Thank you for visiting art23design.com aka StudioSK and thank you for taking the time to explore anything here you might have found interesting.

I come to you a uniquely creative person currently seeking work where I can share my creative and innovative skills.

My work has been diverse and my tenacity is my golden shield while success is my golden fleece. I am true and have a motto”

“Never Give Up, Never Give In…”

My work lately has been mostly with gotNurv.com and clients I have over there. It’s all social networking stuff.

I got a call from a recruiter this week that got me thinking about my resume. It has not been very successful and people seem to not pay attention to the skills in it; or is it they are projecting what they need? Either way, it is good to hear from recruiters, but it is time to update and re-post it out there.

I tell people I have more than a decade in design, which is true, but professionally only in the last 4/5 years. My first web hosting company was Software Tool & Dye. The domain was something like world.std.com … yes “std”. It always bothered me to have to go to that web site, but since the 90′s there has been a lot of water through that bridge.

My original AOL account??? How long ago was that??? What was my first web site? I learned html originally through a WYSIWYG called “Hotdog Professional” and it was simple! I mean the software was simple.

If you follow the blogs on this site, you can see what I imported from Blogger when I was actively using that for “AchtungMediaDesign” and “ActionHeroNetwork” which were previous versions of StudioSK.

My personal blogs go back further than these of course!

Anyway, I just wanted to share a little personal information. Needed to post something on this site to keep it pumping and alive… and who knows maybe someone will appreciate it?

Recently Adobe took a buttload of crap when they refused to support a 64 bit version of the Master Suite for their Apple computer and then there is the never-ever ending of Microsoft and their browser… what was that? Internet Exploder?

This week a product that I have personally taken to fall in love with, especially for clients who need easy back-end access to their sites, is the almighty WordPress. Unfortunately, WordPress went on a diet and forgot to tell anyone with the release of WordPress 3.2.

Like in most cases I updated about 4 of my sites, including this one, and was suddenly locked out out a lot of the controls used to manage the site. Did you visit in the last few days and see something far less brilliant than what you see now? Well, I had the kind folks at my hosting company www.HostHead.com restoring my site to pre-3.2!

WordPress says with their release of 3.2.1″

“After more than a million downloads of WordPress 3.2, we’re now releasing WordPress 3.2.1 into the wild. This maintenance release fixes a server incompatibility related to JSON that’s unfortunately affected some of you, as well as a few other fixes in the new dashboard design and the Twenty Eleven theme. If you’ve already updated to 3.2, then this update will be even faster than usual, thanks to the new feature in 3.2 that only updates files that have been changed, rather than replacing all the files in your installation.” – Source

In the above WordPress blog there is not even an apology. With the barest of acknowledgements to major major changes I have to wonder how much of those ‘million downloads’ resulted in jacked up web sites.

When I posted for help in the Support Forum indignant and rude people who identified themselves as volunteers wrote comments to other posters that were just uncalled for and just plain bitchy!

I still have other sites needing fixing. WordPress ‘volunteers’ basically told me I had to rebuild my sites in order to recover them. While I was lucky to restore a back-up on StudioSK, one of my sites is a very busy social networking site that my hands are tied with and will have to be done at some odd hour once I finally figure out my approach.

Other designers and developers have reacted with curiosity through my Twitter (@scott4design) because not all experienced this horrible result like I did. What got some people through an easy upgrade and so many others with a fumble with a face-plant is beyond me.

The biggest problems I experienced were:

• widgets would not open to allow for editing
• menu’s for images libraries would not open

If there were more then I did not discover them yet. On my social networking site www.gayburners.com members are having trouble logging in and posting images, setting up groups and what else? What am I not hearing about?

This update with WordPress 3.2 may have been created to be more efficient and break away from some old baggage with IE6 and more, but at what price? How come your users were not given some warning? This upgrade should have had a lot more warnings and acknowledgements, because I know I would have appreciated it.

WordPress is the best CMS on the market in my humble opinion. It is the one you can give any client and let them go with it. But if I left this update to a client alone… they would have had no where to go.

I sent an email to the FLG (Flaming Lotus Girls) a note asking for advice and help on this direction of the project because technically I am still a newb in their world. The burner community has been very generous in the past with what resources they could spare. FLG has some huge projects in their pipeline and I am just hopeful they know someone who might be able to help out some.

