That new product smell.

New tinasweep.com re-design!

My simple website re-design and update has just been finalized and launched, due to the not-so-simple coding efforts of my sister, Cas, who is a website developer and designer for Absolute Marketing Group.

CSS and I are still on rocky terms, but my sister coded everything to meet the key goals for the design as follows:
1) Employing CSS instead of iframes to make the site more search friendly with cross-browser usability
2) Using html-text to avoid excessive use of image-text
3) Allowing for easy illustration updates in the code and design through cut and paste tactics
4) No pop-ups, flash, or extra buttons to complicate the design and site interaction

Eventually I intend to separate my oil paintings from the illustrative work, probably through the use of a subdomain.

Overall, I enjoy the pattern and repetition created by the thumbnail gallery and how well the site works across different browsers within the limitations of the design concept: simple, effective and immediate.

Thank you for your hard work, Cas!

Go North

Looking back on the 50s and 60s, ads told a story to sell the product through text and illustration. Plenty of the ad stories and illustrations were irreverent to what the product actually did, rather more like fairy tales than ads and at times not even showing the product itself. In this image I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek ad for an AARP article, illustrated as a dreamy fairy tale inspired by those ads as well as the work of Lisbeth Zwerger.



I'm irrepressible when reminiscing about the good old days. Er, wait, that's not right.

I really really do.

So much so that I had my squid printed on a t-shirt. The squids in my sketchbook were the results of stress relief from coding my website in CSS. Style Sheets and I are not on friendly terms, unfortunately.

And then there's the little pieces I meant to post ages ago. E&M is a situational piece about relationships and showing interaction without explaining the interaction. Also, fun with patterns.



I need to do many more Soyer mastercopies to study his ability to stand back and let the piece be. It's my life's goal to get to that point.