Prologue

This is the first post I think of a blog that could become substantial in my life. Or at least become read by people other then myself. I don’t know what to expect fully, or what the hell Im getting my self into…

But..

I think it beneficial for myself and others in situations like mine to feel that we are not alone in our up stream battle. That dignity and recognition in a field we feel so passionate about, or at least or interested ( or in my case: Entangled)

This will be the telling of my own struggles and inspirations as well as information that through my massive internet trolling, blog reading, and information scrounging I have amassed. The field in question is the wonderful Graphic Design. To be more specific that of primarily Web Design, with the intention of branching into Branding and Print media.

Let my start with some professional background so we can all discover why it is I’m the way I am.

The Beginning

So lets start with some basics. First I’m a left handed, right minded individual. I’m also some what of an autodidact, meaning I learn and store information on many different subjects, and somehow manage to retain them very well. Honestly I think it’s a slight form of autism, or dyslexia, or something of the sort. As soon as I find anything that interests me I engulf everything that I can about that subject… I’m no “good will hunting” but I know a lot, about a lot. But still somehow get killed at jeopardy by my girlfriend…

This also leads to serious problems, as I get bored with subjects very easily and tend to procrastinate about everything. It is a huge personal battle that I think I will defeat only as adulthood continues and I develop the skills to force my mind to do what it needs to do beyond its desires to absorb. Being left handed also tends to allow me to think and process information differently then most people. I was once given this analogy:

A Single Blue M&M is placed into a jar with the rest of the other colors. 2 men are then asked to find the M&M Without breaking the jar.

The first, a right handed man takes the jar and meticulously scans each individual line and row looking for the M&M, moving the jar only when he reaches the bottom… Eventually he finds the M&M.

Then the second man, left handed, is given the same task. He picks up the jar, dumps in out onto the table, spreads the candy around and looks at the image as a whole and instantly finds the blue M&M. Both methods give the same result but the steps are far different.

OK! ENOUGH OF YOUR LEFT HAND BS!!! WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH DESIGN!!!

OK! OK! Well, what this means is I either did homework so fast, or put it off so much that when the street light comes on, and I have 3 hours before I’m supposed to go to bed that I’m doing NOTHING. Sometimes I would read, or play killer old video games… My step-fathers tolerance of this only lasted so long and eventually invoked a confrontation between the computer geek and the 13 year old teenager. As a casual interest of any computer or tech minded person in the 90’s my step-father had been messing with HTML and these concepts. He told me, that if I wasn’t going to be doing homework each night, that I would HAVE to learn something. His tool of choice was HTMLgoodies that he himself was using to learn.

Within 2 days I had learned everything he had learned and beyond. I had started writing code on free hosts and started reading everything that I could. This lead to JavaScript and java.

“But how do I create the cool images?”

In comes photoshop 5.5 and COUNTLESS photoshop tutorials and HOURS upon HOURS of working on projects.

“Well how do they do those cool animations?”

Flash was still version 4, which I started on.. and Then in the middle of my Flash infancy the world got Flash 5 and the mighty Action Script which felt oh so familiar to the JavaScript I had learned the year before.

This lead to CRAZY amounts of amusing designs and movies at a level I would not yet appreciate.

I eventually went with ASP as my first language, then went to PHP as my serverside of choice

I was in High school, in both the Architectural design path as well as seeking honors recognition in ART (An Art background Helps A TON!)

I Lead a club of Draftsman, Designers, 3D teams to many state competitions which we won, or were disqualified because our approach was yet to be understood (IE we turned a local college lab into a 3dsMax render farm to render a movie, with sound, whilst our competitor was still on one machine.)

I was winning awards for design, logo development, technology (IE the use of browsers and PHP to develop a interactions without user direction.. Ajax before HTTPrequest) I designed the schools letterhead, and permanently hid a piece of my self in every letter ever sent from my High School.

I worked freelance with a few different companies, trying to hide my young age so most of my work went unaccredited..

And then suddenly it ALL stopped.

Why? I don’t know. My creative side has gone many other directions over the past 4 years. I did some cool stuff with High end cars, and even learned to build guitars from scratch. Architecture is still my #1 passion, and in the end is what I hope my life ends up with… But alas I don’t have all the answers. I think that when I graduated high school the TV was flooded with ads for technical schools teaching web design. I felt that the pool would only get tainted, and the world was going to move a way that I didn’t want to go creatively.

