Chris-Barr.com

So, Photoshop crashed on me.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

I hope this helps the nice people over at Adobe.

Posted by Chris Barr on 12/31 at 07:13 PM
Filed under Design, Macintosh, Comedy, Tech • 0 Comments • Permanent link

I wanted to show off some amazing album art from my music library, so I've picked 24 of my absolute favorites (arranged alphabetically). My rules for selecting these was to purely judge them based on the artwork, not on the actual music itself.

Some just have amazing photography, others just focus on great use of typography. All in all, I love each piece of album art (and the music.)

Posted by Chris Barr on 11/27 at 07:15 PM
Filed under Photography, Design, Music • 2 Comments • Permanent link

Five Words That Will Rock Your World

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

My church asked me to make a quick video intro for a new 5 week sermon series titled "Five Words That Will Rock Your World." The graphics were already made, I just had to animate it somehow. It's been a while since I last touched Adobe After Effects, but I think I came up with something pretty decent.

I originally made this as a standard 4:3 video at 720x480 to fit on the projector screens at church, but I decided to re-render this in 16:9 720p HD so I can have a good archival copy for my portfolio and just so it looks great online. The original 4:3 video took roughly 5 hours to render out on my MacBook Pro (which I had to do 3 times due to various mistakes and errors!) and the larger 720p version took 10 hours!

The music is "Life Inside You" by Matthew West from his album Something To Say (Amazon MP3 download page)

Five Words That Will Rock Your World from Chris Barr on Vimeo.

Posted by Chris Barr on 06/02 at 09:02 PM
Filed under Design, Projects, Video/Motion Graphics • 0 Comments • Permanent link

Guessr - A Flickr Game!

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

So, I wrote a game! It's something I've been wanting to do and had the idea for a while now. The premise of the game is that a random word is selected, a search of Flickr.com is performed with that word and you see the images from that search. Now you have 30 seconds to guess what that word is!

The game is entirely written in javascript/jQuery and is completely themable with jQuery UI. I wrote the majority of it in one afternoon, and made some updates the following week based on some great feedback from friends on Twitter and just some better usability ideas I had.

Take a shot at it and let me know what you think. I hope to find the time soon to make even more improvements to the game.

Play Guessr!

Posted by Chris Barr on 04/14 at 09:41 PM
Filed under Photography, Design, Projects, Web, Code, Javascript, Gaming • 6 Comments • Permanent link

Mix ’09 Session Videos

Sunday, March 29, 2009

I just got back from the Mix '09 conference in Las Vegas, and it was so much better than I expected! For being a Microsoft sponsored conference mostly focusing on .NET and other MS technologies, there was about 50% Mac users there and most of these people were designers. It was a really nice mix (haha?) of designers and developers. I've got some photos from my trip up here on Flickr.

I think one of the best things they do is put up ALL the session videos online for free! There's some really valuable information in these! http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09 (also you can view past years MIX sessions at http://videos.visitmix.com )

Here's some highlights I'm going to recommend:

Web Form Design - absolutely one of the best sessions I attended. Watch this video! He talks about why forms suck and what we as designers can do to help the process along. Very very well done and extremely informative. As soon as this session was over I went and bought the speakers book.
The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Anotehr great session, but not necessarily directly related to web design. It's on how to get ideas out of your head and communicate them properly to people via a whiteboard of napkin.
Measuring Social Media Marketing - If you or your company does any kind of social media marketing, this is a great one.

The following sessions I did not attend, but they seem great:

And finally, for any other ASP.NET or Visual Studio users, These are somre great previews of what's coming soon!

Web Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio: Now and in the Future - A preview build of Visual Studio 2010 is shown. Looks amazing!
Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 : What's Next? - awesome new features is ASP.NET 4

Posted by Chris Barr on 03/29 at 09:34 AM
Filed under Design, Web, Code, Javascript, ASP, MIX '09, Productivity, Tech • 0 Comments • Permanent link

MIX ’09 Days 2 & 3

Friday, March 20, 2009

Wow, this conference has been a lot more involved than I initially thought, and I haven't been able to do the daily blog post that I was hoping to. My initial impression was that I would go back to my hotel around 5, and then be able to chill out and browse the web and write my blog posts. It turns out there’s a lot of great optional Mix ’09 related stuff to do after the official ending time, plus my hotel has no web access!

Day 2

Day 2 opened with an awesome keynote presentation. They really had the atmosphere down to get everyone pumped up. While we waited for the keynote to begin, they had a cool app called running on the big screens which grabbed tweets and Flickr photos tagged with “MIX09" and they all dropped in like tetris blocks. Also, some sweet tunes by the DJ.