The lead welder on this project is a metal artist and is a nice guy. I have had a problem getting commitment from people in the past and I hope this does not became one of those. Can you see me learning to weld from a YouTube Video??? I am not opposed to it!!!!

Resources are an issue and I need to find them and transport them to the shop. Working that out as well. I also wanted to share with you the necklace design I am working on. I will attach an image to this update and let you guys see. I have to get that finished too.

Thanks all.

p.s. – If you were debited your contribution it should be on your statements now. There was 1 or 2 where they were unable to get the donation. I do appreciate all the faith and support both monetarily and through whatever connects us spiritually in this universe.

I wrote out a projection of what the costs are on the project just as an estimate. There are some costs that can’t figure in so easily, but I think the projection is pretty accurate.

Check it out and stay with us… pictures will continue to be posted!

To see the history of updates on the project use the “Final Passage” category.

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

TO-FU created a motion graphics animation of 29 Ways To Stay Creative based on the list by Life on Michigan Ave.

via David Karp

This was one of a few web sites they had me there to assist with, but this one needed to be built from scratch.

The template for this web development company was bright and colorful compared to their existing web strategy and also needed an updated logo matching the new color scheme.

My job was to make that work and then transfer all their copy over to it almost exactly with a lot of general edits.

Using Photoshop to slice this up minus the redundant elements of the graphic, or items that could be created through CSS or HTML, I had everything I need to make this in the image of the executives for the company.

With a little help from a photostock site, this is what I proposed to the management and they liked a lot.

I enjoyed working there and I do not want to take anything away from what this company offers for their design aesthetic. I worked with their principle designer closely and was graciously given some licence to prove my skills.

Religion is not a part of this art work but an abstraction and a by-product, but none of it is directly addressed. Yes, you see Tree. The Tree of Life comes from Kaballah, ancient African religions, and Pagan spiritualism and more. Water is represented while fire is actually present at the end of each branch. The boat is the Ferry Man from the River Styx.

The project page has the mission statement on it while the Facebook is getting frequent updates.

Work Space

Today I secured a work space and I am very excited. It currently houses come of the most prestigious projects connected to Burning Man or did. The Raygun Rocketship currently housed on the  Embarcadero was built there. See some of the images below and their notes:

American Steel Gallery is a huge warehouse of amazing art that is recognized all over the world and houses some amazing talent. Not that I want to place myself in the company of those people necessarily as an equal, but I feel like being in their presence is an inspiration. When I first came face to face with the Flux crew, Flaming Lotus Girls and others I was so intimidated.

I have seen and live among amazing creative energy. I came to San Francisco hoping to discover new roads to creativity and success and am blessed to be – here.

There is an effective nature of this Content Management System (Tool) that makes posting and sharing information infinitely more effective for myself and for people I might build a web site for. The positive angle on using WordPress is that my “clients” have the ability to directly impact their own web site’s and manage their own publication with a tool that is not very far from using MS Word.

Consider many of the mainstream web sites are using similar software. Some use WordPress, some Joomla and other Drupal. Pick and choose, but the bottom line is there is a framework that comes with these packaged systems that behooves attention for serious reliability and easy access for clients.

However, a couple people I did some work for are not the most technically savvy and have not learned to access the back-end of the sites to see behind the curtain. I continue to work on their updates under the gotNurv.com business model I developed to help those people.

The future of web design is much more technical and tools like this bring it down for the average person and makes the playing field a little more friendly. We are in a world where you can make your own cookie-cutter web sites for 10% of hiring a designer. Or send it off to India for more if you need something more specialized. But have faith America, there are designers where that can give you a lot very cheap while using tools like this.

So, basically most of the stuff in Vegas goes on hold. I am talking tomorrow night at an artist group and need to have this non-existent video ready. So, I will be spending the next 24 hours on After Affects and with my Android Camcorder.

Meanwhile, I found an interesting video that I found very interesting from the Ignite conference that also includes Joseph Pred from Burning Man. I came across it because I follow @josephpred on Twitter. So, I think it is worth a looksie.

Joseph has often posted information I wanted to follow and having checked out this video I enjoyed it a lot. It’s information and just interesting. I looked at it from the social impact on social networking and technology that applies to the world today. Get what you want out of it.

I appreciate the following and will keep things updated.