Santa Fe poet, Michael G. Smith is an interesting guy. He worked for many years as a chemist at Los Alamos labs before a health crisis set him on a path he never expected. After a serious stroke and the mild brain damage which it caused, Michael found himself practicing Zen meditation and writing poetry. Now, this in and of itself is a fascinating story, but the plot becomes even richer when one begins reading his work; uncovering lines about science and Zen on the same page.  After knowing him for about a year now, it’s interesting to watch him on this ongoing path of investigation, writing and teaching on the subject of how poetry and science are similar.

Michael Smith, guest teaching for Miriam Sagan’s poetry class at Santa Fe Community College in 2011.

If that’s not enough, he’s also an avid hiker, tackling the Grand Canyon at least once, if not twice every year on camping trips. All of these interests compose a mind of interest, but I must say after getting to know him he is anything but complicated in his presentation or demeanor.

So how to design a website for him?

When Michael came to me inquiring about a website to showcase his poems and provide him an area to journal about nature, science and meditation, I knew it had to be intelligent, creative and minimal in its design and architecture. After tinkering on a design in Photoshop for a couple of hours, I got up from my chair and walked across the room to obtain a different vantage point. I often do this during the design phase to obtain a different viewpoint–hopefully unexpected one. Even though viewers would rarely look at a website from 6 or 7 feet away, I find it very helpful to see my creations from a vantage point where their stories are often more apparent. I knew immediately I was on the wrong track. The design looked like it could have belonged to any other writer interested in nature, didn’t feel personal enough, and lacked the power and balance of simplicity. I popped back into the chai, promptly trashed the psd file and started fresh. This design is what quickly emerged in the aftermath.

Truth be told, this is my favorite web design to date and both of us have received beautiful feedback on it – the kind of feedback we all yearn for, affirming what you feel really good about, others also feel is good. (I hope you do too!)

I felt it was important to add some visual emphasis to the poetry section of the site; treating this section in a way which communicate it was somehow special without blowing over the audience. I felt the added emphasis needed to feel more like a hint of favoritism instead of a blatant spotlight. The solution, which is illustrated in the screen grabs above and below, makes use of my original photography in the form of watermarked backgrounds which allow the textured paper background found throughout the rest of the site to show through. All of these muted background images were taken in the last year and a half in New Mexico and reflect the poetry of both the landscape and wildlife so palpable in this region.

This site is a completely custom WordPress design and utilizes Google fonts, the method of choice for displaying creative, targeted typography across platforms. Please take some time to read New Mexican poet, Michael G. Smith‘s work and let us know what you think of his work!

 
Susan J. Preston is a web designer now residing in Taos, New Mexico and working with clients from Santa Fe to Washington DC and all the way back to California. For more information, read the About section, or take a look at the article, How to write a website RFP for help with getting your web design/redesign going.

I really love it when I come across an inspired work which touches the heart, makes me cry, and makes me wish I worked with the people who created it!

Please be inspired, and enjoy.

You will find a making of video of the song by clicking here.. such a beautiful, whimsical and heart-touching animation for the season.

A view of the snowy rodeo grounds in Taos, New Mexico. I hope the animals are all safe and warm this winter.

Susan J. Preston is a web designer now residing in Taos, New Mexico and working with clients from Santa Fe to Washington DC and all the way back to California. For more information, read the About section, or take a look at the article, How to write a website RFP for help with getting your web design/redesign going.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – at least it is over at my award-winning Banjo Bunny Ecard site! This December marks the 13th Annual Advent Calendar I have lovingly maintained and offer for free each year. It has won about 9 (or is it 10) Cool Site of the Day Awards since its inception in 1998 when I was just starting my interactive design career. Perhaps as the years roll by and the internet becomes more sophisticated with high def movies and the like, a simple little advent calendar isn’t as amazing as it was 13 years ago, but you know what? I watched the old claymation holiday special on PBS, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, last week, and found it immensely delightful – a breath of fresh air, really. I’m more than a bit tired of overproduced, glorified Christmas pop, and found the imperfections of the animation made me feel brightly optimistic. And the message? Well, the reason those old Christmas classics have lasted this long is because they speak to the true meaning of the season – friendship, family and love.

The Advent Calendar is a full fledged application built in Flash and features a gliding menu containing each of the 24 “doors” you may open to count down the days till Christmas. Just try and open a door a day early, or skip ahead to day 24 and see what happens. You just might summon the Advent Calendar Police, but don’t take my word for it!

