After a week or two of frenzied preparation, coding, updates, and tweaking, the website for the 2007 Toronto After Dark Film Festival has officially gone live.

This year’s redesign—or is it a realign?—brought a few noticeable changes to the site even as the 2007 website still maintains some similarities to 2006’s website.

Most of the changes to the design flowed out of one another.  One of the client’s main goals with the new design was that a user would be able to quickly get to the wealth of information on the site.  And so the menu was changed to an “expanded” view, which necessitated a three-column layout, which necessitated a wider design optimized for larger monitors, which necessitated revamped mastheads, and so on.

The bigger changes, though, are all under the hood.

Last year’s website was a largely static affair, which meant that any changes to the content or site structure needed to be made by me, the designer.  Initially, I didn’t think that would be a big deal.  But you’d think that after years of doing this gig, I’d have slightly better foresight.

Even a “static” site is constantly changing, even if the changes are just minor content or layout tweaks.  And all of those minor changes add up after awhile, taking time away from more pressing concerns.  And so while a redesign was certainly planned for the new site, the primary goal for this year was to move the site to a platform that would make it easier for anyone—be it myself or the festival staff—to make all but the biggest and most difficult changes.

Big shock here, but the Toronto After Dark website is now running on ExpressionEngine.

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Lots of things have been transpiring lately, things that are begging for me to comment on.  But alas, I’m a bit overwhelmed with work right now, so I’m going to have to wait until the weekend to do any serious writing/blogging/whatever it is that I do on this site.

That being said, “Bookshop Casanova”—one of two new songs that the heavenly Clientele have posted to their MySpace page—has me feeling all kinds of giddy.  It’s a somewhat significant departure from the woozy folk-pop that they’ve done so well over the years, but its disco-y dreaminess is all kinds of wonderful.  If this is any indication, than God Save The Clientele is going to be a fine record indeed.

• Hayao Miyazaki’s next film will be entitled Ponyo On A Cliff.
• Elastic Heart has a couple of MP3s from Mew‘s recent SXSW gig.  Mew’s coming to Lincoln next week, and I can’t wait.
• Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain was responsible for the recent redesign of the various sites in the EllisLab network, and he’s just posted a fascinating article that covers the entire design process.
• John Fischer on Francis Schaeffer’s legacy: Schaeffer was the first Christian leader who taught me to weep over the world instead of judging it. Schaeffer modeled a caring and thoughtful engagement with the history of philosophy and its influence through movies, novels, plays, music, and art. Schaeffer was teaching at Wheaton College about the existential dilemma expressed in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blowup, when movies were still forbidden to students. He didn’t bat an eye. He ignored our legalism and went on teaching, because he had been personally gripped by the desperation of such cultural statements.
• I’ll admit that when I saw the first trailer for the Pixar movie, Ratatouille, I wasn’t all that impressed.  However, this Japanese trailer (requires Windows Media) has me thinking twice. Via
• Director Zack Snyder (300) talks about his upcoming adaptation of The Watchmen.  As I mentioned in my review of 300, I’m a little skeptical that Snyder can pull it off, but I’d love to be proven wrong.  If nothing else, he’s certainly passionate about the project.
• Bungie, the creators of a little game known as Halo, have just redesigned their site.
• My favorite computer keeps getting better: the Cupertino-based Mac maker has called upon its award-winning design chief Jonathan Ive and his team to cut the fat from the the current iMac line and outfit a pair of new Core 2 Duo-based models in a form factor that will be both slimmer and sleeker than today’s offerings. Yowza.

I began spending significant amounts of money on CDs when I was in high school.  However, my musical knowledge was much more limited than it was now.  I didn’t have discussion forums, e-mail lists, MP3 blogs, and Pitchfork giving me advice.  There were a few artists that I knew and loved, which gave me a place to start as I ventured into increasingly obscure realms of music.  But for the most part, a CD purchase was a gamble.

