This was a fantastically fun job and a chance to work on a very stylish comic. I had the opportunity to put together a flash trailer for The Faceless: A Terry Sharp Story, and really liked the work of Adrian Salmon and writing by Robert Tinnell. It is very much like a 60’s spy/detective story with fantastic color and biting wit. When Bob approached me about an online comic, I was excited. When he mentioned that he would like it to be flash-animated and initially hosted on Fangoria.com, I freaked. We set some guidelines as far as how animated it would be, and tried to be by-the-panel to maintain the comic feel. I also set about lettering the frames and bringing them in as semi-transparent .pngs. As the strips go on, I was progressively more ambitious about the animated sequences. This reached near critical mass when I pulled a truck out of a panel and animated it (Day 20, 21 & 22). (more…)

This is/was a site that I developed to showcase my work in 2005. I had a few real issues with this site which ultimately led me to discontinue development shortly after Feb. 2006. That coincides with being hired at COMAR, Inc. The 2 moves and about 3 other projects kept me from any real additions after that. My biggest issue with this type of development is the lack of easy update. If I wanted to change the size of an image, or change text, I would have to launch Flash and then find the file, hunt the text and then go through the export process. I have since decided that any further Flash development will be using XML porting from a dynamic back end like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or another CMS.

I was asked to show some of my web work this week by a prospective client. I realized that most of my work has been fixing other peoples sites and I wouldn’t want to be represented by those. However, there are a few from the late 90’s and ‘01 that I think show an understanding of the web as it was…

Signs by Brother Bill - One of my responsibilities as the manager of a sign shop in Fairmont, WV was to build and maintain at a very low file weight, a business web site with examples of our work.

Best Western of Summersville, WV - One of a few Hotel sites that I designed for a family of owner/operators. This hearkens back in the heady days of 800×600 and table based design. I love that bright yellow and blue.

Sixty Dollars | The Band Web Site - Ahead of the curve, Sixty dollars the band was ready to move their press kit online to not just HTML but flash it up. I was preparing to teach flash at college level and used this site as an example of multimedia, dynamic loading and embedding javascript popups(which consequently didn’t make it to the final site).

These are a small cross section of Pre Xhtml / CSS web sites that I have built. I am in process of 3 at the moment, with more coming soon.

After years of dodging web design and focusing on print design, my wife and I gave up on Charleston and moved to my hometown. What does that have to do with web design? Well, my family business is Jewelry & Gifts. Time and again my Mother has asked me to build a viable, interesting website for the business. As we are in Romney now, I thought it would be a good time to give it some attention. Web design is like quicksilver, always moving, changing, and very hard to nail down. There are some constants like CSS, and there are some waypoints like A List Apart, so the basics were pretty clear. 3 books and constant printing of site after site and I felt I was ready to get started. (more…)