Author: kirsti

Change ~ new website design

| kirsti

The newly re-designed version of kirstiwakelin.com went live today. Thanks to the tireless work of Arash Ramin of jinnius Solutions Inc. for the web development side I now have a brand spanking new site that works like a dream and is fun to update with its handy new admin panel.

Along with this site update, this blog has also had a bit of a face lift (courtesy of Arash) to tie it in with my main site.

My website redesign has taken me about 5 years. My hard drive is littered with discarded design ideas. Starting with a complicated, illustration heavy versions, the mockups slowly shed useless elements until I arrived at the current pared-down state.

The design was also influenced by the needs of resolvedesign.ca. Because the two sites share the same code base and functionality they needed to be as similar as possible and we spent quite a bit of time discussing how we wanted our work to be viewed. This helped me narrow down a structure for the site – I find it’s always the most difficult to design (or illustrate) something when it’s a completely open road, with no rules, no guidelines and no parameters. Darren (Resolve Design) and I fortunately share the same design aesthetic. The sites exist to display the work as cleanly as possible without design elements getting in the way. The navigation is intended to be as straightforward as possible, while still allowing us to show as much work as we can.

It’s really fun populating a brand new empty site with work. It’s akin to moving into a brand new empty house. There are so many wonderful possibilities. But then I start to unpack the moving boxes and find… old, worn belongings from the old house. Many don’t reflect my current taste in decor. And somewhere along the way there’s a box or two missing… Updating a website is a sure-fire way to reflect on one’s career. And that can be, and has been, exhausting. But it’s still pretty inspiring. There are so many new project spaces to fill up… so many possibilities.

The final challenge with the new site lies not with navigation, functionality or portfolio fodder but with the biography. Oh how I hate writing biographies. I hate it just as much as that inevitable question that pops up when meeting someone for the first time… “so, what do you do”? Because what that question really is is “so, what are you?”. And there’s no simple way of answering that. It needs to be a quick bite. One sentence that sums up a lifetime of work experience, expertise and interests. I always feel a bio is a bit fluid. What I write in January might not really reflect how I see my work in August. I inevitably feel like I’m lying through omission; I’m not telling the whole story. But how can I in 200 words or less? I tell stories in pictures. Shouldn’t I be telling my own that way too? But the biography page is the necessary evil that I’ll have to deal with. Expect it to change frequently. I’d like to say it’ll evolve over time… but I think all I can promise is change.

A face lift without the stitches

| kirsti

If you’re dropping in on the blog today you might notice some stuff moving around, changing colour, shifting a bit… That’s because my blog is in the midst of a bit of an aesthetic update, coinciding with the impending launch of my newly designed main site – more on that a little later. Change is good!

sketchbook | In Transit

| kirsti

music on the bus | ballpoint pen

 
 
This was on the day I left warm spring sunshine on Bowen Island to find it hailing and slushing like crazy in downtown Vancouver – enough to pile up on cars and plug the storm drains. Some people had problems making the hill on Burrard bridge. I know, Toronto, I know we whine for very little reason. But please, let us have this little bit of drama.

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Sketchbook ~ In Transit (LAX)

| kirsti

Sleeping in LAX | ballpoint pen

From a trip down to Cabo in last summer with a stupidly long wait in LAX. This is a horrible terminal. I recommend sleeping through it if possible. Food choices are dismal unless you are into dimly lit sports themed restaurants of dubious cleanliness. I swear the one there is designed to look like a locker room which is a totally unappetizing atmosphere and a very strange choice. Darren said that it was actually supposed to be a stadium but the ceilings are just way too low and there are too many football helmets hanging up around the place, the result being that all I could think about was foot fungus and sweaty pits. I went looking for a sandwich stand that sold stuff without grease as a main (or sole) ingredient.

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Sketchbook ~ Passport Office

| kirsti

People signing and paying for their passports in the passport office | ballpoint pen

I kept putting off renewing my passport until I was finally in possession of a passport 5 months expired. I kept hearing horror stories of how long the waits were and how early people were getting to the offices to line up. I couldn’t bring myself to book off an entire half a day from work to stand in line (or get up at 6am). When I finally got around to it, it took me a total of 35 minutes for the whole process (and I could have knocked 15 minutes off that if I’d read one part of the form correctly). And they mailed it to me a couple of weeks later! A whole day earlier than they said they would! The only down side to the whole thing is that I was a little too casual with my passport photo – I didn’t want to obsess about it and just said to the photographer “yah, sure, that’s fine” without even really giving the shot a good look. So now I’m stuck showing a very intense, somewhat fanatical deer-in-the-headlights version of myself to every suspicious passport control officer I encounter.

Now I just have to get my taxes in order. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.

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Sketchbook ~ Tosca

| kirsti

Tosca

I have a weakness that I’m a little embarrassed to admit. I subscribe to a blog that posts photos of cute animals, gleaned from the blogosphere. It’s shameful, I know. I can’t really believe that I’m “one of those people”. But I have to admit, among all the day to day frustrations and exhaustions of running my own business, of meeting deadlines, of writing invoices, of worrying about the next job, of worrying about the impact my expired printer cartridges will make on a planet already groaning under mountains of discarded plastic, I was surprised by how much of a mood lifter a photo of a hedgehog, its head stuck in a toilet paper roll and its little pink toes pointing skyward, could be. I love animals. I grew up on a farm, surrounded by dogs and cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, lambs, pigs, chickens (we’ll get to chickens in a future post), horses etc etc… Of course, most of that list was destined to land on the table (dinner often had a name when I was a kid). At any rate, there was always something warm, furry and happy to see me even on my darkest of childhood days. I miss having a dog. I’ve taken to staring at people’s dogs when they walk by the studio or when I see them in a park. I smile at puppies. I’m like one of those creepy women who fixates on other people’s babies.

I had a guinea pig for a while a few years ago. Its teenage owner had grown bored of it and left it in its little crate all day. I took it over – smuggled it up to my no-pets-allowed apartment and renamed it Tosca. Tosca, who I later determined was actually a boy, not a girl as he’d lived his first few years of life, was a pretty unadventurous guinea pig. I recalled the guinea pigs of my childhood as playroom raiders – getting into all sorts of stuff. All my childhood dolls are missing fingers and noses as proof of their escapades. But Tosca, used to his 1’6″ x 2″ pen, was terrified of open spaces. He hugged the wall and refused to frolic. A network of covered bridges built out of cardboard boxes soon ran up and down my hallway, enabling him to scamper through them like some wild-haired subterranean spy. Tosca lived a couple of years with me before succumbing to old age and passing away peacefully one night.

Bookpig tosca1

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