What's Cookin'

journal of my recent projects

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Sherlock at Holmes online store opening 2016!

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I had some time recently to revisit the front end “enhancement” design specs for the new Downton Abbey site WGBH built for PBS. The site has launched, but we’re rolling out features as we get closer to the premiere. 

Most of our sites place equal weight on mobile and desktop usability. My hope is that the average Downton Abbey user will spend some time on a screen larger than their phone interacting with the video and images. So, we’re spending a little time on fancy stuff for the desktop / laptop user. I’m getting myself up to speed on touch interactions for tablet/phones down the line. 

I just finished up polishing the image galleries and can share a snippet I did for the previous and next buttons. The buttons have a neat hover state that reveals a thumbnail image of the next or previous slide.

See the Pen Masterpiece Carousel button by Catherine (@terned) on CodePen.

We use OWL Carousel for the image galleries, so I wrote some code to incorporate the button styling into the gallery and dynamically update the thumbnail images that appear on hover. 

Check out the hover state and code here.

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Clearance sale! As I transition into making more cluster necklaces and narrowing my color palette, all my one of a kind Long String of TeePearls pieces are marked down 50% to $10 each. Every one still comes with a matching pouch made from the sleeve of the same tee shirt as the necklace. Check out the colors available in the Etsy shop.

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One of my most active non-web projects is TeePearls. Follow along on tumblr: teepearls.tumblr.com

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Tons-o-Stuff

See the Pen Text Link Effects by Catherine (@terned) on CodePen.

I have a few draft posts of projects I've launched in the past year that I would like to highlight, but I also need to spend adequate time editing those into things that actually make sense. For now, here's a new ongoing project I started to collect link effects for future use. Check 'em out.

Forthcoming posts about these sites:

Foreverstan

Masterpiece: Poldark

Masterpiece: Wolf Hall

American Experience: Walt Disney

others I can't think of...

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Another contest I couldn’t help entering... A month out and I still like it, so I thought this was worth sharing. This is the top half of my cover design entry for Harvard Book Store’s Microchondria II, a collection of short fiction written during the month of February.

You can see the winning covers and read more about the project here.

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This font has been on my mind since I created my Neko Case poster. Now it's done and ready for you!

Luseeda is a hand-drawn seed font that I converted using the awesome site paintfont.com. It's free and super easy to use. Having already scanned in my alphabet and digitized it in Illustrator, I copied everything over to their template and pieced together the punctuation from bits of different letters. The drawing guides on the template are super helpful in keeping your letters the same size. Please donate to their site if you end up creating and using your own font.

Luseeda is an Open Type Font that is easily installed on both Mac and PC systems. You can grab it from me here.

I'm still searching for an online marketplace to sell some digital work like this. Please let me know if you have any recommendations. It's been a disappointing process thus far. I have a few sites to recommend you not use, but I won't do that publicly.

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I sketched this image out as a plan for a hand-painted sign and worked up the colors on Photoshop. I liked the blue green version so much that I ended printing it on card stock and using Mod Podge to adhere and seal it to a small canvas.

I have an etsy shop's worth of ideas for a line of home and crafting goods that I've had trouble getting motivated to produce. At this point, I have all the materials and no excuses. The problem is always the same: if I don't have a specific person in mind to give the end product to, I don't finish it.

I've toyed with the idea of preorders to ensure that I won't end up with boxes of products sadly staring at me from the corner of my apartment, but, on the very rare chance a product goes "viral", I want to take advantage of the attention with a shop full of ready to ship items.

With all that considered, I'm offering the digital files for this image at a low price to anyone who stumbles upon it and can use it. Go here for more details.

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New featured content pages coming down the line for Novel Songs! Check out the first one here.

It's not often... Never do I get a project that allows me to use all of my illustrating, AV editing, coding and design skills, so I manufactured one.

I've hosted a radio program called Novel Songs on WMFO in Medford over the past three years. It has been a lot of fun and a lot of work for a one hour show that aired weekly then monthly as time wore on. I have pondered ways, other than just posting a link to the archives, to showcase the broadcasts as something more than a live show available online for two weeks. While on possibly permanent hiatus from the live broadcasts, I'm turning to podcasting as a way to archive some of my favorite shows and possibly continue with new content in the future.

I gave my last show special treatment throwing all the tools at it that my overheating laptop and I could muster: html5, CSS3, Adobe CS2/CS5, iMovie, GarageBand, and brains.

I'm proud of the work that resulted and the increased confidence in my skills that I was hoping for. I hope a lot more of these are in store for Novel Songs as well as my future professionally.

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The company I work for launched a new app, My BP Coach, Friday for iOS in the App Store. I was responsible for designing and building the three types of emails users of the app will receive: welcome email, newsletter, and weekly update.

The overall approach of the app is to help you monitor your blood pressure in a healthy way and communicate important changes to your family and medical team. Blood pressure issues can be scary, but continuous monitoring is the best course of action. We wanted the weekly updates to encourage continued monitoring without being grim or pushy. To keep things light, I was tasked with creating a character that I’ve (unofficially) named Beep Boop (Beep when happy, Boop when disappointed). The worst he does is shrug, indicating “we’ll do better next time.”

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I'm working on rebuilding my site to be responsive and giving my branding a bit of a facelift.

