In case you’ve been wondering why my site is “ClelandIllustration.com” instead of “ClelandDesign.com”, it’s because ClelandDesign.com has been taken. And whom, you may ask, has this domain? My wife. I’ve been trying to acquire it from her for several years now, and she won’t budge. I’ve offered her millions of dollars but she refuses (something about money not meaning anything because we have a joint bank account). I even made her hot chocolate last night—still won’t budge. Oh well.

Since she’s being a big meanie I’ve decided to be the nice one and update her portfolio website for her. She has really great work, and needs a good site to showcase it. The site has been updated a few weeks now, but we’ve added a blog over the weekend, so be sure to subscribe. Check it out at www.clelanddesign.com. Comment on her first blog post. Encourage her to update it regularly, because she has a lot of cool stuff in the works.

Hello, everyone. I wanted to point you in the direction of a new program my dad, Donald Cleland, is creating. I should have posted this a couple weeks ago. He has created a theatre program for home school children. Actually, a better description is he’s extending his program that he established over 20 years ago. Back in 1986 he created a summer theatre camp for kids on summer break. The program is called Ya! Theatre (Young Actors Theatre), and to this day it continually sells out every summer. A brief description in his own words:

“In Ya! children will discover and nurture their creative and performing talents. They’ll find a place where they will be treated with respect, patience and dignity.  It’s also a place where their imaginations can run wild amidst laughter and fun.”

Don has dedicated his life to sharing his passion for building character in our youth, and has used his love of drama as a vehicle to do so. Being an elementary and middle school drama teacher for over 30 years he is the perfect person to teach a program like this, and he has garnered respect from the education and art communities in Hillsboro and Forest Grove, Oregon. If you have children in the Washington County area I suggest you check out his website (www.yatheatreclass.com) for more info. He has programs for home school students beginning in later September, so I suggest you hurry.

My wife, Rayna, re-created the branding/logo for Don’s program, and I whipped up this site in WordPress. Enjoy!

I’ve been pretty silent lately when it comes to updating this blog. Mainly because I’ve been hard at work redesigning my website (initially posted about it here). I wanted to post a quick update to my progress. It’s coming along great. I’m very excited about this new look and functionality, and I’m thrilled that I’ll be completely dumping Flash!! Also in the works is an iPhone-friendly version. Here are some tease shots. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a link to the complete “beta” site version sometime next week. I will also be redesigning this blog. This presents some dilemmas. I get a lot of compliments on my current design, which I like. However, I need to have my blog fit the identity of the new site. So, I’ll have to work that out. I’m also debating switching the blog over to WordPress, although figuring out how to transfer all the feed info and stuff sounds like a headache. We’ll see. I’ll also have to figure out how to design a custom blog with WP (something I need to know anyways). So, stay tuned. As always you can keep up with the blog by subscribing via RSS, or signing up to receive updates via email. How fun is that! UPDATE 7/25/09: This post was originally written on my old blog. As of 7/24 my new site and blog has been released.