Archive for the ‘TK Studios’ Category

Marketing’s Bad Name

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I’d like to share an experience I had a few years ago: I was at the supermarket, making smalltalk with the cashier, and she asked what I do for a living. I answered truthfully: “I work in marketing.” (which is just a broad brush for “i’m a web developer & designer, as well as graphic artist and designer, and I create all advertising and promotional materials for X company”)

I’ve never seen someone go from friendly and cheerful to all business so quickly. From the reaction, you’d think I’d said “I vivisect puppies.” I haven’t told someone “I work in marketing” since – at least not out of context.

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New Theme and a Project Name

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

The new blog theme has been live for a couple days now. It still has a few tweaks to be done (single post page lacks styles for the next/previous links, for example), possibly some component rearranging, but it’s okay for now. The look and feel now matches the background on my twitter page, or you could say the background on the twitter page now matches the blog, as it was the blog that was designed first.

This is probably my first real attempt at a grid-based layout. Vertically it falls short of perfect baseline alignment, simply because I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to get it perfect. This is a blog. If it were a corporate product page, then yes, it would be worth the trouble to get everything in a perfect rhythm, but it’s not.

Also, I have not tested this in IE 6 or 7. Out of curiosity, I tested it in 8 a few seconds ago and it looks fine. Obviously, ignoring IE isn’t a luxury I can afford in the future, but in the current “I just want to get this WP theme done so I’m using something more appropriate than a public theme” context, it works.

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A Workspace Photo

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

I spent about 4 hours today on modeling the database for one project. Other time was spent reading up on the Zend framework in order to lighten my load a bit—I figure a couple days learning it will save me weeks of programming work. I also took half an hour to read up on all the manual settings on my camera, and celebrated my newfound knowledge with a photo of my (almost) newly cleaned workspace:

The desk surface in my office

The desk surface in my office

I’ve missed having a camera with manual settings. My most recent before this one didn’t have a fully-manual mode, or manual focus, and was therefore only good for tourist photography—point and click but nothing artsy. New one has a very nice manual mode: It’s a Canon Powershot A590. It’s no DSLR, but for the money (less than $100), it’s pretty damned nice. I still need to do a little Photoshop tweaking to perfect the image, though. 

I guess I should set up a Flickr account, huh?

TK Studios Reborn as a… Blog?

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

I’ve set up TK Studios as a blog for several reasons, mainly because after giving it a lot of thought, I really don’t want to do enough freelance work to warrant a dedicated website. I just don’t have that kind of time these days. I have a number of projects up my sleeve, and I think this is a good place to talk about them, as a kind of central hub.

So I set up WordPress, picked out a nice template, did a bit of tweaking, and here we are. The problem, of course, is that while I’ve been trying to flaunt my portfolio recently to a select few, the portfolio that was here is no longer… here. I actually just entirely swapped hosting providers to simplify setting up WP – my other provider only offered MovableType, and I just like WP more.

Sorry about the confusion, folks. I’ve relocated my javascript “portfolio gallery” to tkstudios.org: James’s Portfolio Gallery. I’d planned to just add a couple pages to WP to act as Resumé and Portfolio, but ended up spending a lot of last night managing some problems that crept up on another project. Soon, I promise.

Now that the “Why” is out of the way…

I currently have two experimental projects underway that could probably monetize rather well. I’ll start posting about them as they develop more, and try to give some insight into how I’m approaching the unique challenges of each.

Subjects you can expect to see covered in this blog: Web Design, Security, Marketing, to name a few. I’ll probably muse about off-topic things now and then as well, but try to keep it all relevant.

Here’s to a bright future.