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The Boy Who Lived

August 18, 07 //
10

It was ten years ago when I first saw Harry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone sit­ting on the shelf at Borders.

I dis­tinctly remem­ber the front cover illus­tra­tion, how col­or­ful it looked from afar and think­ing how geeky the boy on the cover looked with his round glasses and oddly-shaped scar. Yet, because it was a children’s book I fig­ured it wasn’t worth my time.

The Cho­sen One

I would’ve never guessed that not only would I read (and digest) every book in the series and watch every movie to date I would finally say good­bye to such a rich and imag­i­na­tive world and a char­ac­ter that, next to Mickey Mouse, is so well known around the world.

The road to under­stand­ing Harry Pot­ter wasn’t so smooth for me. It took some con­vinc­ing on the part of my best friend’s father, who in his late 40s fig­ured out some­thing that I could not; that children’s books are writ­ten for chil­dren but also meant to be enjoyed by adults.

Adult fic­tion can be stress­ful and com­pli­cated, tak­ing itself too seri­ously at times which is not to say children’s lit­er­a­ture doesn’t stray from com­pli­cated plots, it’s just writ­ten in a man­ner that even at its most basic level a child could understand.

If you think for a moment of the best children’s sto­ries turned to movie adap­ta­tions, sprin­kled in there will be films that prob­a­bly rate high on your all-time favorite list.

A few that come to my mind are:

  • The Wiz­ard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
  • Bambi by Felix Salten
  • Jumaji by Chris Van Allsburg

There are sev­eral oth­ers that have had such a pro­found impact on all of our lives and to think they all began as sto­ries intended for children.

Moral Align­ment

As for Harry Pot­ter, after hav­ing read the first book, I had a cul­ti­vated ini­tia­tive to fin­ish the series to the end. It was my goal and since I’ve reached it there are thoughts that have stayed with me through­out the course of the story.

Many of which deal with the fact that Harry doesn’t fit the mold for a hero. He isn’t bulky, doesn’t have strength beyond his wand and depends on the aide of others.

How­ever, he is the epit­ome of hope and strength to the wiz­ard­ing world, which shares par­al­lels with groups that in a his­tor­i­cal con­text have been sup­pressed in every cul­ture under the sun. While Harry never truly rec­og­nizes his impor­tance, he remains hum­ble and lov­ing and these are traits that ulti­mately keep him on the straight and nar­row, resilient to the evil that is always at bay.

This strug­gle between good and evil, right and wrong, deci­sions based on the protagonist’s moral stand­ing are com­mon threads shared by good lit­er­a­ture. Lit­er­a­ture that pulls you in, makes you feel sor­row and empa­thy and lays the ground­work for the ulti­mate showdown.

A World That Seems Real

While I con­sider myself a healthy reader there’s never been a series that has cap­ti­vated me as much as the Harry Pot­ter story has. I’m a lover of fan­tasy and while the Lord of the Rings books are grandiose, they can be dif­fi­cult to read because the lan­guage itself (explored in depth by Tolkien) is a char­ac­ter unto itself.

The enjoy­ment of read­ing Harry Pot­ter stems from the fact that Rowl­ing doesn’t take her­self too seri­ously and instead has fun with her mate­r­ial. I believe that beyond her shy per­sona is a woman who is witty and con­stantly imag­in­ing things as evi­denced in the books. She man­aged to make read­ing inter­est­ing again for chil­dren and that alone deserves attention.

There’s a lot to like about Harry Pot­ter and for that he’ll remain as real as other char­ac­ters in fic­tion have become.

Book Meme

July 20, 05 //
17

BookEither peo­ple are anx­ious to see fresh con­tent or I’m just read­ing into it, either way, I’ve been passed a book baton by Greg, Phu and Khaled.