It is my hope to continue sharing this calendar as long as the internet is around and I have the good fortune to still be breathing. It holds a very special place in my heart, reminding me of the initial days of the internet before it was pretty much taken over by bigger companies. Back in 1998 I couldn’t believe how many hits my site received! Thousands! I was getting emails from Denmark, Israel and Canada in addition to messages from my own homeland. In the following year it was also featured in a New York Times article about Advent Calendars on the internet – that was a hoot! What began as a little self-imposed project to learn Flash 2.0 became a sort of international sensation and ultimately became the bedrock of animations for the initial e-cards that still appear in the Banjo Bunny Christmas Ecard Category!

I invite you to take a look-especially if you’re familiar with the Advent Calendar tradition. You may find some surprises in there later on this month, including unexpected content which supports my theory of interconnection and the transcendence of love and acceptance!

With all good wishes,

Susan J. Preston
 

Susan J. Preston is a web designer now residing in Taos, New Mexico and working with clients from Santa Fe to Washington DC and all the way back to California. For more information, read the About section, or take a look at the article, How to write a website RFP for help with getting your web design/redesign going.

My love for poetry often shines through over at Banjo Bunny Ecards. Emily Dickinson’s words are woven throughout this hopeful ecard, featuring licensed bird photographs. The pace of this animated greeting is intentionally slow, inviting the viewer to take breath and pause in the midst of what can often be such quick and mindless online interaction.

What is hope? is the question the ecard gently asks. How fragile is a feeling of hope in what can sometimes feel like a cold and disconnected world. How fleeting is it, and if something as simple and unsubstantial as a little ecard can spark hope in one’s mind, what other small things might inspire us too?

Just this morning the wonderful programmer who does my back-end WordPress implementation forwarded me this video, produced and hosted by Annie Leonard, creator of The Story of Stuff Project. Not only is this an informative video, teaching viewers how to take power back from corporations and creating a better society and a healthier world, it’s a great example of simple, effective frame-based animation. How do we create a million and a half new jobs that create less pollution and waste in this country? Make sure to watch this to find out.

As a web designer & e-card animator who lives and works in a building which is powered in part by solar panels in Taos, New Mexico, this kind of animation – smart, effective, containing content in support of the greater good – is something I whole heartedly applaud. It speaks to the power of visual communication and the best of what the web animation industry has to offer. With so much emphasis being put toward formulas for online success – Click HERE to get more followers! which is total drivel – it is my hope the majority of developers (and viewers for that matter) wake up to the fact that people follow content which is valuable to them, period. You can gain all the followers in the world, but if none of them are actually reading your tweets or clicking through to your articles, your success is an illusion. I’d much rather have 10 responsive, interested people in my linkedIn camp than a million useless voices who are simply following me to get me to follow them back.

Ahh.. but I digress! This is supposed to be an article about a cool animation, right? No.. it’s an article pointing toward the things our world needs, expressed by a heart wishing we’d all pay more attention to what really matters.

A couple weeks ago, a talented DC illustrator posted a heartfelt query on a web professionals’ listserv I subscribe to.  Like so many of us in the industry, she was unsure of where to devote her continuing education after spending spending copious time learning Flash and finding herself smack dab in an uncertain landscape. What is a Flash professional to do? What is the state of animation on the web after the “headbutt” Apple delivered to Adobe via banning all Flash file playback on its iPhones and iPads?

After reading a reply that left me rolling my eyes in disbelief, I decided to express my educated opinion. As someone who has worked with the program since its inception in the 1990′s, my view is an honest and personal one.

Hi Karen,

 

I understand your confusion about animation and the web. Here’s a synopsis of the state of the industry as I see it. Lengthy, yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than a simple “Flash is Dead” story.

 

As an interactive designer who spends about 1/3 to 1/2 of my time animating with Flash, I can say it certainly has undergone a huge shift in the last year or so, however the idea that “Flash is dead” is ridiculous. It all depends on what you wish to use Flash for. Right now, HTML5 simply cannot touch Flash for the ease with which it creates rich web-based and cd or hard drive-based applications, which is why I don’t see it disappearing any time soon. Why? There are no HTML5 software packages out there that can come close to touching the power of Actionscript. Adobe recently reaffirmed its commitment to Flash development for this very reason. I use it to create web-based pieces such as e-cards, e-vites and web ads, but also for less talked about media-rich trade show animations and high-end business presentations, neither of which run off a hard drive and don’t require a plugin. If you are a good animator, you don’t have to limit yourself to the web. Flash is by no means a clunky application if one knows the appropriate ways to apply it.

