1999, Travis wearing the special Magik Glasses
2007, Travis now, with newer glasses
I did a bunch of work on my site lately, and I thought it would be cool to give a lil' magik history lesson.
Originally, magikglasses was formed by my coworker and best friend Travis Button and I in July of 1999. We became the new web department for our company and in addition to the sites we designed for work, we were able to obtain a site "for practice and staging". Travis had this sick pair of nerdy yellow plastic sunglasses he used to wear which just cracked me up. We coined the phrase magic glasses and when it came time to name our site, we chose magikglasses. Not wanting to be normal, we spelled magik with a K. Soon we got the hang of what we were doing as far as the work websites were concerned, and staging was something we did less and less of, and playing we did more and more of! Soon magikglasses was ours to use at will, as the company didn't use it anymore.
At first, Trav maintained a few pages and we shared the webspace, but after awhile he went on to bigger and better things and soon magikglasses was overwhelmed with my stuff. I started out doing simple dhtml with GoLive3, animated gifs in photoshop... It was such a big moment for me when I could scan in my watercolors and then animate them. I felt pretty empowered and enthusiastic and made all sorts of strange little animated ditties. Inspired by photomontage, I started working with collage and began animating my artwork. Soon I got turned onto Flash, and it became my new favorite animation tool [and still is!!]. (Click here to see my very lame first flash animation)
The site went thru several revisions. I really wish I had saved screenshots or something so I could go back and see the progress! But computers get replaced, firewire drives die in power outages, and you get so glad to replace that same old page....you don't think to save them. The digital world is quite ethereal!! I can remember a puke green background with a tree and text as menu, and a minimalist version that was really plain and modeled after m/m paris...There was another version that didn't last that long that had crazy artwork that I created specifically for the site.
The logistics on that version drove me nuts and it wasn't too long before I had to come up with something that would last just a bit.
My all time favorite magikglasses design was the one modeled after one of those ads in comic books, you know the ones...with the xray vision glasses, whoopi cushions...The site stayed like that for the longest of all of the designs I suppose.
Until 2005...I think at that point I started refining the design that I still am using today. There were a lot of links to projects on the web, and several people also had their work on my site in various galleries...I really couldn't just delete the old site. So I decided to put in a whole new index, and this time have a link to the "olde site" and leave everything there.
Unfortunately, with this cheater way of re-doing the site, I ended up with really cool projects buried in the site really deep in the old pages. In fact, some of my best animations were done back then! I worried that no one would even find them. So, in this latest revision of magikglasses, I put some organization into use. The best of the best old stuff I brought up front and I removed the link to the Olde Site. Hopefully, this will be a better way of presenting my work.
Here's a run down on what I did in the update...
Totally new:
• Mini Human Artefakts Show
• Human Pixel Project
• The FEAST
Drudged up from the deep:
(no more links! Go to magik and see these!)
• Insektika
• Aviaria
• Peeping Toms Peep Show
• At the Creek 2 Sisters
• Adirondack Gallery
• D3
• Focus
Full Collage Journals:
• Journal of the Birds and Bees
• The Silver Journal
• Scroll Collage
• Composition XX4
• Dragonfleyez
• TRUNK
And I Updated and Annotated the Links List that makes it easier to know what you are going for.
Today, Magikglasses enjoys daily traffic, and over 25,000 people have visited our measly magik world. If you haven't been there in awhile, it's time to make another visit!
2002, me back then with lame glasses
Today, Me taking a complete dork picture of myself in the bathroom at work with the ORIGINAL special Magik Glasses
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