Num­ber of Books on Shelf

Oh wow. Truth­fully, there are about 100 books on the small book­shelf in our liv­ing room and scat­tered through­out our apart­ment I’d esti­mate that I’ve col­lected over 3 – 400 books that run the gamut as far as dif­fer­ent sub­ject mat­ter. The plan is that when we finally take the plunge and pur­chase a house to store our mate­r­ial items, that we’ll set up more book­shelf space to prop­erly (for once) store these books.

Last Book Purchased

Harry Pot­ter and the Half-Blood Prince. While I didn’t go to one of those overnight par­ties, I did pur­chase it from Ama​zon​.com and received it the same day it was released, which was a com­mend­able feat in itself on Amazon’s part.

Book Read­ing Right Now

Harry Pot­ter and the Half-Blood Prince. Unlike Greg, who fin­ished the lat­est Pot­ter book in a few days, I’m about halfway through. I’d say this book is much more historically-driven than the pre­vi­ous novels.

Last 5 Books Read

I typ­i­cally read about 5 or 6 books at a time, mean­ing that a lot of the con­tent kind of mashes together into what I can only describe as a vividly stitched and inter­wo­ven storyline.

Books That Mean A Lot To Me

As Greg stated, this is a bit dif­fi­cult since there are a slew of fan­tas­tic books that have in some way or another effected me on an emo­tional level.

Pass it Along

Instead of choos­ing a select few to pass this along to, I’ll just sug­gest that any­one that’s inter­ested, feel free to steal this book meme and make it your own.

The State of Animation

March 28, 05 //
12

Oliver and Company [1988]My wife and I were watch­ing the mak­ing of Disney’s Oliver and Com­pany on DVD. Unlike today’s exten­sively (and some­times exhaus­tively) researched “making-of” fea­turettes, you could tell this one was used more so as a mar­ket­ing tool. Halfway through the fea­ture, the announcer men­tions that Dis­ney used “state of the art” com­puter tech­nol­ogy as an aid to tra­di­tional 2-D animation.

The next scene shows an inter­view with Roy E. Dis­ney who seems excited about the adap­ta­tion of com­puter tech­nol­ogy and sug­gests that it’ll be a use­ful tool for future Dis­ney films. Now here’s the kicker — towards the end of the com­puter ani­ma­tion bit the announcer reminds the view­ers that while com­puter ani­ma­tion is a fan­tas­tic tool to aide in 2-D ani­ma­tion, fear not, for it will never replace tra­di­tional animation.

15 years later we’ve seen the imme­di­ate clo­sure of Disney’s Florida Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio in 2004 which “put approx­i­mately 250 ani­ma­tors, tech­ni­cians and other per­son­nel out of work.” — a move that many say ended the era of tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion and the rumor that Dis­ney will redo many of their clas­sic films using CGI (or Com­puter Gen­er­ated Imagery).

Like many I’ve been extremely impressed with Pixar’s films, but also feel a bit sad­dened by the fact that tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion is viewed as some­thing arbi­trary and stone aged. To me there are tra­di­tion­ally ani­mated films that impress me more so than computer-animated movies. Put it this way, to this day I’m still moved and in awe of many 2-D ani­mated films (like The Jun­gle Book and Bambi) and mostly because of the flu­id­ity and beauty that res­onates via a few pen­cil strokes.

The secret to Pixar’s suc­cess, at least from what I’ve gath­ered from watch­ing “making-of” fea­turettes and books, is their abil­ity to dig deep into their sub­ject, into the core of their film and its mes­sage and then flesh it out with CGI, some­thing that is lack­ing in other ani­mated films.

Start learn­ing graphic design in Philadel­phia and look for­ward to cre­at­ing the next famous ani­mated char­ac­ter in movies.

Related: The State of Ani­ma­tion Fea­tures by Michael Heilemann

CSS Refresh

March 8, 05 //
10

Two years ago, after read­ing Design­ing with Web Stan­dards by Jef­frey Zeld­man, I made an oath to myself that I would kick my old web devel­op­ment habits and take my Jedi train­ing in CSS-based design.

