virtual housekeeping

yuck, you know when you have those days where it flies by and you wonder if you actually accomplished anything? i'm having those, two days in a row, too--argh!

i've been trying to be good about getting my life in order: clearing my office area of junk and stupid piles of papers, throwing away old magazines, putting all my receipts in order, etc. the most frustrating thing was yesterday, where I spent like, 10 hours trying to redesign my art website so it was more organized with "categories" of work as opposed to a giant dumping ground of random projects. As it is right now, as soon as I document something, it just goes to the top of the list of things to click, and now I have, like, over 30 projects that seem to lack a meta-cohesion or something. Anyhow, 10 hours was wasted because in the end i don't think I'm going to use the design I tried to come up with because it's not as streamlined as I would like. Below is the new homepage for the site, but I haven't followed through with changing the other pages into a similar style yet:



Today i ran errands: picked up slide duplicates downtown, picked up packages at the post office, bought stamps, deposited checks into bank, went to office supply store to buy organizational stuff like file folders, etc. etc. etc.

The biggest thing today is that I finally finished working on a 120-page book I designed as a portfolio of my projects, after slaving away at it for days now. It's like a "retrospective" catalog of sorts...I mean, if no one else is gonna publish it (like my galleries? hello?), I might as well, eh? It's part vanity, part trying to be my own good career manager. It's a full-color perfect-bound 9" x 6" book that will be printed by lulu.com, which is an amazing online self-publisher: you upload your designed files (in my case, done in Quark and turned into PDFs) and get back fully printed professional-looking books! Really! Way! I did a test one that was 8 1/2" x 11" with color images and it looked amazing--since the test was only 36 pages, it cost me less than $10. The 120-page one will be about $21.00 each to produce, but it's worth it as a promotional tool.

This is a mock-up of the cover, which wraps around the front and back and shows the spine text:



It should take a little over a week for the sample book to arrive. If it all looks good I can go ahead and order more and start sending them out to all those special people who have power in the art world and who I need to start getting under the radar of ;p oh, how i hate the uber-promotionality of it all. it has absolutely *nothing* to do with the actual making of the work but winds up taking almost as much (if not more!) time...