Coldfront Redesign

I recently completed a website design for online poetry purveyors Coldfront. I began by designing their logo, using a decorative cloud element from their previous site as the primary image. Then we embarked on the task of designing a website that would include an ambitious front page that would feature a multi-tiered magazine-style layout. As always, I chose Wordpress as the platform with which to power the site and customize its appearance. The Coldfront editors have yet to migrate the entirety of their content to the new site, but I hope you'll stop by and take a look at the results of our hard work!

And of course, if you're in the market for a new website or blog, please send an email to dan at magnetic state dot com!

Chet Baker - 'Time After Time'

Wordpress named its new version (Wordpress 2.8, 'Baker,' released today) after jazz legend Chet Baker, so here's a little dose of my man Chet. This performance captures the great vocalist and trumpeter early in his descent into a drug habit that ravaged his looks, his musical skills, and his career. Here, he's missing a tooth from a contentious incident that was allegedly an altercation with an angry dealer. He hits a few sour notes, but otherwise, you can still hear the bittersweet melodies and laid back phrasing that made Baker a pioneer of the 'cool jazz' sound that arose in 50's California. The man was just bursting with beautiful melodies. Baker is the subject of the riveting documentary Let's Get Lost - probably the one film that I would have released on DVD if I could.

Attention: Artists

Do you need to get your portfolio online or upgrade your web presence? I'd like to build your site - and at a very low price. I've been building websites for the last year (mostly Wordpress-based blog/magazine sites like the one I built at www.fivechapters.com) but I'd like to begin building portfolio sites (view the one I built for my own work at www.magneticstate.com). My goal is to build simple, professional sites with intelligent navigation and a layout that makes your work shine. Take advantage of my cheap rates while they last and drop me a line at dan@magneticstate.com.

Five Chapters Redesign

Five Chapters logo by Magnetic State

I am pleased to announce my redesign of literary website Five Chapters! I was asked to design the logo (shown above) and redesign the site, and the results went live at www.fivechapters.com over the weekend. Five Chapters is an online magazine that publishes a new short story in five parts each week. As a fledgling fiction writer myself as well as a fan of many of the authors featured on Five Chapters (including John Cheever and Jay McInerney), I found this project to be an exciting challenge. I am quite happy with the results, and in the spirit of President Obama's fondness for transparency, I thought I'd discuss some of the work and share a few of the logo designs that didn't make the cut.

I began the project with the logo design; below are two of my favorites from the rejected concepts (I especially like the 'bookmark' concept). Five Chapters editor David Daley gave me his initial brief on the nature of the site's identity: it combines a 19th century reading format (serialized fiction) with a modern one (online publishing). This was an inspiring starting point that led to lots of research and some interesting results (like the old-style printer's ornament adorning the second logo below), but eventually, we began to feel hampered by it, and chose our final logo, whose primary functions are aesthetic and visual rather than conceptual.

Two unused logo designs.

The previous version of the website (see below), was abrasively colored, contained the site's name in the header but had no logo, and contained only one way to access the site's archives.

Old site.

To power the new site, I chose the extraordinarily powerful content management system Wordpress and designed a custom theme to control the appearance of the site. I modernized the site by equipping it with access to the Five Chapters RSS feed, and added alphabetized menus for the archives, which are now categorized by story and author. Finally, I extended the Five Chapters brand by revising the 'about' blurb, making it the first thing visitors see in the sidebar, and then embedding the new logo in the header and background. The 'bookmark' concept from our rejected logos can now be seen in the favicon.

New site!

So visit Five Chapters and read today's chapter or a full story. There's enough free fiction on this site to entertain us all until the next century. There's even a story about my 'hood Greenpoint!

Visit www.fivechapters.com

Portfolio Site Do's and Don'ts

Here are two publishing industry websites promoting values of good web design. Read the posts 'A Good Author Website Is...' at 26th Story and 'What not to have on your book website' at The Book Publicity Blog.

These particular posts are aimed specifically at the literary industry (author's websites), but many of these values apply across the board. A good portfolio site is easy to navigate, inherently entertaining or aesthetically pleasing, and it immediately engages and informs first-time visitors and gives them a reason to return. Flash should be used sparingly or not at all.