design

LARGE SCALE THEATRICAL PROJECTIONS (1993-95)
A shout-out to wonderful Wendall K Harrington, Sage Carter and Elaine McCarthy. We made good stuff, and it was a blast!

WEB WORLD (1996-2020)

Back in the day before corporate swamped freelance, template solutions for making a website did not exist.  So, people made things for other people.  It is my privilege to have collaborated with people deeply into their work. I’ve been a designer, programmer and creative director on major web projects that lasted for years: co-creator as well as designer and programmer of artseensoho.com in the nineties; then designer, programmer and webmaster for a small, elite clientele that included photographer Patrick Demarchelier as well as National Geographic adventurer, filmmaker and writer Jon Bowermaster, and Vogue fashion editor Tonne Goodman. I’ve coded and consulted with both firstview.com and mintmoda.com. Together, we have accomplished a lot, and we broke new web design ground along the way.

ART DIRECTION, DESIGN and PROGRAMMING  (1993 – ongoing)

tiger-time I wore multiple hats for this early National Geographic project: web designer, graphic designer and programmer. In the early days of the web, dial-up bandwidth was narrow and restrictive, meaning that pictures and graphics had to be tiny little GIFS, minuscule by today’s standards. Getting things to look good was like an arcane science. Entire websites were designed to accommodate a postage-stamp computer screen resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. It was fresh.

artseensohoartseensoho.com This home page (circa 1999) comes alive with multiple rollovers when the visitor’s cursor moves across the surface. It is structurally a very detailed graphic interface that was built on sound fundamentals – it works today just as it did years ago. As a designer-builder, I’m irked that much of my detailed, handmade work has been bumped offline by the march toward automation and do-it-yourself template solutions.

AWARDS: USA Today Hot Site; Wired Magazine Spotlight; Rockport Press, Best of the Web – Navigation; Communication Arts Web Site of the Week.

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GRAPHIC NAVIGATION

One of my strengths is the conception and design of intuitive graphic interfaces that invite the visitor to explore. The goal is to visually engage the visitor at each level – from the main home page all the way down to pages buried four clicks into the mix. To do so means that every detail of design and navigation must be consciously attended to – it’s important to sweat the little stuff.

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WEB GRAPHICS: BANNERS AND BUTTONS

This project of banner creation for Jon Bowermaster’s blog site involved grabbing images from video clips that I found to be strong enough to make a lasting impression while conveying the spirit of his Oceans 8 project. For me, giving a light-filled, natural appearance to the whole project was essential.

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UNIFIED DESIGN

A clean, consistent look and feel across the board – for navigation elements, fonts, spacing and incidental buttons – establishes an atmospheric quality that works as a kind of environment through which the visitor moves.

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FORM and FUNCTION

Photo editing, cropping and web optimization – the design and programming framework – the javascript drop down menu – every detail and every function… below is one of many slideshows I have created by following my own methods. Unlike the little breakdowns in a boilerplate template, there’s nothing random about this. It’s not entirely mechanical, either. Knowing how to build this myself really helps me get the most out of today’s off-the-shelf image galleries and templates.

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INTERACTIVE DESIGN (2013)
This project involved the design refinement of an interactive flash media player.

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