Nato Tuke is a 20 year old photographer/writer who currently resides in Los Angeles, California. I’d like to share Nato’s photography with everyone because her photographs tell amazing stories of travel, beauty, and the hustle and bustle of every day life. Even though Nato is young, she is very accomplished in her field and has had her photography published in 5+ magazines and will be interning with National Geographic photographer, David Doublet at the end of 2009. Nato took some time to answer a few questions for me so we could see deeper into the life of a photographer. Nato posts new photography on her blog for anyone interested in seeing what she is recently snapping photos of.

Photography is a field that most designers become interested in, but with our busy schedules and client deadlines it becomes difficult to find time to grow our photography skills. So what better way to learn more about photography than from a professional photographer?

Introduce yourself!

Hello. I am Nato Tuke. I am a photographer of all things from travel, fashion, h20. Life is my canvas!

What are you working with?

I work with a Canon 5D and Canon 5D Mark II , Strobes, Aquatica H2O housing, Sea+Sea strobes for the housing, and a MacBook Pro computer

Do you have a favorite thing to photograph?

My favorite thing to photograph is the unexpected. That’s when you’re photographing or you’re about to photograph and then the unexpected occurs and you get this incredible shot. Example, I just encountered my first sea lion on one of my dives in California but was disappointed because I had a macro lens on which disabled me from photographing the very enthusiastic, posing seal. So I ascended to the surface and heard splashes in the distance, so i got my camera ready and hoped that the sea lion would surface far enough for me to photograph it with my macro and pose long enough for me to focus…the chances were close to nothing, but then the unexpected occurred and I got the shot, with it staring at me. That’s the unexpected.

Where do you find inspiration?

I thought that I got my inspiration from magazines, but then realized some time ago that a few of my best photographs came  before I studied magazines and it got me thinking. It’s hard to explain but ever since I can remember, I live my life by letting my emotions (good or bad) affect the way my atmosphere looks and feels to me. If I’m sad for example: I could be sitting sitting against a tree and simply notice the strong shadow it’s casting, but I could be happy sitting underneath the same tree and only be noticing the sun’s bursting beams against the tree, creating those shadows instead. So, when I go to create an image I really tap into my own past to make an emotional image.

Do you do all of your own photo touch-up, or do you let a designer handle that aspect of the job?

Yes, I do my own. Which makes me feel like I have a lot of learning still to do. (though it never stops)

You live in LA, how can someone go about contacting you for a shoot?

Mainly email. But I have had people just call me up from my number on my website. Either are fine, but email is always a safe bet.

Click to view this one large:

I had the pleasure of designing Nato’s business cards and she took them underwater:

Web standards are a hot topic when it comes to the web design/development community, and a big part of web standards is having a flawless website consisting of no XHTML errors. It is very rewarding to get the green light from W3C verifying that your website is error free.

With so many considerations and requirements a web site must live up to, the last thing any designer or developer needs is more confusion. User capabilities, browser capabilities, and the headache IE causes are enough to worry about when juggling multiple web projects, right? Recently, web designer Nick Hand has created a solution to simplify a web designer/developer’s workflow. I sat down with Nick to talk about his new web project ‘StayValid,’ which is a web application used to manage the validation of all your web projects from one central location.

Enlighten us by sharing a little about yourself.
Well, I grew up in Palmer, Alaska, and wouldn’t trade that for the world. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Digital Arts and Design from Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida – graduated at the top of my class in June 2007, and had a job waiting for me back home in Alaska. I’ve been working as a Sr. Web Designer in Anchorage ever since. No I don’t live in an igloo, yes we have cars and electricity (obviously), no I don’t eat whale blubber, and yes I know Sarah Palin.

How did StayValid come about?
I’ve become somewhat of an advocate for valid and semantic code over the last couple years. The realization of just how much time and money is spent on making corrections for inferior browsers just blew me away.

After the many facepalms, tears, fits of rage, and more tears, I began to realize the problem wasn’t so much the browser’s fault – but the fact that we as web developers haven’t pushed strongly enough for a consistent set of standards to make our lives easier. How could we possibly expect Microsoft products to behave anything like other browsers without some set rules of how certain behaviors are rendered?

