Its been a very crazy time this past month. Between a slew of shows with the Winter People, I’ve been completing a few freelance projects (will post on the design / development story there in a week or two) and about three weeks ago we got a call from Los Angeles to say that Rich Costey wanted to mix the rest of the Winter People record – after the excellent Peter Katis had to drop out.

This had always been talked of as a potential with our managers, but given the man’s intimidatingly impressive discography I considered it quite out of the ball park of the reasonable (i.e. Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine, Bruce Springsteen, Aphex Twin, The Shins, Interpol, Bloc Party, The Mars Volta, Philip Glass, Fiona Apple etc.).

But just before we played a show (on a boat!) I got a call from our managers to say that it was all on, leaving me about three days to organize, pack and leave for LA. So I’ve flown, mixed and returned – bringing the Winter People album one step closer towards its completion.

Similarly to having Peter Katis involved with the mixes, I personally got a great sense of validation from Rich wanting to do the project. These are the guys who mixed records from bands who are for me the top-of-the-top of contemporary music game in my opinion. To be a part of that, even vicariously, was pretty exciting stuff. Speaking of bands who are in that top echelon Omar from At The Drive In and The Mars Volta was hanging out in Studio B the whole time we were mixing the record, so I got to hang out with him, and he was a pretty awesome, friendly and funny fellow.

Now I tried to document the journey with some photographs, but I have to confess that I was (rightly so) distracted by the mission at hand, which was to mix the record as perfectly as possible. Hence the relative lack of documentation.

I’ll leave with this quaint factoid of Americana (which I didn’t know): you can buy guns over the counter at a sporting goods store!

So after a lot of photoshop-pixel pushing and midnights spent in code grapple mode, I’ve launched Dylan Baskind.com my online CV site. I’ve gone for a “minimalism-with-a-few-frills” design approach, with an essentially two-tone colour scheme and a focus on making page elements reactive and interactive. I also went for a fixed top bar navigation, so that the various sections of the CV are all immediately and clearly accessible.

There are a few little responsive elements to the layout. The “connecting” atom on the left resizes for smaller screens, and disappears altogether for really tiny screens. Ditto for the logo in the top left corner.

The information architecture challenge I pushed and pulled with on this project was the breadth and scope of what to include in terms of achievements, skills and portfolio work. It’s a bit of a challenge deciding what content is extraneous and what is salient, when creating a site to highlight an all-rounder type of creativity. I dealt with this challenge by including almost all my creative pursuits in the site, but providing a limited selection of examples.

I am putting the finishing touches to a CV / Professional Skills site (I’ll do an extensive blog post of all tasty design elements for the official site-live, which should hopefully be in the next few days). The concept theme behind the site is the idea of nodes and connections, and I’ve (jokingly) coined the term: “Connectionist” to describe the professional practice of connection making.

The final (cherry-on-top) design element was a logo identity. The challenge was to visually represent the Connectionist idea as well as myself. Here’s what I came up with:

The ‘sell’ of the Connectionist being that having a wide field of training allows someone to make connections between disparate disciplines and hence to produce creative solutions.

The design and development of this project has been (notwithstanding a few notable Jquery pains) quite a joy. The web is evolving faster than early man when he got his first set of opposable thumbs!

Musical Happenings: Plenty going on at the moment in the musical sphere and over quite a wide geographical spread: Winter People are embarking on a national tour with Busby Marou from next week, playing our first shows in Tasmania, before heading to Queensland, then Victoria, then Western Australia for five shows, then one final home-coming show in Sydney. The band has been accruing some decent frequent flyer points lately, with a trip down to Melbourne last week for a one-off show at the Toff (which was a great night, but getting up at 4:30am to fly home was not so great). Finally, the two photos below will illustrate the fact that I really do need a haircut.

Besides actual musical efforts we’ve been shooting film-clips and getting some photos done (our great lament is the relative impossibility of getting six people, in the one photo, to look vaguely acceptable, alas, alack there is always closed eyes, or wonky eye-brows, or surprised expressions etc – some off-cuts below).

I’ve just finished the design and coding work for the Blue Ribbon Design site, through which I’ll be handling all web & design work from now on. An official launch will be coming in the next few weeks.

The design went through a large number of phases as the character of the site developed. At first it was too colloquial, too colourful, then it became too corporate and too monochrome, but eventually after umpteenth revisions, it settled upon (what I hope is an appealing) mid-ground between understated professionalism and a little aesthetic flare.

Technically speaking: I was considering building the site on a WordPress backend (as I have for this, 10th version of Riversend) which certainly makes things easier to update, but in the end just opted for a straight up PHP/MySQL backend. Also, working with the JQuery javascript again for all the client-side navigational functionality has been a real joy, web-technologies are just getting better and better lately, and with modern browsers starting to take standards seriously the HTML/CSS component is also becoming increasingly enjoyable to work with.

Winter People are going to be packing our bags for a lot of touring in the coming months, with a national ticket confirmed for November. But in the meantime, we’re also crossing the state borders for a show down in Melbourne next month, for which I’ve designed the artwork.