design

I was recently inspired by Jeffrey Miller's embeddable Advent Wreath widget to try my hand at illustrating and animating an advent wreath in HTML5 with the <canvas> element or by animating an SVG.

My heart was in it for a while, but I ultimately gave up on the project due to the fact that I had already spent a couple hours on it and wasn't happy with my progress...

However, I did end up with a fairly good illustrator/vector wreath and candles (I spent a bit of time trying to get the flames looking just right), and also created a brush to create the actual wreath, making it look somewhat like an evergreen wreath.

I could spend a bit more time making things look a little nicer (everything's relatively flat right now), but I thought I'd just release this artwork for anyone to use and improve. I just ask that if you make something awesome with it, you let me know how you did it and give a link to an example :)

You can download the brush and the wreath graphic using the links at the bottom of this post.

Advent Wreath by Jeff Geerling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.lifeisaprayer.com.

I recently had the first of, I hope, many columns on Catholic online evangelization in the St. Louis Review. I will post the column here for archival purposes, but you can read the column on the Review website as well:

The Digital Continent | Catholics should become leaders in online communications

by Jeff Geerling

The status quo is no longer acceptable.

That was the gist of the two keynote talks during this year's Catholic New Media Celebration in Boston. The Catholic Church needs to become a leader in online communications and social media — and it needs to do so now.

Father Robert Reed, director of CatholicTV, an online and broadcast television network, suggested Catholics practice the craft of media production and web development as a skilled craftsman would fabricate a chalice: As the craftsman labors over every detail and creates a work of art, which leads the priest and those present at Mass to ponder the mysterious and divine Presence within, so should we communicate and design our websites so as to allow Christ's love and beauty shine.

There must be a professionalism to our craft. We cannot settle for anything less than the best, most useful, functional and interactive websites and service on the Internet.

There is no reason why the Catholic Church should be seen as lagging behind all other areas of the secular world in digital catechesis. After all, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed, in his Message for the 43rd World Communications Day, that we must all "take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this 'digital continent.'"

Lino Rulli, a Catholic radio broadcaster, suggested that every Catholic involved in online communications and "new media" should be humbly asking, "Are you actually good at what you do?"

Instead of doing something only because we like it, we should consider doing something at which we're adept. Rulli said, "Don't just do something — do it well." We must realize that the work of podcasting, blogging and social publishing is an art that requires skill and hard work.

Rulli concluded his keynote with the statement, "Make it real, and make it relatable." New forms of communication, such as Facebook and Twitter, are more personal than traditional forms. They are more relational, and we should strive to make our evangelization efforts as good online as we do in interpersonal communication. We must remember that the receiver of our message is an individual human person, and we must always speak, write and relate with truth and charity.

If we want to proclaim the Gospel message of Jesus Christ on the Internet, we must hone our skills, labor over our medium and our message, relate to our message's recipient and pray for a renewed passion and love for Christ.

As the Director of Web Development in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, I hope to assist the many agencies and organizations in the archdiocese in their online communications and evangelization efforts. I welcome your input. Please feel free to send me an e-mail or collaborate with me on the Open Source Catholic Website.

You can read a full summary of the Catholic New Media Conference.

Geerling is the Director of Web Development for the Archdiocese. Contact him at (314) 792-7610 or jeffgeerling@archstl.org.

Today Google announced they'd help advance web typography by hosting open-sourced fonts on their CDN, and by giving the code to easily embed fonts on websites on a new website, the Google Font Directory.

It was amazingly simple: just copy the <link> code and paste it in your template's header, then set any element on your page to use the Google-provided font(s). I started using OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT, and I like the look (except for the lower-case y, which seems to be cut off).

(The code simply adds an @font-face declaration via a Google-hosted CSS file... I wonder if it's legit to self-host the CSS and font file; I haven't read through the terms and conditions yet).

I'm thinking of using this library for a few other projects on which I'm working. Much easier than Typekit, and it doesn't require any javascript or flash overhead, like alternatives such as Cufon and sIFR do.

Creighton model NFP students will recognize the dancing baby above. I am starting work on a project related to NFP, and I was in need of the image. So, being handy in Illustrator, I snapped a shot of my fiancée's chart, zoomed in on one of the dancing baby stickers, and hand-traced the lines in Illustrator.

I might clean it up a little more sometime, but for now, this will do. After a second glance, it almost looks like a cage-fighting baby. Hmm...

While I was attending Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, a few brother seminarians and I had a long run of Monopoly tournaments, and we became quite adept at the game. Of course, my winning strategy was to always give up any and all properties to get Boardwalk and Park Place, buy a hotel, and hope someone hit the hotel before I went bankrupt...

I created this vector file (below) in Illustrator after many hours of path-tracing original Monopoly board art, my own hand-drawn designs, and some clipart. I was intending to print it on some cardstock and mold some actual pieces (like a biretta, a Liturgy of the Hours book, a pipe organ, etc.) to play the game, but never got around to that part before leaving.

(Click image to view larger).

So... I have had this file sitting on my desktop for over a year, and I thought it'd be best to simply share it. If someone wants, I can GPL the vector file so someone else can make a custom monopoly-like game without having to go through the Monopoly site and pay a ton of money.

[Edit: I am releasing my work (see attached Illustrator file below) free of charge, under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license. Please do with it what you will, but be sure to link back to my site or give me a shout out when you use it!]

Click to download: Seminopoly (Monopoly-like game board) - Illustrator Vector File
(you can also download the Community Chest artwork in a separate file, below...)

Seminopoly by Jeff Geerling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.lifeisaprayer.com.