So, if you’ve been following my various internet ventures for the last little while or so, you’ll notice that things are slightly prettier around these here parts.  Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on revamping my site and it seems to be, finally, presentable.  It has not been the easiest task, considering how much I hate web code and how many various places this “site” is hosted.  It also seems to be a work still in progress since I still have a few features I hope to implement.  Anyway, I thought I’d go through a little of the process for all you design stans and hopefully some of you can help me figure some of this out!

The first thing I did was figure out what I wanted to include and the hierarchy of it.  I probably have a gazillion pages across the internet from Pinterest, to Behance, to Soundcloud, to Twitter.  Of course, the fact is, not all of those are relevant, necessary or even significant enough to include.  Eventually, I narrowed it down and decided the things I want the present, first and foremost, are my blog, bio, beats, gallery, records and shop.  After deciding upon these categories, soon to be navigation links, I worked out an aesthetic that I wanted to go with (colour scheme, fonts, vibe, etc).

The next thing I had to do was settle on a tagline or title.  One of the challenges I’ve always had, as someone who’s professionally involved in so many various fields, is how do I actually categorise myself?  It’s not as if I’m just an illustrator or as if I’m just a rapper or just a designer, etc.  I’ve wanted a clever “job description” for a long time and this was the time to come up with it.  I figured I needed to start from the highest common denominator of all the things I do.  As an illustrator/designer/music producer/rapper/DJ, I’m definitely in the business of the arts, creativity and culture.  I also happen to make carefully designed things.  My earlier options included: Culture Architect, Culture Engineer, Culturesmith and Culture Craftsman.  I really liked the mental picture of a craftsman as someone who has a proud and distinct skill in creation and finally refined it to “Culturecraft”.

My working definition of “Culturecraft”

(noun.) The trained skill of careful and intentional fabrication of things pertaining to the culture of creativity; visual and performative.

Once I was settled on Paul Chin: Culturecraft as the title of my new web-dealings, it was time to do layouts.

I was inspired by the simplicity and boldness of Australian beatmaker, Ta-ku’s Bandcamp and still wanted to keep my horizontal link bar like my old blog, and many others, had.  I also am a huge advocate of the blog-as-a-homepage school of thought.  I remember, back when Kanye’s website was more than a repository for the single last thing he’s done (it was kinda cool pre-MBDTF, but I really miss UniverseCity).  His blog was, basically, the sole reason the majority of people went to his website and I feel that if people aren’t necessarily familiar with my work in one arena or my interests, my blog is a good neutral ground to get started.  That said, I’ll be removing the “blog-dot” subdomain from my Tumblr and just pointing the straight “dotcom” here soon.

One blog that I really like as a homepage is rapper Shad’s Bloggy-blog for its layout.  Now, he has a lot more going on than I do so the Press column on the left wasn’t really a priority (or a feasibility) for me whatsoever.  However, I’ve always liked two-column layouts for the space to place secondary elements (Twitter feeds, search bars, archive links, blogroll, etc).  I particularly like that Shad has an upcoming events feed in his and have been trying to get one to work on mine.

I currently have gig data running through Songkick which streams through nicely on my Soundcloud and my Bandcamp pages.  From my understanding, there is no official Tumblr-ready port of the Songkick API but the developers of the Amplify Theme have figured it out for themselves (as well as how to throw in a nice custom Soundcloud player).  I’ve got myself a Songkick API key and found the “support” document on how to load Artist Calendar data but I have no idea how to string/package/implement it whatsoever.  If anyone knows scripting jazz, hit me up, yeah?

The next biggest challenge came in the form of my Cargo Collective page.  It’s always been loosely based on the same HTML/CSS as my Tumblr but this time around, with the extra kick from Google Web Fonts (a wonderful, free alternative to Typekit), I figured this was my chance to unify things that much more, using styles.  I’m currently using the Kennedy layout as my base because gridded thumbnails are all kinds of wonderful (just ask my Bandcamp).  Something I still need to figure out is how to better utilise the width of the page’s intended metrics (975px wide) so that the container with the content (currently 880px, I believe) better meshes with the banner.  It’ll probably just take a couple more hours going over my multiple lines of CSS.

Now, what was supposed to be the easiest part of the site, due to its numerous constraints, is my Records page through Bandcamp.  The 975px I arrived at for the pages actually came from Bandcamp’s design guidelines (they let you only upload banners of that width).  However, I completely spaced on the height restrictions (180px) and thus, did not take into account how much taller my banner image is, including navigation links (oh, the magic of area mapping).  Currently, I’m leaving the banner as is but if I ever plan to rectify the disunity (and I probably do), it’ll mean I have to make the banner more shorter to accomodate the nav links.  My one concern is the visibility of the hand-drawn Paul Chin: Culturecraft ribbon.  I’m sure it’s difficult enough to read at current size so I’m hesitant to shrink it any further.  Still, you never know until you try.

Finally, the most bizarre part of the site is the Merchbooth.  It’s been its own Big Cartel entity, gathering dust in the back of the interwebs, for years now.  However, since my Heartbeat pins have become an overnight hit (before the since-amended shipping rates drove everyone away), it’s come back into circulation.  However, Big Cartel has pretty steep premium account pricing which I can’t justify, given the stability of my sales, so I had to pass on that and, subsequently, the ability to customise HTML to fit the rest of the site.  So, how did I get it to fit in the way it does now?  I embedded the page in an iframe.  Not the most glamourous solution, I know, but it’s a solution for the time being.  I was looking into some Big Cartel API jazz to be able to pull from the Big Cartel page itself a lot more elegantly, but it’s going to take a number of hours of pulling and twerking before I can pull that one off.

So while things have varied (only slightly from the original model), things remaining to be finalised include the Songkick feed, the appropriate metrics and mouseover link effects in the Cargo page, proper embedding of the Big Cartel page and a photo/image of some kind in the bio.  Additionally, I’m thinking I’d like to create an extra page through Tumblr for Beats to post Soundcloud tracks (since that’s where I’ll mostly be hosting beats outside of proper releases and such).  I remember Donald Glover had something similar a couple years ago when he put out his album, Culdesac.  It was a blank page that simply had Soundcloud mini widgets neatly arranged in it.  Of course, I would have to upgrade my Soundcloud account to get the mini widget but I wouldn’t be opposed to doing so.  It’d be a selection of my beats, a link to my full blown Soundcloud page and maybe a Soundcloud dropbox widget.  This would also require me to do actual HTML/CSS coding to replicate the neat arrangement.

In conclusion.  The site has been the result of several hours of arduous web-jiggery and there are probably several more to come.  If you see anything out-of-wack around the place, please let me know and I’ll try to figure it out.  Or, better yet, if you KNOW how to fix stuff, help a brother out!