Website design and Book design

-

It's July 18th and two important creative projects are coming down the pike.  I'm designing a website for a dental laboratory in Chicago that should be simple and elegant.  It's due this Wednesday night.  And I'm working with Createspace on finalizing the book cover for my first novel due out in August!  Above is one draft of the dental website.  I'm very happy with it as is the client so far.  Seeing all the lab's great photos of bright white teeth brought to mind for me white tulips.  And so a concept was born.

And as for the book covers -- there are some good ones to choose from.  From top to bottom, I call them:  Escalator Boy, Handstand Man, and Falling Man.  The above three are my amateurish renderings.  The real designers will make them look more book store ready.  Handstand is a late addition into the face and a rising favorite.  I do like the words "a novel" on my cover so that people know what it is.

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are always appreciated! Thank you.

Popular posts from this blog

MOVIE REVIEW OF ANOMALISA: An Edward Hopper Painting Come to Life

-
Image
Charlie Kaufman's film ANOMALISA is the movie that moved and thrilled me the most this year. It's not for everyone, but it was for me. Kaufman gives us trippy, amazing movies like ETERNAL SUNSHINE, and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. And this movie is just as trippy and amazing but not in his usual way. Eternal Sunshine threw us into sci-fi territory with a machine that could erase painful memories, and the visuals were a beautiful nightmare. Malkovich gave us John M in a red dress on a p iano, John M in a hallucination of multiple Malkoviches. But ANOMALISA felt different to me. What was trippy was the presentation (stop motion puppets) but for a change the content was surprisingly naturalistic and realistic (middle aged man has identity crisis en route to giving a motivational speech). But it's in the lovely, cryptic dialog, the surrealism appears. Kind of like in a Haruki Murakami novel where simple reality starts taking tiny, menacing, magical U-turns.  It also rem
Read more

How Big Is The Circle of Your Friends?

-
Image
Do you ever think about the circles of your friends? How the circles shrink and grow and morph over time? I do.  How consciously do you work to expand your those ever-important circles? So I was talking to a Luther, a male friend, about how I find myself in mid-life with mostly female friends.  I'm a gay man. Nothing wrong with any of that. They're great friends. And many of my female friends are single women in the arts -- so we have things in common.   But I used to have a larger collection of male friends. Many of them were gay. What happened?  Well, the AIDS crisis took some of those who should rightfully be living beside me today. So there's that. Some others found life partners. And of course any friendship can end with time. Someone moves away. Someone stops keeping the ball rolling on their end. Arguments happen that can't be resolved. And that special chemistry between friends can one day disappear for no reason. You are no longer necessary to each
Read more

My entry to the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards

-
Image
It's Monday, Jan 28. I am part of a large blogging event called the "Re-Introduce Myself" Blogfest where I get to introduce myself to new audiences. My name is Dwight Okita. I live in Chicago where I design websites and work at a nonprofit for the visually impaired. I just finished writing my second novel THE HOPE STORE and I've entered it in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. You can learn more about the contest at www.amazon.com/abna Below is the pitch for my book: "We don't just instill hope. We install it."  That's the slogan for the first store in the world to sell hope over the counter.   Luke Nagano goes to sleep each night dreaming about hope and how to make more of it, ever since he lost his sister. He and his partner prepare the store for its grand opening. As media interest grows, an activist group called the Natural Hopers emerges with the mission to warn the public about the dangers of synthetically created
Read more