Earlier this year we were working on an experimental website for PUSH Your Business, a consulting firm that helps businesses maximize their value throughout the entire life of the venture. Part of the concept for the project involved an opening animation of character pushing the letters in for the logo. We shot this footage to eventually turn into a simple vector animation but never had the opportunity to actually include it in the site.

I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day as a final project but I thought it was worth posting up here.

CK has been hard at work with Hartmann&Forbes on both print and web projects. We recently launched phase 1 of a brand new website for them that better matches the direction the brand has gone as well as provides a more graphical presentation of their product. The website runs on Drupal with a fair amount of custom templating and configuration.

We’re working on phase 2 now that will provide a secure back end for their customers to make printed product books and brochures a thing of the past.

Check out the site at www.hfshades.com.

On the window outside my office I’ve posted a slide from a PowerPoint that reads, “Like it or not, you’re a publisher and you need to start acting like one.” On the web content is king; it’s different than traditional advertising that can be all about the feeling or emotions that an image and headline provokes. On the web people are looking for a new morsel, something they haven’t seen before.

Those are what survive on the web. That in addition to a snappy visual they are accompanied by something rich and new. Blogs aren’t always visually engaging but they are still full of drama, intrigue and knowledge.

I read a blog called A List Apart which writes on topics relating to web design but written in a sort of lofty designer speak. One of the most recent posts is called, In Defense of Readers.

Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

As more and more projects and clients move into the content creation space and become publishers I want to make sure we remember the readers. On the web people actually read the body copy although formality isn’t a mandate.

The post is definitely worth reading. They discuss both function – some thoughts on how to pace an article – and also conceptually what we are trying to do when we set type on the web.

Just something to mull over on your next interactive project.

A new project we’re working on is for a company called PUSH. It’s still early in development but we shot some video for the site on a stage and figured I’d share it here.

For the second year in a row at Coates Kokes put together a web-based Holiday Card for the Port of Vancouver. This time it was Art Directed by Alicia Mickes, Copy by Karl Schroeder, a bit of motion graphics prep work by Ryan O’Reilly, leaving me responsible for animation, editing and sound design.

It was actually a really fun project to work on – got to use some of the newer animation features of Adobe After Effects and really had the opportunity to do some character animation for basically the first time.

I had a bit of a different aesthetic in mind for the project – I wanted to make it a bit more atmospheric – but the clean lines of the animation were the consensus in the group. I might go back just for fun and throw in a bit of my own sort of style.

I was the lead interactive for GetConstructive.com, a site designed to provide people interested in the construction field some resources to figure out how to start a career. It was executed entirely in flash and was interesting to me to figure out how to balance load time issues with a graphically engaging site.