 

Steve Jobs, (rest his amazing, innovative soul) had a huge motivation to squash Flash because users can self-publish and distribute games and apps to any device which supports it. Apple wants to take away this freedom, and why they are afraid of it. The decision to remove swf support was a decision which, in my opinion, went against the very fiber of what Apple was founded on, which was power to the people, opensource, educational technology. It’s been a huge disappointment to watch the story unfold over the last year or so to say the least. Flash is not just an animation program, nor is it simply a music or video player. It’s a powerful app-building software program which is why knowing how to animate with it is important in the near term while the powers that be hash it out.

 

That said, Adobe has come out with the second of 2 beta versions of an HTML5 animation program called Edge. Edge is simply a linear animation program – a quick solution to the iPad/iPhone conundrum animators are facing on Apple gizmos. Although Edge has scripting capabilities, it is generally suitable for homepage animations and web ads. Adobe, no doubt, will continue to develop Edge into the future, so if you’re interested in staying on top of the ball, it would be worth your time to begin learning the program. There are many differences between the two interfaces, so it will take some getting used it.

 

To answer your question about animated gifs is yes, Flash can output animated gifs, however the size of the animated gifs (which, of course are bitmap-generated, and thus larger files than their Flash/vector counterparts) almost ALWAYS go over the file size limitation imposed by online advertising services – usually a mere 100k for rich media. Animated gifs are rarely suitable and quite honestly, clunky and unprofessional compared to the elegance Flash has to offer, which is precisely why the web ad industry is still using Flash – for how long we don’t know. I’ve personally not seen a let-up in web ad projects coming my way. If anything, it’s picked up.  The conundrum during this transitional phase is there is no top of the line authoring tool which can output to HTML5. Edge or some other program will change this.

 

Those who chide Flash for its heavy file size are simply not taking into account the fact that it includes “fat” media, such as sound, video and bitmaps – or, they’ve not understood the streaming capabilities in Flash, or gave up on it before the streaming functions were implemented years ago. Every choice in this world has its price, so if you don’t care about sound, advanced coding/interactivity, elegant transitions, etc… then an animated gif or a static image is more than good. However, if your audience could benefit from being communicated to on more than one level by utilizing interactivity, transitions and sound to reinforce your message – such as in a special web-based presentation – then nothing can beat Flash. It all depends on your target audience, and the likelihood they may be trying to view your site on an iPad.

 

My advice: if you’re only interested in linear animation then move toward Edge. If you’re interested in creating interactive presentations which can be played online or from a hard drive for trade shows and the like, then stick with Flash until a really big, new product inspires you to do otherwise.

Susan J. Preston is a web designer residing in Taos, New Mexico and working with clients from Santa Fe to Washington DC and all the way back to California. For more information, read the About section, or take a look at the article, How to write a website RFP for help with getting your web design/redesign going.

I’m a big fan of Pinterest – a newish social site which revolves around sharing image links which are “pinned” into “boards” within your account. You can follow other pinners, thus creating a network of visually oriented people who share similar interests and aesthetics with you. At the moment, it’s still in beta format while the creators figure out a way to make money with it, so you’ll need to request an invitation to join. Not to worry, they’ll approve you quickly and you’ll be off and running in no time. I must admit, it’s pretty addictive for anyone who thinks visually.

It dawned on me a couple weeks after using the site that anyone with images of their products online could benefit from the links that are created when someone pins an image in their Pinterest account. The obvious next step is to test the the site out with Banjo Bunny, home to my funny ecards. (Yes, that was a shameless link!) Most of my content over there is visual, which makes it a good testing site for these purposes, and though the majority of my content is Flash-based I do have a blog to help flesh out the message of my site and post static images.

I know full well that any idea that revolves solely around link-building for advertising alone is difficult to sustain – if your heart’s not in it, motivations are difficult to veil. What I have going for me is an authentic passion for the content I’ll be bringing to the table, including images of vintage postcards, antique Christmas cards and charming paper ephemera from the early 1900′s. Boxes of antique postcards make up my personal collection, so yes, I’m a real, live, authentic collector of vintage photographs and antique greetings!  I don’t see this little test as a burden, rather, this is an outlet for an active passion of mine which is frequently expressed through my creative ecard endeavors.

For the time being, I’ve started a “board” within my personal account titled “Advent” where I’ve begun pinning images from my annual award-winning interactive Advent Calendar. (See the image above for a detail of an image I pinned this morning.) I also started following other pinners who have an interest in antique postcards and Christmas-related images. People involved in social media frown upon those who only post or pin about themselves, so it’s imperative to pin quality images from sites other than my own – which, I must say, is very easy to do. I found myself getting lost for over an hour searching the internet for quality advent calendar links and wonderful DIY holiday treats.

