So in order to give myself a break from seeing the guy with the old outboard motor I decided just to park the site under Chris Pearson’s fabulous Cutline theme, just until I get a chance to redesign.

It’s going to be another Cottage-inspired design, once I get around to it. I’m just trying to collect some inspiration about how to have a site that really suggests Old Muskoka. The last one was a reference to the old National Geographic magazines that are found at every summer place, complete with ads for Evinrudes.

But I need some fresh Cottage elements. Wooden boats, sunsets from the dock and … what else? What are some of the iconic elements that really define the cottage experience?

Leave your suggestions in the comments!

Very cool. 

A Texas photographer recently shot a series of stills that were inspired by Rockwell’s work. He recreated that famous painting, but with a subtle modern touch. See the rest of his work at his site: randalford.com and read about the project. Brilliant.

Below is a series showing Rockwell’s photo that he used to create his painting; the painting “The Tattooist”; and Randal Ford’s Inspired version…

I rationalize that I’m looking primarily for business, productivity and design articles, but invariably I trip over things that either provoke or augment conversations that I have offline among my flesh-and-blood confreres.

And so it goes that today I’m going to feature a couple of links that I’ve recently seen. I found them both this morning, and for some reason they seem related, although distantly.

One is Jeffery Zeldman’s amazing essay Understanding Web Design—in part about how web design is for the most part misunderstood. He provides a thesis that it bears as much or more in common with architecture and typography than graphic design and illustration. And Kevin Cornell’s illustration at the top say it better than my words ever could.

And the other is New York photographer Joseph O. Holmes inspired images of silhouettes of people viewing displays at the Museum of Natural History. The body language tells us so much about how they understand what they are seeing. The images themselves are references to the act of using the architecture of the Museum to view it’s content. They are defining it, and through the photographer’s work, in turn becoming a part of it. It’s what Zeldman posits that web sites are and can be and should be. And it is absolutely beautiful.

The thread is tenuous but the connective, somehow, is there, at least for me. That thread is why I am attracted to web design. That thread contains the work I want to do.

Apologies to all those looking for more uncredited photos of bears crapping in the woods. I’ll post more like that in the very near future. Promise.

Nobody really knows about the dynamics of the web as a professional experience – thus spake the incomparable Zeldman who is, for my secular friends, kind of the grand-daddy of the whole web standards movement. (I can say that; he’s slightly older than I am.)

Two years ago, when I mentioned to my partner Rob at our traditional-media-corporate-communications-experiment Wild Imaginations Inc., he greeted it with something just this side of indifference. It wasn’t something that either of us knew anything about. He was happy that I was happy, but that’s about it.

But now we’re growing it. It’s bearing fruit—and it is absolutely compelling. I can’t remember being more excited about a prospect. It’s exhilarating, even though most of the people that I end up working shoulder to shoulder with are a little over twelve and seemingly 100-fold smarter than I am. Scary.

So that’s why this survey is important. And if you’re a web professional: fill it out.

As usual, what began as a chance to test some code based on Andy Clarke’s seminal Transcending CSS for a client’s Shopping Cart site turned into a complete overhaul of the blog.

So for those of you so inclined, it is now using xhtml strict, CSS positioning for layout (oy, that was fun – but I think I’ve got it down…) and a bunch of unfinished styling and pages.

For those of you not in the new media trade: it’s nothing more than a tip of the hat to the outboard motor ads in the old National Geographics that lie in cardboard boxes in the basement.

A trip to the boat show got me thinking about how the blog might be a way to make even this mild winter pass a little more quickly – and the cottage dreamer was born.