So I’m back in Ohio, remaking a website I built five years ago. It’s mildly horrifying opening up pages built in GoLive CyberStudio 3 — it’s all table-based, utterly unexpandable stuff. It’s vindicating too, though, being able to fix all these things using CSS and, in so doing, both make the site accessible and improve its load time a thousandfold.
However, as I’m doing this there’s also this weird feeling that I’m dismantling something that was done in my own style and putting something up in its place that is somehow oddly reminiscent of Josh Davis. Not his angled funky Flash work, but his simple, elegant Arial-based designs. This is not a bad thing – the resulting site is a much better fit for an “electronics for industry” company – but it is a little weird. I guess my 20-year-old self had a decidedly different sensibility than my quarter-century self.
That, and he didn’t know jack about hand-coding HTML. Jeezus.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