Now Im 22 years old, and it seems the world pushed the weak aside and stayed on its natural course. Flash is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO strong now its incredible. I wonder if designers that have come in the past few years even remember shockwave. Or for that matter Macromedia for which I was such a fan. The speeds of internet technology have caught up to graphic and content ability. Sites are more complex, larger in size, and far more astonishing. Of course we call it Web 2.0 and I think that this was what invited me back to design. I see a lot of amazing work out there and I think that I may actually have some potential to do some good work. I’m not saying I’ll be groundbreaking or astonishing. Hell I’ll say I’m not even that good in comparison to my peers that have stayed with it when I abandoned the internet. I’ve had no formal training, and this annoys some of my friends who HAVE and have spent A LOT of money to learn things I figured out at 13. But I don’t think this world needs you to learn everything in a classroom. The classroom is the stage and blank document and like every skillful profession it requires seat time to learn.

I’m going to try and teach those that want to learn like I did. Through the world of information that is surrounding us. You can learn as I learn, We can learn together. I find its my peers that I revere most, and take in more from and I suggest the same. Find someone’s work you really admire. Maybe it’s a painter, or Photographer, or a great writer, and talk design, or thought process, or read their books, and their explanations.

BTW I LOVE the comma. Get used to it.

Only through constant emersion will you learn anything.

Don’t stand there holding the jar trying to figure it all out. Pop the top, dive in and nock some things around. In the end there will be a blue M&M that made it all worth it.

I Promise.

-Dennis Smolek

Hell below me, Stars above.

In recent months Vaden and the toadies boys have been getting a lot of extra air time. Perhaps it because they were a underrated band of the mid ninety’s that failed to capture the stature they had locally due to the dying national grunge scene. It seems as the many things rise in fall in popularity and music that even good music is caught in the torrent of duplication and dismissed as another copy of that genre’s pioneering force. Glam Rock was the answer to the 70’s disenfranchisement, whose followers quickly developed the Metal scene in opposition to the flood of copies. Metal stayed underground as pop evolved and became the polar opponent which then again came over populated and commercial. The mix of metal ideology with classic 70’s forms and folk music bore the “Grunge” scene which like all music started in clubs and small national tours to towns like Austin, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Boston, etc that always seem to harbor the underdog of National taste. Soon enough too the world would be overwhelmed with international grunge and rock that would push new listeners to the next new media as grunge became polished and overwhelmed with those that used the format for success. So now we set with even more evolutions of popular music and evolution of the new counter cultures genre de facto from rock, to emo, to 70’s revival, to neo-grunge, to whatever kids at home makes them feel that they are in fact unique and that somewhere someone created music that fit the lifestyle they wanted to live that was different from the rest of the herd.

Sitting on a picnic at Carlos and Charlie’s at 18 years old I had a talk with a fantastic Texan guitarist who at the moment I cant remember his name. It was at the birth of the Burden Brothers. Vaden-Todd Lewis and Taz Bentley’s hellspawn of Texan grunge and Classic rock Mash up the two had created. He was one of 3 guitarist including VTL and Mike from Baboon. Anyway! He said to me, ” I could sit and play like that…”[a new act was ripping into a sweep picking exercise on a electric acoustic with a beat] ” but thats not what gets down to your soul. What really moves someone is deep hitting power full guitar play, from the 70’s to now thats what has made rock last”

And he’s right. In the last decades battle for a stable counter culture Iconic style we have created a hodgepodge of musical styles left over from the different attempts. Rock Radios no longer are able to play the current trend because it is ever evolving in the myspace internet driven culture. instead we are left with new players in a field of stable “good” music. Bands that started in the early 80’s(Chili peppers, Metalica, Toadies) are mixed with those from the 90s and those that break out of the counter pop formula.

This is a 4AM rant… perhaps I’ll polish this turd later…

4:23AM -Round Rock TX broke and philosophical

It seems to me that the only time anyone either thinks about the world or actually attempts to read what other people think, is when we are at points beyond the realm of reason. Then later we string it all together, or announce our findings when we get back on our feet. Who would listen to us otherwise?

I’m dead broke, my truck broke and I borrowed money to fix it so I could use all of my gas to drive 200 miles at 5AM to get back home to make a morning shift. Only to lose my job after 20 minutes in the building. I went home, watched the price is right, and took a nap.

After this excursion I sat alone and thought about everything in my life, and what the next step is…

but I wont tell anyone now, who would listen to me.. I’ll wait until I get on my feet, make a witty observation and everyone will be amazed…

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
KV —Player Piano, 1952