This is the most recent of the Virtual Tours I’ve done for the NSW Minerals council. These sites are use as a part of their educational outreach program (don’t get me started on the “ethics” of working with the mining industry – our entire society depends on processing raw materials). Unfortunately these sites are all in need of some maintenance, since there were a lot of tricks (now obsolete) required to protect the quicktime content from being hijacked by windows media player, which couldn’t play it correctly.

This client distributed high end audio products, so the design theme chosen was metal and wood. Again, I think it’s a beautiful and serene design, that has some nice simple iconography, with a strong corner oriented placement.

Keeping the home page as the central product hub makes the navigational topography very clean.

This is the first design I produced for this client. It was intended to be a promotion for a motivational speaker they were bringing out. Sadly it suffers from photos that weren’t of the best quality. It only lasted online for about a week however, before I was asked to completely redesign and repurpose it to be more company-centric.

This was a somewhat frustrating design, in that it started out salvaging another design that was abandoned about a week after it went live. Not that there was anything wrong with the design, the client had a change in business relationships, so their site was redirected to promote them exclusively. You can also see an image gallery of the variations the site went through, which to my eye, all looked nicer than what eventually went live.

These works were the core of a project based around using computers in art. Now, as someone who works digitally a lot of the time, I actually think they’re a terrible artistic tool since the crutch of “undo” robs people of any risk while creating works. Never having to risk destroying a work to progress it, I think is going to create risk-averse artists. But that’s a rant for another time.

The basic premise was to scan some real world objects, and combine those with scans of our sketches done of the machine part templates, and then use photoshop to composite the parts. I ended up scanning my scarf, and watch. Some of these digital pieces were combined with crayon drawn on acetate overlays, but the final product was to take them and retranslate to a charcoal drawing.

This second piece was begun by covering the entire sheet in charcoal and compressed charcoal marks, then begin cutting the image out with an eraser, then go back in with charcoal and pastel, over and over building up a depth of texture to get to a dense image.

The bits of text on it are sequences of random numbers, done with one of those adjustable rubber stamps. And when I say random numbers, I was in the studio with my laptop running a random number generator. Hit the button to generate the number, adjust each digit on the stamp, ink, stamp, hit the button again. Very laborious, but a really satisfying result. This is one of my favourite pieces of 2007. It’s a little under A1 in size.

This is a very old site, predating my use of CSS for typography. I still like it for the design itself though, especially the “products” page.

Even by today’s standards, it’s got that “web 2.0”-ish look to it, rounded corners and all. Really, all it needs is a bunch of superfluous reflections, and to be missing a few vowells from the name.

This site was done quite a while ago, but I think it stands up quite well. It was still in use many years later, which is sortof the point – to make a good design in the first place that doesn’t have to be updated and changed with fashion year after year.

The Maritime Services Board Credit Union site. Hence, the general wharf / jetty theme.

Sadly this site barely made it online before they merged with another credit union and it was mothballed. Once you go into the “products” section it has a really nifty animated menu system. This site also has a completely liquid design, able to resize to any browser window.

It’s a product of its era, in which frames was the only technology that could accomplish the design. Today, a simple CSS technique would achieve the same result.

This was a subcontracting piece. I was given a basic version with the animation done for one menu as a demo, but without any wiring or functionality.

Apparently the piece was used to pitch to Subaru Australia by the client.

This was from a life drawing class, and was one of my early uses of black and white on pre-stained paper. I think the volumetric modelling on the lower back ended up working really well, and the fading detail through the head provides some depth. I’ll try to get some more life pieces up over time. They’re A1 in size, and stained with a combination of burned sienna and black washes.