Well, if you've been a visitor of my website in the past year, or maybe the past several years, you see that I've completely overhauled my website yet again. But this time, I moved away from the black backgrounds and dark landscapes to something much brigther, lighter, and reflective of me.

Welcome to the brand new Ben Hauck online!

Most of my designs start out as a search for inspiration. Here and there designs catch my eye and I wonder if I can implement them on my own website. Usually I fail to integrate the approach or it doesn't work out. But that's all part of the process. Eventually I lock onto a simple scheme that appeals to me. Usually it is in the minimalist vein. In fact, I sometimes get in design dilemmas and to get out of them, I ask "What would be the minimalist thing to do?" And the answer swiftly speeds to me.

The inspiration for this new design was http://www.kau-raben.dk/, a website I couldn't tell you anything about. I liked how the KAU:RABEN site had a handful of headings, writ somewhat large, expanding with animation to a treasure trove of items. I found I was able to recreate the effect to a certain extent, then I played. I couldn't figure out what kind of layout I wanted inside the sliding menu items, but eventually I found that tabs (which I've never really liked) actually suited my website and its contents. As a result of tabs and animated panels, I could pack an enormous amount of information into a minimalist design.

I'm fairly proud of this achievement. I actually pulled it off. To get to what you see now took a week of solid work on the website, from first thing in the morning through much past my bedtime, sometimes staying up all night. (I can get a bit compulsive or addictive when I do web design. It presents problems I like trying to solve, even though sometimes I'm vocally frustrated.) The last days were the ones of least progress and they were reserved for figuring out the more complicated aspects of the site--the "thickboxes." The thickboxes are located in the Gallery and the Videos tabs in my Acting section. I wanted really badly to have something like these on my site to show video, and I'm happy to say they worked out. I even skinned them a bit though I couldn't get rounded corners on them.

And that was one of my fears that I overcame in this design: how to make rounded corners. I found an online generator of rounded cornters and their code, and I played with the results and was quite happy with the results. So I used them all over the site, making for a softer, less severe feel than my past designs. Fear is indeed something that is involved in web design, at least for me. You never know if you'll somehow make a typo (I make plenty of 'em) that you can't find and thus brings down your website. You may be afraid by the daunting task of learning a code language, or being forced to deal with it. You may also fright by being a bit over your head and not knowing the consequences. Finally, there is fear in having others seek the work. I'm actually excited to share this radical new design but fearful it won't work or won't display properly.

Which brings me to faults of this design. I have designed it with the very nice News Gothic font, one that is reminiscent of one of my favorite bands They Might Be Giants. But I learned late in the design that it is next to impossible for others to experience my site this way as it would require their having the font on their computers. While I still held out for News Gothic, I had to code the site also for Arial and Helvetica fonts, but I don't have a good grasp of how these affect the design. So I don't know if you seea layout and font choice that I'd really get behind.

I'm also a bit irritated by the slow load time. My last-ditch effort before launching was to change the tabs to AJAX, a programming language (or something) that allows me to call external files when needed rather than having everything download immediately. However, I seemed to be learning that when I used AJAX in the way I wanted, I lost important formatting. So I had to ditch that and deal with a slow design. (It seems the site is fastest in Firefox and slowest in IE7.)

For some reason, toward launch time my website was crashing the Safari browser, so if you have that browser only, you're not getting a peek of my site. I'm trying to figure out why the crash but I had to launch because I'm so behind on "life" as a result of this week. (I pulled another all-nighter.) I actually paid attention to how the website looked in more than just my browser. I hope that means it will look like the same for many visitors.

But apart from the bugs, I'm happy, and I feel I have a website to work with and can get behind. I do hope you'll send me an email telling me what you think. Especially email me if something isn't working right or isn't looking right. Email me under the BEN HAUCK > Contact tab. If you can make a screenshot, even better, but you'll have to wait for my reply to get it to me.

So that's that! Seriously, click around. There are so many worlds on the site. I had a great time challenging myself to do better and better work. I'm happy my Alpha phase is done ... I consider Ben Hauck online as now in Beta!

Cheers for now!
Ben :)

 

 
June 30, 2009 (Tuesday)

Today I had a print modeling job at Industria Studios. The client was Humira Gastro. The production team was Inna Khavinson Productions.

Look for the ads!

 

 
July 1, 2009 (Wednesday)

Today I was a guest at a polo match for Episode 301 ("Reversal of Fortune") for the television series Gossip Girl.

 

 
July 2, 2009 (Thursday)

Today I added to my website in the Writing » Essays & Reports section an essay-presentation of mine recently published in the General Semantics Bulletin. It is titled "A Better Tomorrow for General Semantics."