John Pezzetti's Blog

Here’s a roundup of a few more sites I’ve built.  The first is a pretty complex drupal install for the Violence Research Foundation.  The layout is designed upon the beautiful A3 Atlantis theme by Blamcast.  I’ve wanted to use this theme as a base for a long time now, and I’m glad I finally got the chance.  A lot of interesting and informative information on this site about the hazards of Manganese, especially to infants in soy-based infant formula.

Also built a robust drupal install w/ an ubercart store for Amy Bisogni Jewelry.  I built this theme up myself to her specifications, and all in all it was a fun website to finish up.  Since I wasn’t able to find any D5 slideshow modules that fit my needs here, the slideshow on the front page is powered by a modified version of Slideshow AS2 by Todd Dominey, as well as the Drupal CCK and Contemplate.  It’s very easy to manage photos on the back end, and I would love to package this as a module when I get the chance.

Last website of note is fit-2gether.com.  I didn’t build this website, or even do the css… just provided the layout PSD, but that sill counts for something!

Elle Mckenna Beron, age .0082.  What a cute little kid!  Polite too–didn’t throw up on me at all despite being given every possible opportunity.

Check out the Quantum Communications website.

The process to arrive where we did was a fun one.  Terry wanted a design in which the user is immediately offered pretty much every service we offer–SEO, re-branding, brand positioning as a bunch of big ass buttons… looking to green your brand?  BAM!  This was pretty much the idea.  He also wanted some kind of a creative element, something to show off our creative side and to hook a potential client.

Meanwhile, floating around in my head was this idea of integrating a passive game into a functional interface.  Thus I proposed the basic premise to him, that the user should be able to browse items on the front page and, whether they realize it or not, they will be playing a game in the process.

The content is managed by a Drupal 6 installation.  The front page is running mostly on jQuery, and the game is a flash element. The color scheme can be switched very easily–we ran a Halloween theme…until new years.

The next two elements I plan to program in are a user color picker, so users can choose their own color schemes, and a more expansive leader board so my buddy Almu’s unbeatable scores aren’t the only ones the game will track.

Check it out.  If you don’t like it, tell me why, I would love to hear about it.  Maybe.  I might be a little annoyed, but don’t let that stop you.

I’m not going to say that my last design job was as sweet as my current one, but I did get to design two or three show posters a year.  You never appreciate what you have until it’s gone, and now that a large portion of the print design I’m doing involves stock photos of attractive + intelligent + confident + multiracial + 30something people I have to lean pretty heavily on my web development projects for creative release.

Well, in what will hopefully be the first of many freelance poster design projects I made this poster for “The Loft” at UCSD, a new wine bar / club / venue that is opening up in a week.  I hope you like it!

You can see all the posters I designed earlier in my career at my portfolio.

Tyson Chandler is a really cool guy.  Very laid back, just did his workout and joked around with the people with him.

Finished off a website for the UCSF Mission Bay Art Collective.

I got around to putting together a Muxtape.  What a great idea, muxtape is.  Several of the songs were supplied to me by my brother.  Enjoy!

A few months ago I built my most recent computer and for the first time installed Windows XP 64-bit edition. Anyone who has done this knows it is kind of a pain. So much of my old software didn’t work, I even had to buy a different wireless networking card due to Airlink101′s ineptitude in driver updating.

This morning I was informed of an IE6 display issue on one of my sites, and I realized in horror that my odds of finding a standalone IE6 to run on my 64-bit platform were not good. Fortunately, after about a 45-minute search I did stumble upon a working browser, which you can download from evolt.org.

Well, the title is misleading. I did have to launch this website in three hours–and it was a pain–but I got to come back in and spend some time on friday cleaning up loose ends and filling in the details, which as I’ve come to realize, are the only thing that make the difference between good web design and websites that look like they were made in Microsoft Word by a non English speaking grandmother.

Marv Marinovich’s Sports Lab v1.0 is off the chopping block. Here is the backstory:

Thursday 2pm

Boss: “So Sports Lab is going to be featured on the NFL Network.”

Me: “Super. Some press will help them out.”

Boss: “They’re on at 4pm today.”

Me: “Wow, and they’re just telling us now?”

Boss: “We need a website up by 4pm.”

Click. Click. Click.

Me: “Damn, forgot to buy bullets.”

Well if you looked at the website Thursday night it was pretty raw, but I got it mostly where I wanted it on Friday. We’re soon to be adding quite a few interactive elements, but for now I’m happy with it as a static web page. Bring on the next project!

I spotted this ribbon on the back of a car in my neighborhood a couple of months ago, at a rare moment when I didn’t have a camera handy. Definitely the most compelling magnetic ribbon I’ve ever spotted.  I had to recreate it.  And I didn’t want to spend a lot of money.