Since this realization, I began spending a decent amount of time running pages through the W3C validator. This can be time consuming in itself, when running page after page, at least for the core pages of your site. It just seemed like there should be an easier way to manage the validation of your entire site, and for that matter, multiple sites. Alas, the concept of StayValid was born.

How does StayValid work exactly?
The functionality of StayValid is a very simple premise. Essentially what you’re doing with our service is creating a hub for you to store and access all your validation scans in one place, so you can manage them with an easy-to-use interface to drastically simplify the process of making your sites validate.

For example, if you are a freelance web designer, or even a small studio that makes a new site every week, you can add each site subscription to your StayValid Dashboard, it is immediately scanned and your validation results are directly accessible on a per-page basis under that domain.

Making your site validate can be time consuming, and you may not have time to get it completed in one sitting. No worries, you can just visit StayValid at anytime, log in to your Dashboard, and your site subscriptions are waiting for you to continue reviewing errors. No need to scan your site again or scroll through endless unorganized code outputs that generally are the result of current online validators. StayValid has each page’s output neatly organized by URL. You can even choose to hide valid pages so they are out of your way. There’s a nifty new feature that allows you to scan an individual page directly from the error details view, so you don’t have to rescan your entire site just to recheck validation of one page!

Can you give us a briefing of your design process for this project?
My first thoughts for StayValid were mostly functionality-based, which lead me to trying to find if there was a service that provided what I was wanting to create with StayValid. As I searched – and came up empty handed – I found the sites that provided ANY validation functionality were painfully drab and unattractive.

Not only did this reflect poorly on the use of the sites’ functionality, it seemed to create a sort of ‘old fashioned’ feel to the whole process of validating. I wanted site validation to seem current, modern, and part of the future of web design and development – which I feel it is.

So I wanted the core of StayValid to be productive and stay focused to the goal, but I also am hoping to make a bit of an impression to show the ability to put a beautiful face on the somewhat code-based tedious functionality. There’s enough difficulty in sorting through your nonsense code to make it validate, I didn’t want it to be difficult to make your way around StayValid’s interface. That meant creating a slick, clean-cut environment that is easily navigated and keeps the power of the service at your fingertips while making it an enjoyable experience at the same time.

Sell yourself, why should designers/developers use StayValid opposed to a browser validation plugin or by visiting w3.org to validate sites?
Designers and developers all know that our time is valuable. Especially when it’s spent on things like cross-browser fixes, debugging javascript, or Search Engine Optimization. There’s no need to add site validation to the list of tedious time-consuming processes we tack on to the end of a project.

Using StayValid not only keeps all your site validation results organized in an intuitive, simple environment, but adds powerful tools like the ability to automatically have your site scanned every night, have your scan results emailed to you, and individual page scans on-the-fly while reviewing page errors. Knowing you can add a few site subscriptions, leave it, come back later, check the errors, fix them, rescan, be emailed when it’s complete, is just a comfort of having that much more control over your site’s maintainability. With each scan also comes the number of pages found with our site crawler, and a list of every page found on your site through internal linking. These can also be very powerful tools in site management.

What do you want people to know about StayValid?
I’m not going to claim that there is anything groundbreaking about the technology behind StayValid. It’s just a simple, yet powerful tool that has the potential to save very valuable time for designers and developers who feel it is important to maintain site validation.

StayValid will not stop at just producing site validation output, there’s more in the works, and I’d love to hear what people think of it, and what they would like to see come in future releases in areas of functionality. What would save you more time in your site development? What tools and time-saving options do you want to see? I value user feedback greatly, and I see a lot of potential to continue growing the power of StayValid to meet needs of today’s web developers.

Along with most web applications, StayValid is fresh out of the box, so bare with them as they work out the rough patches. You can help by giving feedback about your experience using StayValid – all user feedback is greatly appreciated and will only be used to make StayValid more useful and enjoyable for you. So be patient, but take advantage of the tools it provides!