The more I get into it, the more I feel like I'm going to miss my old layout. That's a feeling I haven't had before, but I know the reason is because it was the first layout for one of my personal sites that I consciously designed rather than making decisions as I coded.

In addition to being necessary to learn as a front-end developer, there are so many awesome elements in responsive design that pushed me into revamping my personal site. Being able to control the presentation of my work no matter what size screen it is viewed from will be a huge relief.

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While avoiding other projects that would require me to sew a zipper for the first time ever, I've drawn this strawberry.

As a frequent attendee of the Owego Strawberry Festival, I've convinced myself that entering their logo contest as an outsider was justified.

Please get in touch if you need a logo designed for your folksy summer gathering.

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From an inked drawing to full color in Photoshop.

I have entered into yet another Creative Allies competition (read bout the first one here).

The first and only time I saw Pixies (am I the only person who calls them "The Pixies?") was at a show they did at UMASS Lowell in 2004. A few quick internet searches to pin down the year revealed that the show was recorded for a DVD special. As you can tell, I'm not a die hard fan, but their upcoming album title and its track listing inspired this illustration.

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I love bagels. I used to go to Bruegger's on Fridays to celebrate the end of the work week. When they announced a bagel related illustration contest, I had to enter. I would've entered if the prize was a week of free bagels.

The design brief had an intimidating list of desired motifs to be included in the illustration, so I explicitly represented the ones that I thought were important (NYC style, bagels, made fresh) and rolled the rest into the idea of the merry-go-round (friendly, local, traditional). I'm very proud of the Chrysler Bagel. It wasn't in my initial sketches, but it came together very quickly. If it had occurred to me sooner, you'd be looking at the whole NYC skyline in bagels.

The winning design will become part of the decor in the new Minneapolis location and possibly be rolled out nationwide. They noted it would be applied to a brick wall, so I mocked up a few examples to make sure my favorite color scheme (just look at my site design) would work well.

If anyone seeing this is on Dribbble and wants to shoot me an invite, I'd appreciate it! I'd love to keep posting "rebounds" from this illustration. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Dribbble. It is awesome.

(photo sources: 1 | 2)

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I started taking courses on skillshare. Everything about them works for me. If you engage with your classmates, you get great feedback and suggestions. Being able to access the videos and lessons FOREVER is great for refreshers and reference.

The first image is my project from Mary Kate McDevitt's hand-lettering class. I always manage to get carried away with the non-letter parts of hand-lettered-illustrations. The class helped me plot out the layout and experiment with sketching before diving into a final drawing. My new work flow results in a cleaner, more considered finished piece. Yay for learning things.

Coloring illustrations isn't my strongest skill, so I'm both looking forward to and procrastinating getting started on a project for her second course. However, the first few videos did help me successfully digitize a proposed tee design for the Cambridge Folk Festival.

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Kate Spade and The Strand put the call out for new tote bag designs based on one of five phrases they provided. Couldn't pass up on this one.

I went through several ideas that used fancy hand-drawn script (not one of my strengths) before ending up here. It was a bit of a struggle until I came across The New Yorker Page-Turner illustration. The simple blocks of color and the image of the hand on a book are striking. From there I tried to imagine where the words would naturally fit within the illustration rather than using the phrase as a caption.

The bright speech bubble is my favorite part. Overlapping images and transparency are fun to play with. The first time I used different colors to create a translucent element in a painting, a friend wanted to touch it and just kept saying "how... wha.. is that paint?"  I don't think I'd like anything enough to get it permanently tattooed on my skin, but white ink looks pretty cool. The image works for me even if the "Be" doesn't come through strongly as a tattoo. It is a word someone could want inked as a reminder that it's better than "not to be".

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I was lucky enough to participate in the Street Pianos Boston project by painting a piano. 75 pianos will be around Boston for the public to play through October 14th. You can spot mine in the Yawkey Courtyard at MGH.

I named my piece "Sound Objects" after reading an article that referred to music notes that way. I created an imaginary flower shop with the same name where all the plants are actually instruments or musical equipment. Included are tambourines, jingle bells, guitar picks, audio cable, player piano music scrolls, gramophones, and microphones.

Thanks to everyone who made it to check on my progress while I was working on the piano. It was a bit of a journey out to the warehouse where many artists traveled to work on the pianos.

You can find more news about the project on the Facebook Page.

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I designed this for a Creative Alliance contest that ended up canceled upon Neko Case's request after she received a lot of complaints from designers. I can understand the freelancer perspective that these contests are harmful to their profession for a number of reasons, but mainly for devaluing an artist's time. Creating work for free with a prize waiting at the end for one person doesn't compensate the other artists. In contracted design projects, all time is compensated from initial concept meetings to sketches, comps, and final design. Even if a project is canceled midway by the client, the contractor still gets paid in part or full depending on the contract.

On the other side of it, nobody is forcing you to participate or spend a  significant amount of time on the project. I looked into the terms of Creative Alliance before starting and I found them to be reasonable. I see it as another venue for designers to post their "fan art" and possibly get something out of it. So many people design self promotional posters for their favorite bands, or even fictional bands, in order to showcase and refine their style.

I let the tour poster guidelines swim around in my head for a few hours and came up with this. I finished it even though I knew the contest was in jeopardy of being canceled.