I also designed the artwork and what will become the single tour art:

The band will be doing a fair bit of travelling / playing in the next little while. We’re flying down to Adelaide next week for a show, then we’ve been given (yes given!) a house in Byron Bay to record/write/hangout for a week, then we’re doing the Secret Garden festival, then an East Coast tour off the back of the Gallons release and after that there’s a (potential) run of 10 dates as the support for a pretty cool act, whose name unfortunately I cannot commit to print until we’re confirmed.

In other design news, I’ve been getting some great feedback on DylanBaskind.com and has been featured on the design showcase websites: webcreme.com, Unmatchedstyle, Creattica, Designfridge, Web Designers Blog and a couple of other top-ten best xyz type lists. I still haven’t managed to get a site onto Styleboost, but its one of my great unsung missions in life (is that a little bit sad?).

Between freelance web-design client work, I’m currently also working on a new collaborative consumption web app revolving around car-pooling. There’s a couple starting up in the states, and a big site in the UK, but I think I can out-gun them all for usability, functionality and interface design (well, here’s hoping anyway!). Will post some design samples in the near future.

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!

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.

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!

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).

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.

Riversend version’s 8 and 9 were running on the CMS ModX, but this time I’ve gone for the currently ubiquitous blogging platform WordPress. More so that I could develop professional skills (i.e. wordpress is a nice easy CMS for web design clients), than for its functionality. Though I have found the system to be easily extendible and the core code well documented, with a thoughtful and clear architecture.