More often than not, I’d buy a CD based entirely on whether or not I liked its sleeve art.  My reasoning was that a cool band releasing their cool new CD wouldn’t purposefully choose to wrap it up in lame packaging, with crappy photos and layout.  Looking back, it seems awfully naive, and yet, wonder of wonders, I didn’t go wrong all too often.  There were a few embarassing missteps, but by and large, that approach worked for me.

Since then, media packaging has always been important to me, first with CDs and now increasingly with DVDs.  I still often look to the sleeve art to help me settle into a mood conducive to experiencing the art more fully.

To my mind, a great album or movie deserves great packaging (and all that entails).  A great album deserves equally great art whose job is to present the album, whose job is to somehow help communicate and enhance the album and prepare someone for the experience of listening to it every time.

My favorite music sleeve art is that which meshes with the sound contained within the CD.  For example, the cover of My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless is a blurry, saturated close-up photo of a hand strumming a guitar.  It’s nothing terribly complex or wildly creative, and yet it perfectly encapsulates the chaotic-yet-glorious sounds one hears on Loveless.

Another example of this would be the sleeve art that often accompanies releases on the seminal 4AD label, especially the “classic” releases by Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Diz Juz, Clan Of Xymox, and so on.  Those covers, designed by Vaughan Oliver, contained imagery, layout, and typography that perfectly complemented the moody, atmospheric sounds of releases such as This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End In Tears and Filigree & Shadow, The Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand, and Clan Of Xymox’s Medusa.

The same holds true for DVD sleeve art, if not even moreso given the visual nature of movies.  Which is why it annoys me so when I see great and intriguing movies saddled with crappy, uninspiring, and dull artwork.

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The four year old in me thinks that this might just be the greatest idea for a movie since, well, I don’t know when.

Here’s the basic premise: A liver sausage named Wee-Wee is labelled the “smelly duckling” by all of the other sausages, until one day he goes by a toilet and discovers his true nature.  He jumps into the toilet to return home, but he misses the joys of the sausage factory and a beautiful sausage with whom he has fallen in love.

While you’re still taking that in, check out this statement (which I love) from the movie’s director:

Vulgar as they seem, poop stories certainly are children’s all-time favourites. Readers either embrace them with laughter or despise them no matter what. I have always wanted to explore a new way of telling a poop story, and I hope that in this story, I have managed a successful combination of humour, inspiration and elegance.

A computer-animated take on the “ugly duckling” story with a bit of poo as the main the character, done with “humour, inspiration and elegance”?!?  I’d like to see Pixar pull that off.

• And the award for “Worst Cover Art Of 2007” goes to… the DVD release of The Fountain.  Ugh… I didn’t care much for the movie, but even so, it deserves something better than this.  I could eat a box of crayons and crap better sleeve art.
• What is it with all of the recent Christian psych-folk releases?  First The Christ Tree and now The Voyage of Icarus from Milwaukee-based Silmaril.  Hopefully, this means that someone will re-issue The Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus’ discography.  (Of course, you can download RAIJ’s stuff from here until then.)
• Evangelical Christians attack use of torture by US: ...Christian criticism has tended to come from the right of the Bush administration. Yesterday’s statement on torture suggested a new determination on the part of the evangelical churches to detach themselves from the Republican party and stake their independence—even if it is from a position more traditionally associated with the left.
• Time for a wee bit o’ mashup fun.  This time, it’s Sufjan Stevens and Feist, courtesy of Kevan Gilbert.
• Off The Sky‘s Jason Corder has been busy.  His collaboration with Pheek, released under the “Social System” moniker, is now available.  His next release, another collaboration entitled The Geist Cycles, will be available in the next few weeks.  And finally, he’s recently uploaded a bunch of free music, including samples for others to re-work, to his own website.
• Jeff Croft on website rip-offs and re-appropriations: ...one thing can not be denied: creative people, including us web designers, are more aware of intellectual property laws than ever before, and are tending to be far more uptight and even litigious about this sort of thing than in the past. I don’t think Nathan [Borror] and I quite have the exact same view, but I think we do agree on this: a lot of people need to lighten the hell up.
• So this is what XHTML 2.0 will look like…

I haven’t had too much time to mess around with Virb, the new social networking site from the folks behind PureVolume (which explains why my Virb page is so lame).  However, based on what little I have played around with it, I’m definitely impressed.

