactive is a little site I’ve made to display my interactive works in one place. Take some time to explore the projects. I’ll keep adding more work as I create it as well as a number of other projects that still need to be cleaned up and put into the site.

Enjoy!

Most of the projects in it are created with processing and your browser will have to have the java plugin installed to run them. To run the 3d applets you will have to click trust in the dialogue box that appears. There still might be some bugs in the site so let me know if you have any issues.

AnthonyMattox.com V9

Once again, It was time for a complete re-design of my website.

After a few frustrating iterations, my previous design was just something created to be as simple as possible so I didn’t screw anything up. White background, black text, lots of pictures. It worked out pretty well, but it didn’t exactly sell me as a web designer (to be fair this one isn’t very web-designer-ish either). It was also a little cold and unfriendly. It also had some formal issues, such as wide text columns.

This new site fixes these issues, and is also generally more visually interesting.

The Blog layout stayed more or less the same. The post meta-data is in the left column followed by the main column for the post content. A third column, on the right hand side, can be used to annotate images and other elements within a post. I’ve also added a fancy tag cloud and page numbers thanks to a nifty plugin. I’ve been struggling between having a wide column with nice big images, and a thinner, easier to read, column, with smaller images. To try and get the best of both, I added Thickbox (sorry Lokesh, I was already using jQuery).

I feel my work is much more effective when it is larger and I had to sacrifice larger images in my blog for the sake of the layout. Thickbox helped this some, but just to make sure, I added the option to add a custom background to every blog post and page. Someone with a larger screen looking at on of my projects will see an elegant column of images, but will also have it filling in the background around the page. To enhance this I also have custom highlight colors to match the background image. Any page that shows multiple posts pulls these custom options from the top post.

The Home Page has grown substantially. A work from my portfolio is still featured at the top and it’s background pulled. I’ve also added more links to other parts of my site and around the web, and a silly picture of me, just for fun.

My Portfolio now has three viewing modes (large images, excerpts, and thumbnails) and benefited from other site wide additions.

As of right now I still have some little tweaks to make, but everything seems to be pretty much in place. I hope to get some feedback from everyone on the new page look. Comment below, or try my fancy new contact form.

Take Eight

In my quest to master the web I’ve redesigned my site a few times. Unfortunately I keep coming across new things to learn and after finishing each re-design i find something wrong with it. So here it is for the eighth (give or take) time. My goal was to make the site a little more professional and show off my work a little better. The results not so bad, so maybe I’ll give it a rest for a few months.

Alex Wein Photography

Alex Wein is a phenomenal photographer, working with a variety of subjects, from skateboarders to abstract formations of light. I’ve just finished this website for his work. The page is built with Wordpress to allow all the content on the site to be edited without touching the code. The portfolio utilizes Adobe’s Spry JavaScript Framework for the sliding effect. Although Wordpress is not specifically built for this situation a custom theme I built with a little custom PHP scripting places each post based on category into the Spry Sliding panels layout, and adds the navigation above. I also wrote a simple JavaScript to enhance the design and usability of the contact form by removing the default text and changing colors.

I personally look forward to seeing more of Alex’s work as he adds it and am quite happy with the design.