Disney + Lord of the Rings =

A friend just sent this my way -- a clever piece of editing work (some of the lip-syncing is quite good), bringing clips from various Disney movies together to the audio track of one of the original Fellowship of the Ring trailers. Enjoy!

Hurricane Irene Timelapse

I meant to post this back when I made it, but it slipped through the cracks. I took this through my window, looking out at the street. The video doesn't come close to conveying just how powerful the winds were, but you can see on the massive bunch of trees just how easily they're being blown around.

This was taken over the course of about 16 and a half minutes; 500 still frames played back at 24 frames per second. Taken with my Nikon D7000 on August 28, 2011, during Hurricane Irene hitting Massachusetts.

Bahá'i eBook Covers Project: Launching Today!

It's been a while since I last posted, as I've been busy working on a number of projects. I'm really excited to share one of them with you today!

The Opportunity

More and more people are downloading Bahá’í texts, to read on a variety of screens -- their computers, e-readers, tablets, smartphones, and more. Project Gutenberg and Bahá’í eBooks Publications are both great, free sources for these texts, as are widely-used eBookstores like Apple’s iBookstore. However, there did not exist a cohesive and unified set of cover art that could be used with these digital copies, that would be freely and easily available to anyone who wanted to use them on their devices. Searching online yielded low-quality photos and scans of print copies, or sets of eBooks that had mis-matched or generic cover art.

The Solution

I wanted to design covers that would satisfy specific needs:

• Consistency: Clearly identifiable as a set, consistent design across all books. 
• Quality: High enough resolution to look good on all smartphone, tablet, or computer screens.
• Readability: Easy to read when full size, as well as small thumbnails lined up on a digital bookshelf.
• Beautiful: While beauty is certainly in the eye of the user, designing with the elegance and sophistication deserved of Bahá’í sacred texts. 
• Accessible: Free to download, openly formatted and easy to add to an existing eBook collection.

You can see the full collection of eBook covers, available for a free download as individual .jpg files, or together in one .zip file, at my newly-revamped website. There are also directions for how to use them, if you're not sure how to add custom covers to your existing eBook files. Feel free to share your feedback, and enjoy!