One feature of Virb that I like is, at first glance, rather insignificant.  Virb allows folks to customize their pages in a manner that is much easier and more flexible than MySpace’s.  Of course, you have to know a little CSS and HTML kung fu, but if you do, you can come up with a really nice-looking page.

Unfortunately, most folks out there are just a whee bit lacking when it comes to such things.  Just browse MySpace for 5 minutes, and you’ll have ample proof of that: pages for whom the word “eyesore” is actually a compliment, garish colors, poor layouts—a virtual laundry list of design no-no’s.

True, this hasn’t stopped MySpace from becoming one the most popular sites on the Web, but that doesn’t change the fact that much of MySpace looks about as pleasant as a couple of pokes in the eye.

This is one area where Virb improves upon MySpace with a seemingly insignificant feature.  Whenever you browse someone’s Virb page, you’ll notice a “Remove Customization” button up there on the top menu.  Click on it, and the page is reverted back to the default Virb design (which actually looks pretty good), with no customizations in site.  And of course, there’s a “Restore Customization” button to bring the the user’s original artistic vision back.

All in all, it’s a simple yet brilliant idea, and one that will no doubt come in handy as more and more folks venture onto Virb.  Thankfully, I haven’t needed to use it yet, as most of the custom Virb sites I’ve seen look pretty slick.  Still, it’s nice to know the option is always there for when I inevitably come across one of those designs.

I don’t think I’ve made a secret of the fact that I have become rather enamored with ExpressionEngine.  It’s an incredibly powerful and flexible content management system that lets me design without getting in the way of what I’m trying to do, and it seems like I’m always discovering some new trick to the system to do even cooler things.  Of course, it’s not perfect, nor is it for every person or project, but after years of eschewing CMS because they felt so limiting, it’s refreshing to use a CMS that works as well and as flexibly as EE.

And I’m not the only one who feels that way.  While plenty of people are still using Movable Type and WordPress to publish content on-line, more and more people are starting to migrate to the EE.  Which, as it turned out, presented something of a quandary for pMachine, the creators of EE.  Simply put, they’d outgrown their own name.  As CEO Rick Ellis puts it:

pMachine was an outgrowth of our first, and at that time (six years ago), only product.  Both our company and software were pMachine.  A couple years later we released ExpressionEngine, which addressed some serious limitations of pMachine.  EE essentially made pM (the software) obsolete.  Our users agreed, switching to EE in droves and eventually compelling us to discontinue pM due to low sales.  Still, our company continued on as pMachine.

Over the past three years, ExpressionEngine has grown by leaps and bounds in popularity.  In fact, as a brand it had eclipsed pMachine.  So when we set out to define our 2007 goals we decided it was time to move ExpressionEngine to its own site.  And since I always felt the name pMachine was confusing given our discontinued app, we decided to re-brand the company (and our hosting company).

And so, pMachine is no more.  In its stead exists EllisLab, and its network of sites for various products and affiliations: ExpressionEngine (the CMS dreams are made of), CodeIgniter (a very easy-to-use open source PHP framework), and EngineHosting (Opus’ home).

The new sites, courtesy of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain, look great.  And on a geeky note, all four websites are running on the same installation of EE.  This allows all of the sites to be managed from one central location, and more importantly, allows users to remain logged in regardless of where they are in the EllisLab network.

Suffice to say, very cool, and a testament to the flexibility and power of EE.  So kudos to the EllisLab crew, and I can’t wait to see what they cook up in 2007 for the rest of us.