Finally they keynote began with a great speech by Bill Buxton where he talked about how important good design is. This was followed up by Scott Guthrie making announcements about ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Silverlight 3. All of which I am thoroughly impressed with.

People from Netlix, NBC, Stack Overflow, Vertigo, and a few others came up and talked about how they use all this technology. I will have to say the most interesting part for me was when the VP of Netflix came up and demoed how their Sliverlight player works with bandwidth throttling and al they debug information. You can watch the entire keynote online here.

Right after this we attended sessions about what’s new in ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I’m very excited about the changes coming to both of these technologies. Most notable (for me anyway) in ASP.NET 4.0 is better control over viewstate, and the ability to control client ID’s that get rendered out! You can watch this entire presentation online as well.

Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) presented on what was new in Visual Studio 2010, and there’s so many great changes! Most notably are big speed improvements and a complete interface overhaul. Check out the picture below, it’s a word cloud of the most typed things in Visual Studio. Larger items are typed more frequently. They’ve come up with some great ways to resolve this by adding in custom code snippets. You just type the word “listview" (or “lvw", or whatever you define) and it puts all the code that you need or a listview out there!

Later that night there was a party at an amazing club called Tao. Free drinks and nerds everywhere! We met up with Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) and Juan Rivera (who’s writing full PHP support for Visual Studio) and got to pick their brains about what they do, the future of Visual Studio, programing conventions, and all kinds of cool stuff. Overall, we had a great time talking with them.

(not my photo)

Then the party moved up to a section of Tao called Tao Beach, which turned out to be on the freaking roof of the Venitian hotel! It was just like you see in the movies, amazing! We met up with Jarrod and Geoff from Stack Overflow, just hung out and talked for a while.

(not my photos)

Day 3

Day 3 opened with another keynote, which we dicided to skip; and this turned out to be a good idea. The only big announcement was that Internet Explorer 8 was released and now available for download. We heard a lot of that that it was a pretty boring presentation other than that.

More sessions with some great content, and some that were just ok. Around lunchtime they had a small Q&A with Scott Guthrie moderated by Scott Hanselman. This seemed to be mostly focused on Silverlight, but it was still a pretty cool thing to attend. Plus, I got a picture with him!

Afterwards, Scott Hanselman hosted a session about how he built NerdDinner.com using ASP.NET MVC. I learned a lot about MVC, which looks great, and Scott presented all the information really well. That was my first time hearing him speak, and he’s really got a way of communicating well with the audience.

Later that night we went to check out a session where Mix ’09 attendees could show off past work they had made. We got there late, but it was still interesting for what we saw. After that we were able to just walk around the city and take some photos.

Posted by Chris Barr on 03/20 at 04:30 PM
Filed under Photography, Design, Web, MIX '09, Tech • 2 Comments • Permanent link

MIX ’09 - Day 1

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Well, my first day is finally coming to an end as I write this post - a really great first day considering how this first looked as I got here...

My flight out of Pensacola was delayed by 2 hours, but I was lucky enough to still make my connection in Atlanta to Vegas. My luggage however, was not so lucky. I had to go back to the hotel that night with only my laptop and camera. No change of clothes, no toothpaste, and being forced to sleep in my contacts. Thank God my bag was brought in on the next flight from Atlanta, so I was able to get it delivered.

Diego and I got up early, took a brief walk around the Venetian for a quick errand. Also, our hotel has no 13th floor.

Initial impression about MIX were not good. Very little signage and no directions. We got the general idea of where the conference might be, but no specific information. Then it occurred to me, what else should I expect from Microsoft organizing a conference? Once you figure it all out, you’re good to go - but that initial learning of where everything is located was the hard part.

First things first - breakfast and then check Twitter. There’s no wifi at the hotel, but there’s gigantic 8 foot wifi repeaters for the conference - making sure you can be connected from anywhere. Very nice touch. Not to mention, the food provided here is stellar!

On to registration, and then our first workshop entitled “Design Fundamentals for Developers” presented by Robby Ingebretsen. Robby did a great job - really well organized slides and information - i took notes until my laptop battery died - which reminds me, i need to take notes by a plug next time...

This workshop was not at all what I expected, and it turned out to be very informative - I feel like I learned plenty right there. I was expecting it to be somewhat technical since it was aimed at developers, but it was quite the opposite, very abstract and all about what art and design is. No code at all. Snacks and drinks provided of course.

haha? Apple juice on a Windows napkin!

