A Great Photographer’s Website

April 21st, 2008

Beech TreeDiana Gonsalves is a talented photographer from Johnson, Vermont.

www.photosbydi.com

Woot Derby Updates

April 3rd, 2008

Greed 2We’re coming up on shirt.woot.com Derby #37: Greed. They’re offering up $1000.00 for first place in this derby and each derby to follow, thus the theme. I’ve submitted the two shirts you see here, so please stop by and vote on them! Both designs are the result of a hybrid idea that I just couldn’t get to look right. I decided to break the hybrids apart and do them separately. I really like the green on brown look a lot. Please let me know what you think.

Greed 1In the last derby, I placed 13th, up quite a bit from any progress I made before. I’d like to think I did a decent job, but really I think it was because it was such a tough set of rules to work with. There were some really great shirts, but I don’t think everyone was banging on all cylinders for that one.

How do you think the submissions compare?

EDIT:  Both submissions were rejected :-(

The “Blood Money” submission was rejected for having text (on the bill), and the “Ben Frankibal” submission wasn’t greedy enough. 

WordPress Plugin: Sociable

March 30th, 2008

There is a great plugin for WordPress to easily allow users to submit your site content to popular social sites. It’s called Sociable. It was recommended to me by MsDanielle. She just recently installed the same plugin on her site, and I thought it worked quite well. When you’re submitting an article for the first time, it brings you to the submission page of each site with the information already pre-filled. This is great for making it easy for users to submit your content (or for you to submit it yourself).

To install, just download the zip file from their website, extract it, and upload the directory to your WordPress plugins directory. Go to your plugins tab and activate it, and you’re all set. You can manipulate the plugin settings to represent the social networks that make the most sense to you.

Woot Shirt Submission #4: Typography

March 29th, 2008

Woot Shirt Desight #3 This week’s Woot.com shirt submission was really hard. The rules are as follows:

“Frustrated by our frequent prohibitions against text in Derby entries? Well, this week, text is all you can use. But there’s a catch: the letters have to form an illustration of some kind. Whether you go the ASCII art route or imitate the lava-lamp lettering of the psychedelic Sixties, get your text into shape. We’re not looking for slogan shirts. A “picture” of two or three straight lines isn’t what we have in mind. So take warning: the moderation this week will be particularly subjective. If there’s any doubt that your text makes a picture, be ready to feel the moderator’s axe.”

My submission is to the right. I haven’t come up with a better idea yet, but this one is gaining some traction. It’s placed higher than any of my submissions previously. Last week, my truck placed 112th, and my tree placed 53rd. This week (as of this post), my design has placed 41st.

Update: Woot Shirts, My Birthday, and Being Sick

March 23rd, 2008

Sorry for the extended hiatus. It’s more than a week! I’ve been sick for a little while, and it sucked. I had some sort of crazy flu or something.

It was my birthday today too. It’s too bad I was sick. We rescheduled my birthday party for next Saturday (3/30) at the Alchemist in Waterbury.

Spring Shirt 1Spring Shirt 2On Saturday, I threw these designs together for shirt.woot.com. The theme was “Spring.” I like the tree the most. It was an actual drawing I had done a few years back. I used Live Trace to vectorize it. The truck is a photo that I used Live Trace on. If you’re a wooter, please take a minute and vote for my designs! (just click on the picture to vote or get more details)

The last derby I participated in was for “Canada” and I placed 72nd.