I can remem­ber the exact moment when the prover­bial light­bulb appeared above my head because it was around the same time my daugh­ter was born. In a short span of time two pin­na­cle moments (albeit with seper­ate mean­ings) changed my per­spec­tive on life; the birth of my daugh­ter and becom­ing a bet­ter web designer.

Chang­ing my Habits

It hap­pened as I was sit­ting there in the hos­pi­tal cafe­te­ria, care­fully read­ing Design­ing with Web Stan­dards while I munched on over­cooked scram­bled eggs. Comb­ing through the text I felt the need to change my habits, dance to a dif­fer­ent drum and work towards bet­ter­ing my skill in web design. Prior to this, I only used Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG edi­tor because I couldn’t get a grasp of the mean­ing of HTML code. To me, if Dreamweaver han­dled the code, there was no rea­son to muck around and poten­tially cause dam­age to the code. It’s amaz­ing how wrong I was.

The most impor­tant step towards becom­ing a good web designer is first learn­ing how var­i­ous tags work in your code. Oth­er­wise there’s no rea­son to even take that plunge let alone con­sider it as a viable career option. I’ve seen sev­eral good design­ers feel the need to rely on WYSIWYG edi­tors rather than under­stand how HTML (or XHTML) func­tions. I know because I was one of them at one point but after invest­ing in a library of web devel­op­ment books I’ve scram­bled out of the hole I had dug myself into.

CSS is a Tricky Beast

After re-learning how to code prop­erly I hit the books as far as edu­cat­ing myself about Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets. I had used CSS pre­vi­ously, in a lim­ited fash­ion, to style text. I remem­ber think­ing it was a huge deal to change the color of a word or sen­tence using inline CSS but at that point I really didn’t see the value in using it for lay­out, nei­ther did I real­ize that it could be used to con­trol an entire lay­out. Cut to a few years later and I’m sur­prised I didn’t catch on ear­lier but just as well since ear­lier browser ver­sions had lim­ited CSS support.

While CSS is an amaz­ing tool it’s also a tricky beast and that’s due to Inter­net Explorer’s poor CSS sup­port. I know many design­ers who’ve given up sup­port­ing IE all together and while that’s a per­sonal and comend­able choice on dif­fer­ent lev­els I feel the need to con­tinue sup­port­ing IE because it’s still used by a major­ity of the Inter­net audi­ence and mostly because it comes pre-installed on most PC systems.

Also, as Molly and I have dis­cussed, design­ers that have tran­si­tioned from print to CSS-based lay­out have dif­fi­cul­ties mainly because of their inabil­ity to make their lay­outs pixel per­fect. Speak­ing from expe­ri­ence, I come from a print back­ground and quite hon­estly using CSS came quite nat­u­rally for me and a lot of this had to do with my atti­tude towards it. Let’s face it, the web and print world are on oppo­site sides of the spec­trum of design. One can eas­ily fire up a copy of Adobe InDe­sign, choose a two or three col­umn tem­plate and using the Shift + Arrow key method align cer­tain com­po­nents to the pixel. CSS, on the other hand, isn’t as easy to manip­u­late and mainly that’s due to browser sup­port and cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions with the tech­nol­ogy. Instead of cre­at­ing a pixel per­fect lay­out you have to be in the mind­set that you’ll get close to align­ing cer­tain aspects the way you want them to, but cer­taintly not perfectly.

The Road Ahead

Even though I have a good work­ing knowl­edge of CSS and apply that knowl­edge on a daily basis I’ve decided to make a per­sonal goal; to refresh my expe­ri­ence with CSS and web devel­op­ment in gen­eral by hit­ting the books and relearn­ing every­thing from the ground up. To do this I’ve added a few notable books to my library and to date my library of web devel­op­ment and CSS books is com­prised of the following:

Wish me luck.

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