Some big points I took away from this workshop:

The opposite of design is not no design, it’s bad design! The very act of creating anything at all implies a design and therefore must be considered.
Coding has exact answers to problems, design does not.
Design has ponies and babies. Everyone loves babies and won’t let go of them, even if they aren’t right for a project. Everyone wants a pony, but you can’t always have them and they may not be practical. A good designer will be able to let go of their babies and let others know they can’t have a pony.
The triumph of design is when the complex seems simple
Gradients != design

I also noticed the presenter was presenting from a Mac, and there were way more Macs here than I thought I would see at a mostly Microsoft event.

Next, it’s lunchtime! Again, absolutely amazing meals provided. Veal, ravioli, green tomatoes, potato salad, and an incredible line of deserts.

Off to the next workshop, which started out OK, but we decided to leave after the first hour. The presentation and information provided was not nearly as good as the first one.

I did have a few take-away points here though: Designers tend to design projects for the “10 second wow” - meaning you are immediately impressed visually, but may not come back later for real information (think of any “flash” site you’ve ever seen). Developers tend to make projects that don’t really appeal to you at first, but after a while you learn to like the information and function - the “10 minute wow” (think of Twitter - ever tried to explain it to a new user?). A balance between these is needed.

As you move down the chart from designer to developer, you can compare each step to a character from Lord of the Rings. Also notice how the amount of facial hair increases in a logarithmic fashion.

After this, some other guy got up to speak about Silverlight and how to pay attention to details in your project and he really lost our interest. Not well organized, not prepared, and he started to get technical on some things we weren’t familiar with.

He also really turned me off to wanting to ever use Silverlight. One thing he kept talking about was how hard it is to get text to look good in his Silverlight apps. His solution? Duplicate every single text element, offset it by 1 pixel, and lower the opacity. Thus creating a fake anti-aliased effect. LAME!

That’s the point when we decided to leave and pick out sessions for the rest of the week. I got back on the Twitter, both posting and checking out what was happening on the #MIX09 hashtag. I noticed a picture from @jarrod_dixon that looked like it was only about 10 feet offset to the right of where I was sitting. I sent him a tweet just to say hi - then Diego and I got up to do it for real.

As it turned out, we met two cool people named Jared and Geoff who do a lot of the work for Stack Overflow (A site I use and love, and will now use more)! We had a long talk about code, Vegas, what they do, what we do, photography, etc. I’m very glad we got to meet them.

Microsoft Surface was also here! I’ve been wanting to sit down and play with one of these things since it was first announced! Very very cool technology that I hope comes way down in price and becomes more common.

Overall, the screen is not as high of a resolution as I had first imagined, and it can actually be quite laggy at times depending on what you’re doing - but it runs on some fairly meager hardware (mid range Core2 Duo and an average ATI card), so I can understand that. But for $15,000 I thought it would be top notch hardware in there.

The surface itself is not made of smooth glass as I imagined, it’s actually a diffuse textured plastic, but very easy to slide your hand around on as well. Talking to the Microsoft Reps there, it’s just running Vista under the hood and these are just special Surface apps. with in Visual Studio with WPF.

There’s and entire fully lit stage for Rock band - and there’s a tournament tomorrow. That should be fun to watch!

We were all given the schwag bag of course which mostly contained a bunch of crappy ads, but also had some great stuff in there as well. T-shirt, book, notepad, a sharepoint water bottle and an IE8 coffee thing. I might slip off the IE8 logo and use it that way.

That was a busy day! After some dinner, I walked around a bit at night and snapped some photos. I want to try and do this every night that I’m here.

Posted by Chris Barr on 03/18 at 09:10 AM
Filed under Photography, Design, Web, Code, MIX '09, Tech • 1 Comments • Permanent link

Radiohead Box Set = Awesome

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Recently I discovered woot.com, they sell one product a day and only have a limited supply - so demand is usually high and the sell out fast! I was up late one night last week and saw they had a seven-album Radiohead box set for only $45! With Radiohead being my all time favorite band, I had to spring for this. For those less fortunate, you can still pick up the Radiohead Box Set on Amazon.

The box set itself is just plain gorgeous, not to mention the art on each of the seven albums and their respective booklets. I took some photos, click though for a larger version.

Posted by Chris Barr on 02/19 at 09:44 PM
Filed under General, Photography, Design, Music, Web • 0 Comments • Permanent link

Science Machine

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Check out this video from Chad Pugh. He spent 40 hours in Illustrator and took a screenshot every 5 seconds while creating this amazing drawing he calls "Science Machine."

