Five (plus) years later “Big Kids/Little Kids” is back in a newly formed digital edition. All the good stuff from the print original plus new chapters about the 5 city art show tour and an updated “Where are they now” section. The eBook is available on the Apple iBookstore in 32 countries.

If you missed the print edition:

Big Kids/Little Kids chronicles the first 8 years of the newly emerging contemporary art movement in Philadelphia. It features artists from SPACE1026, 1Pixel, 222gallery and Spector (the galleries that have supported this energy) and artists from outside of Philly who have shown in these spaces by shaping and being influenced by this scene. The book showcases the artwork and asks some simple questions of each artist. John Freeborn, one of the founders of SPACE1026, tells the story through his viewpoint, guiding you through the multi-layered connections that have helped fuel a new generation of artists from the city of brotherly love.

Artist list:

In order of appearance – Ben Woodward, John Freeborn, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Jeff Wiesner, Adam Wallacavge, Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, Leif Goldberg, Brian Ralph, Jim Drain, Shelter Serra, Max Lawrence, Clare Rojas, Isaac Lin, Jesse Goldstein, Shepard Fairey, Ed Templeton, Rebecca Westcott, Rich Jacobs, Andrew Kuo, Dan Murphy, Niel Rassmussen, Jordin Isip, Amy S. Kauffman, Tim Lewis, Ryan Wallace, Tom Maher, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Shelley Spector, Jim Houser, Thom Lessner, Eric McDade, Phil Otto, Todd St. John, Dave Delaney, Andy Cruz, and Ryan McGinness.

Here’s the problem. I’m working on a theme where I needed the last post thumb to be a image, that linked to the next page of posts. Normally you have a simple text link at the bottom, but we wanted an image instead. So, problem number 1 was replacing the 20th post thumb with an image.

This is an easy problem, right? I thought so. I looked into the code on index.php of this theme. GridPortfolio is the name of this theme, and it’s really easy to tweak and the theme is free. What I found was a complex little “while” statement that writes the news posts into the page. You tell it how many posts and how many per row–it does the rest. I’d already adjusted it for 5 rows with 4 per row. I talked to my buddy Adam Bert and he gave me some hints on how to target that last post. After fighting for a while, I was able to replace the last post with my new image–this created a new problem. What happens to that last post. Post number 20 just goes away, never to be seen again. This wasn’t the right way.

Another problem was how to replace the text link with an image. This seemed simple, but wasn’t. After the jump, there’s a full explanation of how I got that part to work.

WordPress has a built in solution for this. It creates simple text links for Next and Previous posts. But, it doesn’t do one important thing – it doesn’t actually evaluate when these should show up. Some code gets written either way. There are plugins with enhance WordPress’ next and previous abilities, but these were little more than shortcuts for text alterations–not the overhaul that I was seeking. I did find an example of someone who had a related issue with single post pages and the solution came into focus.

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

I took what he had done for single post pages and rewrote it for the index.php. Here’s what the standard WordPress Next/Previous block of code looks like…

<div><?php previous_post_link( '%link', '<span>' . _x( '←', 'Previous post link', 'twentyten' ) . '</span> %title' ); ?></div>
<div><?php next_post_link( '%link', '%title <span>' . _x( '→', 'Next post link', 'twentyten' ) . '</span>' ); ?></div>

Mr. Roger Johansen from 456 Barea St. did this…

<ul> <?php if (get_adjacent_post(false, '', true)): // if there are older posts ?>
<li>Previous post: <?php previous_post_link('%link'); ?></li>
<?php endif; ?> <?php if (get_adjacent_post(false, '', false)): // if there are newer posts ?>
<li>Next post: <?php next_post_link('%link'); ?></li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>

So, I took a few simple steps and about 25 rewrites to get to this…

<ul> <?php if (get_previous_posts_link(false, '', true)): // if there are older posts ?>
<li>Previous post: <?php previous_posts_link('Previous'); ?></li>
<?php endif; ?> <?php if (get_next_posts_link(false, '', false)): // if there are newer posts ?>
<li>Next post: <?php next_posts_link('Next'); ?></li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>

What is happening here? Instead of looking for a next or previous post, I’m looking for the “previous_posts_links” and the same goes for the “next_posts_links”. After that, I had to get the correct linking  and change the text to match my preferred naming. Hopefully, this can help someone else with a similar issue.

