Vance Reeser

So i made this new site...

Aug 29, 03:54 PM in: general

A while back I decided that my sites (blog and portfolio) needed a good refreshing. My problem was: many times people would ask me where they could see my films or see my portfolio and I would say, “Vance Reeser dot com... uh, then click portfolio, then look around for the piece youre looking for.” which was usually followed with, “Yeah, sorry thats kinda confusing, I really need to update my site...” More than anything, it bothered me that it was so difficult to find my films, since they are the best examples of what I do.

I started digging around for a new way to present my sites - new blogging tools and whatnot. I saw that my friend Mark had created a new portfolio site with this free portfolio presentation tool called indexhibit, so I thought Id give it a look. I quickly realized its almost exactly what I needed to build a portfolio site, but unfortunately it does not have a good way to do a blog or news-feed with comments or anything. However, it does have a way to present any other site in an iframe - so I set it up to present the new blog that way. (not exactly ideal, but it works ok...)

The last few updates of my site were done by Brian Warren, but this time I decided to give it a go all by myself. I did not start from scratch however... I used Brian's last design as my starting point, and changed nearly every line of the css to look how I wanted after I had a decent sketch ready. He had me all set up in Textpattern for the blog, so I kept that going, since Ive always enjoyed using it and I know my way around its features pretty well. I did come thiiiiiis close to using Tumblr, but as slick as it is I still wanted to have comments, which it does not offer yet. When it came time to style the site (using CSS+Textpattern) I looked around at some of the options for easy css tinkering. I tried Coda, but found it to be very buggy. Brian suggested I look at CSSEdit, and boy did that make all the difference! CSS suddenly made sense once I could see it visually with this gem of a program and my pace picked up considerably. With it, I styled both the indexhibit site and my blog to match each other as best I could.

Ive always been inspired by the art in the old (early to late 90s) Lucasarts Adventure games like Sam & Max and Day of the Tentacle, and Ive been thinking a lot lately about what an interesting art form it is to translate art into crude pixels with an extremely limited color palette like they had to back in those days. Those games looked like magical candy to my eyes and their limits were barely considered, and I really think its because of the artistry and care they took in using every pixel to its fullest. Anyway, I didnt really limit my colors too much, but I did force myself to use pixels to draw the elements on the site, as you can see.

Welp, thats basically everything I think! I hope you enjoy the new stuff.

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