You can view the full length 18 minute "director's cut", or buy the print online.

Music by Portishead.

Posted by Chris Barr on 06/03 at 10:20 PM
Filed under Design, Music, Video/Motion Graphics • 2 Comments • Permanent link

Design Revisions

Sunday, May 25, 2008

A few weeks ago I had to start on a site design for a client, and I went through more design revisions on this site than any other I've done. Now this isn't all the clients' fault, most of these are just suggestions I got from the great people over at the Godbit Forum. Overall, I've got 11 different versions of the same site here. About mid-way through I was worried, (especially when the client requested a purple background!), but it turned out to be a site that both the client and I were happy with.

Click to the left to see the full sized image
(beware it's almost 2MB!)

Posted by Chris Barr on 05/25 at 09:50 PM
Filed under Design, Web • 0 Comments • Permanent link

The Comic Sans Effect

Friday, April 25, 2008

If you don’t already know, I’m a huge advocate of the Ban Comic Sans site. It’s a bad font, and it’s just plain overused. Look for it next time you see anything that’s been designed, I’ve seen it everywhere from menus to billboards. Another font that I similarly despise is Papyrus, so much to that I own http://banpapyrus.com - one day I’ll get around to making a real site for it, I promise.

I suppose you can link the use of comic sans to print design, but it really can be used in any kind of media. But, I got to thinking the other day, every different type of media has it’s own “comic sans” per se. These are all extremely common to see in their respective media types, but that’s because they’ve become overused and bland now. Whenever I see any of these, it makes me wonder if the designer behind it is actually aware of how incredibly overused they are! The problem with any of these is that when you look at a design, I shouldn’t see the tools or fonts used, I should see the design and overall message.

I’ve got a more detailed write up about all these after the jump.

The Web Developers’ Dock

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

It's crazy. Also, I need more RAM. Now off to my Linux box to test more browsers...

Posted by Chris Barr on 04/08 at 01:47 PM
Filed under Design, Projects, Web • 3 Comments • Permanent link

Portfolio Time

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Well I haven’t posted on here in a while because I’ve really been working hard to get my personal portfolio online. I started sometime last week, and it’s really been a much larger project than I first thought! The hardest part was finding old projects, and deciding how the portfolio itself should work. Now that I’ve selected all my work and completed it, take a look! Just click on the new tabs up top.

What’s that, you need a link right here? Ok, fine. http://chris-barr.com/portfolio/

Posted by Chris Barr on 04/01 at 10:40 PM
Filed under General, Photography, Design, Web, Video/Motion Graphics • 0 Comments • Permanent link

After Effecting

Thursday, March 20, 2008

This past week web work was a bit slow, so I decided to make some stuff for my church‘s new contemporary service called Seven30Seven. I spent a lot of time in Adobe After Effects, which I haven’t been in for a few years, and it took some time to get re-aquatinted with.

I made two videos for Seven30Seven, one is just a simple background to put on the screens that will animate in and stop, and the other one is a 5:00 countdown video so people will know when the service is starting. I also created a Youtube account finally, so I put the videos up on there. So either head over there and check them out, or just click the jump below to see them here.

Garmin Splash Screen

Monday, March 17, 2008

I needed to update the software on my Garmin Nuvi 660, so while I had it connected to my computer I decided that I was bored with the white logo on a black screen while it starts up. Gamin makes it easy enough to change, you just put an image in there and select the one you want to use.

I decided to give it an over the top "Web 2.0" look. The designed are way overused everywhere online, so I thought it might be funny to bring that here. I've uploaded the PSD file, so feel free to download and edit for your specific needs.

Download the PSD file (2.6MB - Photoshop CS3).

Posted by Chris Barr on 03/17 at 10:43 PM
Filed under Design, Projects • 0 Comments • Permanent link

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Thursday, December 31, 2009

Friday, November 27, 2009

Ben Folds - Ben Folds Live

Chemical Brothers - Push The Button

Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

Derek Webb - Stockholm Syndrome

Feist - The Reminder

Frou Frou - Details

Iron and Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days

John Mayer Trio- Try!

John Reuben - The Boy Vs. the Cynic

Johnny Cash - The Legend of Johnny Cash

José González - In Our Nature

The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath

Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Norah Jones - Not Too Late

Radiohead - Hail to the Theif

Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope

Sarah McLachlan - Wintersong

Shawn McDonald - Simply Nothing

Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise

The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics

The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow

UNKLE - War Stories

Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

William Shatner - Has Been