gus torres: illustration - animation - design

I can’t believe 2003 is nearing its end. I haven’t done 75% of my To Do list yet and now I need to roll it over. This wouldn’t be so bad but it now includes a ton of new things from 2003 as well. Number one on the list is getting the garage back in shape. Maybe that’s number two, getting myself back in shape would be number one.

Business has gone very well; thanks, as always, to my fantastic clients. In 2004, I’ll continue striving to do the best work I can for them. I also plan to expand this site to include my illustration, animation and character design work in hopes of more work in this area as well.

I have so much to look forward to in 2004, balancing quality time with my family and friends, pursuing my desire to teach, and continuing my work in illustration and interactive design.

Happy New Year!

Just wanted to wish you all happy non-denominational holidays. And since the holidays are for giving, I give to you my newest Flash-based game “Polar Golf”. This game — designed in conjunction with rasterhaus interactive and some simple yet elegant golf code donated by one Jeff Gibson (FlashKit) — utilizes some Flash MX code, so you’ll need Macromedia’s latest plug-in.

Polar Golf has you play (as a polar bear named, “Solomon Bruin”) 9 holes of miniature golf in a polar environment complete with the appropriate arctic hazards! If you are not using JavaScript or in some cases with pop-ups turned off, the window won’t open. In that case, use this link instead.

Enjoy!

When I originally designed gustorres.com, I had planned on creating the site like it’s sister site, rasterhaus.com and like the myriad of other sites I design and hand-code. It’s the way I’ve done it (more or less) since I started building sites in 1995. You mockup in Photoshop. You get client approval. You slice up everything from Photoshop and try to reassemble the pieces using HTML circa 1998. This usually means nested tables and little invisible spacer gifs. I’ve gotten to a point where the work I do renders predictably across the full spectrum of browsers, from IE/Netscape 4 to Safari/Mozilla 1.0.

But something happened… Or more like someone. Jeffrey Zeldman.

I picked up his book, “Designing for Web Standards“. Half the book tells me why I need to come out of the dark ages of coding bloated HTML. The other half tells me how to make the transition of separating content (XHTML) from presentation (CSS). The concept is so thoughtful and intriguing that I find myself getting hooked in. I start seeing what I could have changed in old projects (not a road to go down). I begin to get excited again; the same excitement I felt when I created my first multimedia project using MacroMind Director (not a typo), my first animation using FutureSplash Animator, (now Flash), and my first web pages for the planned company intranet in 1994 (some of us were toying with Mosaic, others with Netscape 1).

I’m no stranger to CSS. I tried embracing it back in the late 1990’s and (along with many others) deemed it “not ready for prime time”. But now it’s different. This is the Web like it should be. Flexible and creative yet still structured and organized for its original intent as a medium for delivering information.

I decided to use what I’ve learned in Jeffrey’s book along with his contemporaries and proponents like Eric Meyer to create gustorres.com. Building the site didn’t come easy at first. Years of bad habits kept poking up as possible solutions, but I’d squelch them before things got too bad. The XHTML conversion was fairly simple, just a few modifications to the way I wrote in HTML. The CSS itself proved (and still does) to be one “squirrelly” beast. Not everyone supports the same aspects of CSS. IE5 doesn’t always render it the same as IE6 on Windows. But the good outweighs the bad on such a wide margin that it’s been worth the effort to learn its intricacies.

I still have plenty to learn about this easier way to develop web sites and I plan to use my own site as the playground. You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to play.

Thanks a lot, Mr. Zeldman.

Back in mid-2002 I made the decision to split my creative passions into two distinct camps. There would be rasterhaus interactive - which would allow me to continue working within the new media environment I’ve worked in since 1989 - and gustorres.com which would become my outlet for my work as an illustrator, cartoonist and animator.

For the last year since I launched rasterhaus, gustorres.com has languished with its hideous pea green background and tired logo (hideous and tired to me anyway) serving as simply a gateway for my students to download their assignments. It was long overdue for an update. Heck, even Google lists the site as “Gus Torres Illustration (coming soon, no really!)”. Check it out here before it (hopefully) goes away.

Well, as you can see here, between teaching, client work, and life day-today, I’ve finally completed - and most importantly, posted - the new gustorres.com. What you’re seeing currently will grow and encompass more of my areas of interest. But for now I hope you enjoy what I’ve put together as much as I have enjoyed putting it together.