Replacing the “next” link with an image

The only way to get an image into this area was to create a “background-image” with CSS. I tried a slew of ways of inserting the image into the PHP file and nothing worked for me. I found this post, “Previous and Next Links as Rollovers” which got me started. I found this tutorial the easiest guide for doing the CSS rollover, “CSS Only Single Image Fast Rollover“.

Here’s how it works.

Both the next and previous link are build inside of a div called “nav_controller”. Inside of that each one is a list item (li) given a class label, “left” and “right”. The right one is the “next” link, so that’s the one that I’m aiming for. The first step was to get the image into this list object.

.nav_container .right {
width:240px;
height:250px;
background:url(image to replace the last post thumb);
text-indent:-5000px;
}

You have to set the with and height of the container. The background URL is for the image. Text-indent moves the text link out of the way, so the image is all by itself. There's more...

.nav_container .right a {
width:240px;
height:250px;
display:block;
}

This one targets the same block, but is specific to the fact that this is a link. “Display:block” tells the page to make the whole area a link.

Replacing the 20th post with something else

This was the code that I altered to make the page with 5 rows and 4 columns. This is a lot of stuff. Hold on.

<?php
$args = array(
'category_name' => 'featured small',
'post_type' => 'post',
'posts_per_page' => 19,
'pages' => ( get_query_var('paged') ? get_query_var('paged') : 1),
);
query_posts($args);
$x = 0;

while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php if ($x == 0) { ?>
<div class=”featured_box first”>

<?php } elseif ($x == 3) { ?>
<div class=”featured_box last”>

<?php } else { ?>
<div>

<?php } ?>
<a href=”<?php the permalink(); ?>”class”img_hover_trans”><?php the_post_thumbnail(‘featured_small’); ?></a>

</div><!–//featured_box–>

<?php if($x == 3) {$x=-1; ?>
<div class=”clear”></div>
<?php } ?>

<?php $x++ ?>

<?php endwhile: ?>

What does all this mean? This while start by creating some variables, the lines with the $ are variables. So early on it was easy to change the “posts_per_page” to 19, from 12 in the original theme. The other two things I changed were the 3′s – they were originally 2′s–since the theme was set up as 3 columns at first. The counting starts with 0, so 3 means (0, 1, 2, 3) 4 columns. I didn’t have to do anything, aside from the previously mentioned 19 to add more row, it did that on its own. So, to make it look for the 20th post and replace it I added the code in red.

<?php
$args = array(
'category_name' => 'featured small',
'post_type' => 'post',
'posts_per_page' => 19,
'pages' => ( get_query_var('paged') ? get_query_var('paged') : 1),
);
query_posts($args);
$x = 0;
$y = 0;

while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php if ($x == 0) { ?>
<div class=”featured_box first”>

<?php } elseif($y == 19) { ?>
<div class="featured_box last">
<a href="YOUR LINK"><img src="YOUR IMAGE" /></a>

<?php } elseif ($x == 3) { ?>
<div class="featued_box last>

<?php } else { ?>
<div class=”featured_box”>

<?php } ?>
<a href=”<?php the permalink(); ?>”class”img_hover_trans”><?php the_post_thumbnail(‘featured_small’); ?></a>

</div><!–//featured_box–>

<?php if($x == 3) {$x=-1; ?>
<div class=”clear”></div>
<?php } ?>

<?php $x++ ?>
<?php $y++ ?>

<?php endwhile: ?>

I had to add a second variable, $y. This one counts the posts and when that 20th post comes up, it write that div with my image into the page. The same CCS adjusts the styling. Again, this didn’t work because it essentially deletes the 20th post.

