Get ready to start hearing a lot about this exciting new company! For the past couple months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the excellent team at StarStyle.com (owned by Entertainment Media Works, LLC) on some very interesting new offerings that should be launching sooner rather than later. I certainly don’t want to give away the surprise, but with a “team that includes the ex-chairman of CBS, the founder of AOL, the ex-CEO of Bloomingdales, and amongst others a Brit, a Brazilian and some guy from Kentucky”, they must be up to something big.

Expect to see some of my new design work appearing soon on their site and other projects across the web.

After a long and (completely unrelated) vacation in Germany and the Czech Republic, I had the pleasure of working on a promotional DVD authoring project for Lufthansa Airlines through a long, long relationship with the great people at Catch 24 Advertising & Design. A welcome break from the many internet based undertakings, this project consisted of a short 14 second introductory animation (which may find its way into the portfolio section later for viewing) built in Apple’s Motion 2.0 product. Then some supplied video assets were added to the mix with the authoring being done in Apple’s amazingly intuitive DVD Studio Pro 4 application.

The end product was just what Lufthansa needed to communicate their superior luxury services to their highest priority, first class customers… And possibly the beginning of more Lufthansa work coming this way via Catch 24.

After only about 6 months of using its own proprietary MySQL/PHP system for posting and displaying news items, the news section of the xhtml/CSS version of this site has made the switch over to using the amazing, open source WordPress 2.0 “semantic personal publishing platform” and it’s been an immensly pleasant process.

It’s not so much a move due to the previous system not working, but rather was motivated by the ease and extensibility of WordPress. With all the client work to do on a daily basis, making improvements to this site can often take a distant back seat, so this change should speed things up a bit keeping the content fresh and timely.

Of course, it’s a work in progress and there are bound to be some bugs here and there, but hopefully those can be squashed sooner rather than later.