The site was designed with assistance from Steed Cowart, some editorial help from Jennifer J. Morris and a lot of re-typing of old magazine and newspaper articles by Phil's wife Lola. Phil Franks has also produced a number of features and pages and most of the many hundreds of hours of work that went into this project was spent by Phil scanning images and Mal and Phil tweaking HTML endlessly till we got the design motifs just right.

With the exception off a few scans of album sleeves and magazine covers the graphical content here is 100% Phil's own portfolio of photos, scanned by him using a hi res negative scanner from the original negative strips and color slides. Text is from various sources including a wealth of first person narratives and recollections of Friends Magazine from Jonathon Green's research for his book, plus a few extracts from old features Philm worked on for various mags. We keep on trying to get Phil to remember and write more but he claims he's a photographer and never paid much attention to more than the images he was framing in his camera at the time.

This site is hosted at ibiblio.org (the site formerly known as MetaLab.UNC.edu, previously known as Sunsite UNC), gracious sponsors of various multimedia sites and projects. Here's some info on the design considerations of the Phil Franks and Philm Freax sites.

You may also find our colortest page useful to help finetune your monitor brightness and contrast and optimize your visual experience. These can easily be adjusted to see the full greyscale and color ranges from black to white.

Our design considerations:
These pages will probably look awful on any system set for less than thousands of colors or 800x600 screen mode. In 256 colors most of the photos and custom page design is rendered to an ugly mutation of what we were hoping you'd see.

Phil Franks and Philm Freax have attempted to design these pages for viewing on as many systems as possible. But it's hard to make everybody happy. If you have 256 colors or less, a monochrome monitor or less than a 9600 baud modem you're probably not going to experience the site in it's fullest. Even at 14.4 this site could be a little slow. We've tried to optimize it for 14.4 but assume you're going to be a little patient if you're looking at a photo gallery over a thin copper wire.

Most of this site is designed as an image oriented gallery with the intent of looking ideal in a 800x600 or 832x624 screen setting with at least 256 colors. If you set your browser to default to weird fonts, custom schemes, like looking at tiny stuff in High-Screen Res on a small monitor or just wanna bitch about life and angst in the big city then please call Philm's 1-900-FREAX-OUT party line or vent on someone else.

If you're one of the 10% or so statistical victims not using a recent version of Netscape, Internet Explorer or AOL 3.0 or some web software that support tables, HTML 3.0/3.2 you might see things that look funny. We try to shy away from things needing plugins or long download times but this is a photography focused site and as such is built around graphics. We're bandwidth conscious but sometimes not willing to compromise a design theme or our artistic integrity if we want to get something across the way we'd like to. Thus we suggest you surf the site with graphics on!

There are as of this count hundreds of web pages here and we're constantly dusting and polishing and revising the exhibits.

We appreciate feedback, comments and suggestions!

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Contact: Phil Franks (freax AT philmfreax.com)
Freax Website produced by Malcolm Humes.