My first eBook is now available on the Apple bookstore. This digital zine is 100 pages long with work from 20 artists and is my first forray into this new form of publishing. Check out some samples below. Huge thanks to everyone who participated and if the world buys a few copies, then I’ll do more. It’s just a buck, spread the word.

Artwork by (in order of appearance) Hershel Baltrotsky, Sonia Yoon, Clint Woodside, Ryan Wallace, Rich Jacobs, Jim Houser, Kendrick Shackleford, Tom Maher, Ben Horton, Eric McDade, Chris Sembrot, Joseph Hart, Matt Sohl, Dave Delaney, Sam Croswell, Carlos Miaco, Matt Curtius, Amy S. Kauffman and Jordin Isip.

UK iBookstore –>    Spain iBookstore –>

Australia iBookstore –>    Canada iBookstore –>

France iBookstore –>    Germany iBookstore –>

Here are some additional images, if you’d like to help promote this project…

Random #10 - Cover

Random #10 - Cover on iPad

Random #10 - John Freeborn & Rich Jacobs

Random #10 - Ben Horton & Eric McDade

Random #10 - Jim Houser

This was from 2008-2009. That’s my best guess at least. Grey paint marker on a random piece of cardboard.

It seems like yesterday, but this was almost a year ago, in August, 2010. This video was shot at the opening of the Girl x (Red) show in LA. My buddy Hershel was in the show and it was well worth the drive from San Diego to LA. This video was originally made for Living Proof Mag along with photos of the show.

The process of moving forces you to do a lot of things which aren’t so fun. Two things I do like doing are getting rid of things I don’t use and stumbling on things that I made in the past. I wrote about this once before and oddly, this drawing is from the same studio project. This is another one of these exploratory drawings, in some strange search for a way to combine mixed-use space inside one building. This one even has a key. Blue = Offices, Red = Circulation, Yellow = Public and White = Labs. If I remember correct, this was for an combination office/library/research facility. Below are some detail shots of the same drawing.

I created this video, with a lot of help from Drew Dezort for Roots, Culture Connect. The plan is to create a series of these. Who’s up next?

2010 had a rough start. You may or my not remember that in the end of 2009 I lost my job. This situation created great difficulty in our household. We managed to get by with much cutting back, help from family and a willingness to wear many, many layers. Amy made lots of amazing food to ease the pain (see photos). In February I landed a temp job at the Bank of America and the timing couldn’t have been better. Bills needed to get paid. The next few months were pretty straight forward–get back on track. In June, I noticed an interesting job online and before I knew it I was offered an amazing job in California for Black Box Distribution. This was good news but life is not simple–lots of logistics are involved in moving across the country. We put our house up for sale (in the worst housing market). Amy is doing her best to maintain and I’m doing my best to do good work and balance that with home. I keep hoping that things will change for the better and some sanity will return to our lives.

One fine morning as I rolled into my cube, my neighbor asked, “How you doing?” My answer, channeling my best Allen Iverson, “Living every day like it’s my last!” For some reason this quote, in this context made me laugh all day long. This brought about my first ironic motivational quote poster. I was working in the kind of office that likes to put motivational quotes on the wall in gold letters, so this wink and nod to that was a huge bonus. In my downtime I created the “Live Every Day Like It’s Your Last” poster.

Once this first one was made the creative flood gates we’re opened. A series of 9 were made and you can download the whole set at the bottom of the post here. Some are famous quotes and others are my own invention. They all will raise your cube status and help you get through the day. Enjoy.

This could be you!!! Download the full set as a PDF here –> John Freeborn’s Motivational Cube Signs.PDF

Or, just grab your favorites as good ole’ JPG below.