Hopefully, I’m on to something, but even if it doesn’t pan out on the SEO front, I’ll have learned some beneficial information, not to mention all the new connections I’ll be making with similarly-minded visual people!

To follow my Webpoppy Pinterest feed, click here!

Susan J. Preston is a web designer residing in Taos, New Mexico and working with clients from Santa Fe to Washington DC and all the way back to California. For more information, read the About section, or take a look at the article, How to write a website RFP for help with getting your web design/redesign going.

My experience with the Santa Fe Opera a year ago wasn’t all that great. We went to see The Tales of Hoffman, and although the singing was great and the view, remarkable, the staging and libretto left us wanting less instead of more – the end result? We left after the second act, grateful to take in a showstopping full moonrise over the distant hills which far surpassed the show going on inside the theater.

It was a totally different story this year. My friends, Larry, Carole and Adam and I descended on the parking lot a couple hours before curtain call for a quintessential Santa Fe experience: Opera Tailgating. People show up with full course meals, linen tablecloths and candelabras. The ritziest opera-goers show up in full swank with butlers catering to their every need – yes, in the parking lot, it’s beyond cool and crazy! My comrades and I didn’t take it quite that far, however. We passed on the butler and went for rotisserie chicken, wine and salad. I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun! And.. dear god! The sunset that night was knock your socks off gorgeous, which is sayin’ something by Santa Fe standards!

After we snapped all the pictures we possibly could and packed up the food and folded up the table it was time to sit back and enjoy The Last Savage – the best opera I’ve seen to date out of about six in my lifetime. The libretto features a young woman who refuses to settle down and marry until she goes off on expedition to find the last savage man on the planet. Of course, he doesn’t exist, and a comic sequence of events unfold that Rogers and Hammerstein would have been proud of. Who would have ever thought an opera could be so much fun? Certainly not I, it was wonderful!

Me.. enjoying the fabulous scenery after a delicious meal! (Image taken by Larry)

You can still see it, but you’ll have to hurry! There’s only one performance left this week on August 25th… believe me, it’s well worth it!

I came across this startlingly creative and entertaining video on Typography via Vimeo.com a couple years ago. It speaks even more authoritatively to me today. In a world filled with so much uncertainty, how does one find an authoritative voice, and once found, how does one present it with visual authority? Is a cool typeface that important, or is a steadfast classic font which has stood the test of time the best choice for getting your message across to your audience?

This video is a great launching pad to come back to over and over again before starting any project. It reminds me that the many layers of choices I have at my fingertips in Photoshop and Illustrator really do matter. Tempo, typeface, color, texture… they all can enhance or detract from your intended message. All to often, we don’t even know what our message is, or it gets lost in translation from the initial spark of an idea to the final design comp.

This video skillfully uses a variety of layers of communication:

1. Typographic Style

notice the use of big bold letters and all caps versus smaller sizes with italics. DECLARATIVE is in all caps, because, like, you know it’s DECLARATIVE! Notice how the viewer reads the words – there’s a symbiotic relationship between the choice of typeface elements and the tonality and attitude of the spoken words.

2. Animation Tempo

The speed at which animated text appears and disappears communicates a lot. Which areas of the video contain pauses? Notice the area where the big bold text moves at light speed across the screen? Normally, the viewer may not be able to read those split-second words – even with the ultra-bold weight – but with the added layer of sound recording, the designer doesn’t need to spell it out and can pick up the pace quite a bit!

3. Classic Typefaces

Helvetica, a hand’s down favorite of mine, is the main typeface for this piece. A simple, legible, classic typeface, Helvetica is just one of those perfect fonts that packs a punch without a lot of bells and whistles. It allows your message to take the forefront, instead of pushing its fancy intricacies in your face. (I’ll write more about Helvetica another day.)

4. Knowing your audience

This project was, evidently, a design school project. Geared toward a 20-something crowd, the poem is written in their language; it is humorous and captures the attention of a generation plagued with iPhone-induced ADD.

5. Teach something

Authoritative typography leaves something to the viewer ~ a message. If you leave your viewer feeling as though you’ve bored them or wasted their time, you’ve done zero to brighten and enlighten them. With a creative mind focused on the goal to TEACH the viewer something, you’ll be miles ahead of the pack of marketers, communicators designers who are simply interested in making it look pretty or the coolest cutting edge technology. Substance, and by substance I mean valuable content, married with design choices that give an authentic life to that content is… like, you know… everything!

Susan J. Preston is a web designer residing in northern New Mexico with clients in Taos, Santa Fe, Washington, DC… all across the country! For more information, read the About section, or take a look at the article, How to write a website RFP for help with getting your web design/redesign going.