After a somewhat sudden trip up to Maine to help my Mom install a new floor in the living room and on up the stairs through the balcony of her lake house, I should be heading back to Lowell tomorrow to get started on ArtsKoan.org. This is the name of the site I’d like to turn into a community site for the Arts in Lowell. I am aware that there are other people and organizations in Lowell who are successful in accomplishing this to a good degree, but I’ve always just Loved ‘Herding Cats’, and so I thought I’d give this goal a shot myself, hopefully working with these people and organizations.

Time to begin producing some content.

I’ve designed a new logo for the SummaeStudio & summaestudio.net. It’s been a lot of fun doing it actually, trying to come up with a logo that looks good as a .ico, 32x32px, 80x80px, and on up to the full-size 800x800px. Above are six versions. The first three versions all started looking funky as it got smaller, and the edges got very rough as well. For the fourth version, I tried that dark red colour, but as it got smaller, it got darker, the edges cleaned up nicely though. The fifth looks alright to me, even very small, though it could be lighter. The last I transformed by shrinking the non-vector version of the fifth down to 80x80px, and then up-sizing back to 800x800px, interesting how it ‘simplified’.

The fun part is that I feel I’ve got the drawing pretty much done, and it’s simple enough that the colour & texture can be changed very easily. If it doesn’t quite look recognizable, the logo is basically two ‘sum’ symbols – ∑∑  (∑∑ in character encoding). I didn’t actually use any text that large, just drew one out and copied it. I find the interaction of the figure/ground, object/background quite fascinating, and just realized, heck it would make a good tile. I’m happy with it.

As I mentioned in my last post, summaestudio.net is to become my web/wordpress design site, and I’m going to implement a new site for the Lowell Arts Community. I do have a working title, but I do not want to release the address until it’s a bit further along.

In case you were wondering, I changed the theme because I was running BuddyPress on summaestudio.net, and now have stopped, so I had to revert back to a non-BuddyPress theme.

Two things to note about the current state of the site:

1. I’ve opened registration, so you can now become a member of The SummaeStudio Network. In the near future, I plan on inviting people I know who are involved in the Lowell Arts Community to create their own WordPress sites as well as part of the network.
2. At this moment, my feeds are sadly in a state of flux. I’d like to use Feedburner, but though it is simple to set up for WordPress, I’m finding it not so easy to get up and running with BuddyPress, which adds the community aspect to WordPress.  Unfortunately, I managed to kill the current feed I had set up, and it is going to take at least a few days to get 2 stable feeds back up I estimate.

Other than that things aren’t going too badly, I’m beginning to be satisfied with the way type is looking on the site, though there’s still a long way to go, and I feel like I’m already beginning to meet some pretty cool people in the process of setting this up.

Tools of the trade, Firefox, WordPress, Filezilla, Notepad++, and Typekit

I’ve been working on type mostly so far, and presentation of the site, but one complication leads to another, and so on. I think I really need to sit down and come up with an outline, schedule even, of when I’m going to work on what. Site Presentation, Site Structure and Development, Content Generation, Content Documentation, (Media as well), Communication & Developing the Network…I need to do this so I don’t push one aspect too far to the detriment of all the others. I think that’s part of why I use the word organic to describe the process…a natural and even growth of all the various aspects to keep the project an integral whole.