Want a FREE Premium StayValid subscription? All VelvetAnt subscribers will have a chance to win 1 FREE Premium StayValid subscription or one of 2 FREE Basic StayValid subscriptions for 6 months! Click here for more information on StayValid and how to win your own free subscription.

Kevin Tonkin is an motion graphic animator at Royale, the people responsible for projects such as rebranding Discovery Channels schedule menu to creating onstage elements for Madonna’s latest tour. He is also a co-owner and designer of the skateboard manufacturing company, Brilyent. It is refreshing to see well-designed art displayed on original surfaces. I have been really intrigued by the artwork featured on the Brilyent skateboard decks, so what better way to find out more about the art then to sit down with the man behind the monitor.

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• How was Brilyent founded and what is the meaning behind the name?
• After school everyone moved to different places, and work kind of took over. I’ve skated my whole life and couldn’t imagine being without it. So, to stay connected with skating and friends, we went and made this little company, Brilyent about a year ago. It’s totally for fun and all of our profits go to skateparks or awesome new Brilyent gear. It’s a good way to stay connected with people, and keep in touch with the skateboard industry. As for the name, we threw a couple at the wall, Brilyent was the only one to stick. And WhaleCock was already taken. Crap.
• Where do you find inspiration for the graphics you create for the skate decks?
• Inspiration comes from all over, it’s really random. A lot of it will come from the skateboard culture. Like one shirt that reads “drop tre bombs, not A-bombs.” “Tre bomb” being a slang word for a trick that probably only skateboarders would relate to. We don’t want to leave anyone in the dark though that’s for sure. The latest inspiration came from some dude popping his collar. It’s always really simple stuff, we just like building on it.
• Your graphics are pretty abstract and complex, do they hold a deeper meaning, or are they just something pretty to look at?
• Our graphics are usually thought up in like a minute, but we’ll spend weeks exploring the idea. We always make sure they somehow relate to us. Or else it’d be pretty meaningless, and any other company could do it. Our first graphic was a mailtruck crashing through some city with four hands gripping it from the inside. It symbolized Brilyent crashing onto the skateboard scene. That’s the mailtruck we’d drive around while growing up, full of random skateable stuff we’d find around the city. The four hands are the four people who helped get Brilyent off the ground. And that mysterious city is where we’re from, Oswego NY, hence the smoke stacks.. hollerr. We even threw another companies logo in there, hidden in the wood chips. We’re all friends here.
  
• Personally, I love my sketch book. Do you sketch all of your designs beforehand?
• Heck yeah I use a sketch book.. I find it way easier NOT to be in front of the computer when you start designing. Ideas start flying out your head way faster than you can pen tool. I just sketch stuff real sloppy on paper, and figure out what it all means later. Being an animator, I’m usually the one taking the pre-made designs and making them move. It’s definitely fun being on the other side of things.
  
• Can you take us through your design process from start to finish?
• The designs are always pretty spur of the moment. We never sit down and try to force something out. Something will usually happen or something will be said, and we’ll just feel like sharing it. Once we have a genius idea, I’ll start sketching it out. Most of the time we don’t even have a purpose for it, we just want to make it! Eventually we’ll have to figure out what it’ll even be used for. If it’s a deck, will it be portrait or landscape? If it’s a shirt, where will it be placed? Sometimes the idea will be scrapped completely. Like when we held a photoshoot for a poster, only to find out the camera was on some 72 dpi setting and we couldn’t use any of it. I’ll get back to you on the meaning of “Brilyent”.
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• Thanks so much for the interview! Also thanks to anyone who’s supported us, maybe you have a thumb stuck on your car, or maybe your rockin’ the lime green board. Whatever it is, thank you!
• Royale’s Skate @ 8 spot for Fuel TV

Thanks so much for taking the time to enlighten us Kevin.

To find out more about Brilyent check them out at http://www.brilyent.com. Also be sure to take some time to look at some of the work Kevin has been a part of at Royale and and view their demo reel.