This is greybean.com version 5.0 (codename: keaton).
The live redesign is currently 8% complete.
As you may have seen, the cover art for Criterion’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou DVDs hit the internet this week, and I found myself terribly disappointed with it. And that got me thinking about just how good Criterion’s covers always are.
The Criterion Collection covers are consistently hands down the best in the industry. There’s no other studio who so willingly eschews commerciality (read: star headshots, standard poster art–usually with star headshots superimposed, taglines and the like) in the interest of compelling design. This might be related to how low the commercial value of some of Criterion’s product is, but it usually follows through to their more widely known titles as well. Here, let me do a little comparison for you of Criterion cover designs and their corresponding Hollywood studio designs (and I’ll just use bigger, more commercial titles to better illustrate my point). The major studio’s art is on the left, Criterion’s on the right:
All right… So, welcome to the new, much stripped-down greybean.com: version 4.0 lite. You’ll notice a few things. First, this is the only real page of the site. As I put together other pages (a page of photos and some downloadables’ll probably first, if anything ever is), I’ll add them. You’ll also notice that the, uhh, ‘bean’ (as in greybean) page no longer exists. She’s gonna need to provide some content if she wants to motivate me enough to get it up on here somewhere. My plan is to use some blogging technology like MovableType to streamline her updating process, but we’ll talk about that another day. Also, you’ll notice that the popup window is gone and that the site now stretches to fill your browser window. Isn’t that nice? The idea here is twofold: 1. I want the site to be as easy as possible for me to update in the hope that that’ll make me update it more often. We’ll see if that happens, eh? And 2. I’ve simplified everything to the point that all of the information that was hidden behind various menus, and navigation schemes, and invisible layers and blah, blah on the old site is all plainly visible on this page at all times. Nice.
Now, here’s what’s happened since the last time I made an update:
Monday night is trash night.
Being the man of the house and all (ahem), every Monday night/Tuesday morning somewhere between 1 and 4am (which is many hours later than Alisia wishes I did it, but oh, well) I am charged with putting out the trash and the recycling. And it seems that almost every Monday night since we’ve moved, it’s rained. Which is not a bad thing. 1:30am on Tuesdays is a pretty lonely time in our neighborhood and there’s something about the stillness of the rain and the pink halogen streetlight and dripping tree leaves. I almost look forward to it.
I do wish our upstairs neighbor would put the trash cans out every once in a while, however.
I hope my dad does okay tomorrow. Sometimes I wish I had someone to pray to.