Welcome

I’m a web developer, an illustrator, a writer, a designer, an amateur Fortean, a… well, I think of myself as a lot of different things. Like Heinlein said, “Specialization is for insects.”

My focus is on communication. Without it, nothing is accomplished. With it, anything is possible. Whether it's a great logo or an eye-catching illustration or an easy to navigate website, the goal is always to make that connection with people. All the skills and programs in the world are just tools to help facilitate the communication of ideas and information. That is what I set out to do on every project I work on.

Under Construction
Don't you hate it when you go to a website and it's undergoing a revamp? Yeah, me too, but in this case I'm hoping you'll bear with me. I've been busy enough that the site redesign has continually fallen by the wayside - cobblers children going barefoot and all that. The design proceeds apace - it's just the physical restructuring and content migration that needs to be done. With that in mind I've decided to launch the site in stages - the home page being the first. All sections of the site should remain accessible as I slowly convert the entire site to the new look/feel.

TheBajaUnlimited.com - quick notes on a recent project

The Baja Unlimited website One of my favorite clients is the adventure sports marketing firm Aura360. I do a bunch of different things for them, from print design to video work and all sorts of web-related projects. Always interesting, never boring.

Recently I got to work with them on a project that required me to develop material in all those areas and more, stretching my capabilities and making me more aware then ever just how interdependant the various areas of any project are.

The project, for me, began as a PowerPoint template design. Aura360 makes several presentations each year for various properties and this was for a television show based on the Baja1000. The colors, fonts and imagery had to be very earthy and gritty and we worked hard to get a template that captured the feel they wanted.

Baja PPTThe presentations went well and at a certain point they contacted me about developing a website for the property. The site needed to be produced quickly (designed, developed and implemented in the space of a couple of weeks), so using the PowerPoint design as a basis made sense. Other requirements were to keep to a certain sensibility suggested by their other sites (navigation on the right, lots of large imagery - especially on the home page), keep the content layout and coding simple enough to be updated by the client through Macromedia Contribute and to follow through on the same sort of colors and imagery we'd used in the PowerPoint template.

In addition to the website we also needed to design some button/banner ads for use on various websites to advertise the new Baja site. These led into working on a bumper-sticker to give away at events. This then led to a half-page ad in a race program as well as a 3'x8' banner that would be hung along the race course. It's one of the few times I've had to make a design (and the accompanying images) go from a pixel sized RGB image to a huge 4 color banner! They turned out surprisingly well.

Baja Button Baja Sticker Baja Banners

For the immediate future we have an ongoing requirement to upload unique video content, including video diaries of some of the racers, as well as an upcoming interactive Flash element. It should continue to be an interesting project and I can't wait to see what sort of things we'll need to develop for it next!

That's just a quick look at one of the recent projects I've worked on. Hope you enjoyed a quick peek behind the scenes.

What's next?
Keep an eye out in the coming weeks as I (hopefully) manage to convert the rest of the site to the new design. Along with a new look should come some new content, services and maybe even some product in an online store. Only time will tell. Until then, feel free to drop me a line or say hello on the messageboard.