About

After graduating high school James migrated from southern New Jersey to the city of Philadelphia. He spent seven glorious years there and after graduating art school for techies, he followed a girl named trouble, and her dreams, to Washington, D.C. But, if you ask James, he'll tell you he's always lived in Philadelphia.
UPDATE: After a short exile in D.C., James is back in Philadelphia... but in his mind, he never left.

So, here's a thing or two. When James isn't riding his fixed-gear, or driving too fast in his mini cooper, he's hanging out at the bike shop talking about mini coopers and bikes. Just kidding. (Sort of.) But, seriously, that's James' thing. When most people see automobiles and bicycles, James sees lines and suggestions, working shapes, networks of images, colors and collaboration. He then takes them home with him, sits down at his Apple G5, and spends an inordinate amount of time building interactive landscapes from these parts. Honestly, this stuff bores the begeebers out of most people, but again, that's James' thing. Cars and bikes, computers and trouble.

About This Site

The current design (version 2) was concocted from an idea that came to me just before I fell asleep one night. Old tattered paper, serif fonts, big margins, lots of white space, snore... Nothing ground breaking or very original, but simple. I wanted the main focus of the site to be the content. Previous incarnations of the site were a bit Flash-y, but for this time around I really wanted to focus on the content and presentation of the content. I also wanted to practice what I've been preaching: standards.

So here's the skinny on the site:

• Designed with Photoshop and Fireworks
• SquidFingers.com for the much-appreciated background pattern
• David Knight for the 1948 Time magazine (tattered paper)
• XHTML markup
• CSS 2.0 layout and presentation
• Georgia for the serif font
• A wee bit of JavaScript for the form validation
• hCard Microformat for the contact information
• Scriptaculous & Lightbox for the fancy AJAX image viewer
• Custom AJAX for the portfolio section
• RSS 2.0 for the feeds
• PHP for the server-side
• MySQL to handle all the content
• Apache mod_rewrite for the clean URL's
• Custom-built content management system
• Hand-coded on the Apple G5
• Hosted by Dreamhost (love those guys)

Questions/comments about the site? Visit the contact section.

Featured Work

The CommuterDirect.com e-commerce system, which grosses over $6 million in annual sales, sells transit tokens, tickets, and passes to commuters in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area. The site is one of the CommuterPage.com family of sites, which is run by Arlington Coun...
View Work »