Team North will design and deliver North House, a compelling, marketable solar powered home that makes use of the latest in high-performance architecture and mobile communication technology, while building Canada’s next generation of leaders in sustainable engineering, business and design.

This October, after a two-year development cycle, our team traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the US Department of Energy‘s Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall:

The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college and university teams in a competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

The architects and engineers on the project did an incredible job: combining leading-edge technology, modern aesthetics, and innovative materials to produce a net-zero solar powered home that is viable for the Canadian climate. After a challenging two-week competition, we placed 4th overall! Full results can be found on the Solar Decathlon scoring page. We were pleased with our performance, and feel proud of the achievement we’ve made with the house. Full details on the specifications and innovations of the house are available from the team website.

SFU’s contribution to this undertaking involved the development of a control system for the North House, and the design and creation of a suite of web-enabled applications to provide feedback, control, and community networking to the residents of the house. My role on the project was comprised of contributing to the design team for each of these main pieces of the interactive system, and then undertaking the development of each with a small team of programmers.

For the control system, I worked closely with Chris Brandson of VerTech Solutions. He wrote custom drivers for each of the house’s hardware systems (lighting, shades and blinds, HVAC, retractable bed, etc.) and configured them to communicate with Embedded Automation‘s mControl. I then developed a Ruby on Rails application to interface with mControl using SOAP. This allowed the design team to develop a custom interface for the residents of the home instead of relying on an off-the-shelf solution. The controls were then presented on three embedded touchscreens: a 17″ display mounted in the western end of the kitchen backsplash and two 8″ displays at the north and east entryways. The central panel provides digital controls for all of the house systems, while the entry panels provide local controls for nearby lights. Additionally, from each control point residents can put the house into user-configurable Presets such as Home, Away or Sleep. These presets represent configurations for various activities or times of day that can be activated with a single button press. The control and monitoring system we developed was noted as a standout by software developer Patrick Smith in his Survey of Home Monitoring & Control Systems at the Solar Decathlon.

I worked with closely with interaction designers Kevin Muise, Jenny Thai, and Jin Fan on the web application. These talented designers delivered high quality HTML, CSS, and image assets that I then incorporated into the Ruby on Rails application and populated with dynamic data and enabled with interactive behaviour. The house data was made available by Rob MacKenzie’s datalogging systems. Along with this contribution to the project, his invaluable talents at network administration, hardware procurement, and his knack for pulling off last-minute hacks can’t be overlooked!

Finally, Kevin Muise and I completed the Mobile application together. He led the development with nearly solo design and prototyping work. I then developed the final version based on his prototypes and integrated it with the Rails app and control system. The mobile application provides access to a subset of the features of the desktop web application, including graphing utilities, house controls, and community networking.

Interactive demonstrations of the web application and iPhone application can be found on the Team North website under Interface Demos. Also, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by David Gura from NPR for a brief segment about the iPhone application that aired on All Things Considered during the competition. The segment is available online.

The competition and project as a whole were intense and challenging. The difficulty of channeling the talents and perspectives of students and faculty from a range of disciplines across three universities and two timezones cannot be overestimated. Over the course of the year, I clumsily learned to speak the languages of architects, engineers, computer scientists, and project managers while participating in many teleconferences and email exchanges. I learned how important priorities can sometimes be missed when working in large geographically distributed teams because each person and team thinks someone else is doing it. And I learned a great deal about what not to do (…and less of what to do!) in software development. That being said, everyone on the project undertook their part with such enthusiasm and determination that we were able to overcome these obstacles and successfully deliver a house that is beautiful, powerful, and viable.

My sincere thanks to everyone on the team for their dedication and determination over the course of the project. It’s been a truly memorable experience. Also a huge congratulations to all the teams and great people that participated in the contest, especially those I met from Germany, California, Louisiana, and Cornell. In the coming year, I’ll be applying much of what I’ve learned on this project to my ongoing research into information visualization and tools for feedback on energy consumption.

Other media links:

• Globe & Mail: North House Waves the Flag
• CBC News: The National (October 8th)
• SPIE: Students shine at the Solar Decathlon (video)

For the past few months, I’ve been working on and off on a redesign and interface overhaul of Bitstrips, a social comic creation and sharing application launched by Toronto-based Core Matrix this past spring. Bitstrips allows anyone to create great looking comics and characters with easy to use tools, and share them with their friends and others in the Bitstrsips community. After launching their initial beta, the guys behind Bitstrips wanted to improve the look and feel of their application. To this end, I was hired on to create some design mockups, sort out browser compatibility issues, streamline and improve the site’s HTML and CSS (and push them into line with best practices), consult on the information design and navigation flow of the site, and put together and polish lots of the interface graphics. The latest version takes Bitstrips out of beta and incorporates these and a huge number of other improvements to both the backend functionality and frontend user interface of the site.

Since the site’s successful launch at SXSW, the Bitstrips community has been steadily growing, with over 70,000 comics created so far, and has gained a buzz with numerous mentions in Wired magazine (1, 2, 3), on blogs around the web, and a feature interview on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. For their part, the Core Matrix team has been tirelessly adding new content and artwork, fine-tuning their comic, character and scene creation tools, and passionately giving their all to the Bitstrips community.

Bitstrips is free and fun. The best part is creating characters of your friends and putting them in awkward situations in your comics! I’m excited to see how the site grows and develops over the coming months, as the community gets bigger and more involved. The guys at Core Matrix are putting on a Best-of-Bitstrips Awards Party in Toronto on July 16th, so if you’re in town, check it out! Unfortunately, I won’t be in the area, but hopefully I’ll be there for the 2009 edition.

I had fun with the theme. The underlying architecture supplied by Sandbox avoids a lot of the CSS headaches that can go along with blog theming, and allowed me to focus on a minimal, content-oriented theme that complements my recent site redesign. Where the Creative Creature site is dark and rich, Recursive Loop is light and airy, but both maintain the same colour scheme and typography choices. The developers of recent versions of WordPress have implemented a fairly flexible Widget system that allowed me to easily add Tag Cloud and Calendar widgets to the sidebar, both of which I find to be really useful navigation tools.

Let me know what you think! Anything not working quite right? Any posts showing up strangely within the new structure? I already had to tweak entries with Flash embedded in them, but I may have missed other little errors. I’ve got a batch of entries to post that I’ve been writing during a recent trip to the beautiful but internet-sparse South Island of New Zealand, so keep an eye out for them!

So long, version 1.0!

v1 (June 2007)	v2 (November 2007)

These changes are partly in preparation for a set of upcoming changes in my life. For the majority of 2008, I will be living in Palmerston North, New Zealand. I will be working while my girlfriend pursues a second degree, this time at Massey University. In between hikes and other Kiwi cultural pursuits, I will be dedicating a good amount of my time to working on Digital Texts 2.0 with Dr. Stéfan Sinclair. Additionally, I hope to meet some new people in the NZ web industry, and continue to provide services for clients here in Canada. Keep an eye here for a link to a new travel blog about our experiences in the southern hemisphere. After returning to Canada, I hope to enroll in a Masters program. The times they are a-changin.

Thanks to my clients who have made the past couple of years so enjoyable. I hope the next few can teach me as much and offer as many exciting opportunities. Here’s to new beginnings!

Welcome Page

We adapted the Portfolio interface to suit the Wedding photography, keeping things consistent, minimal, and graceful. Each Wedding that JD adds appears in a list on the left, with a representative thumbnail from that event appearing on the right on rollover. Clicking on either the menu item or the thumbnail then takes the user to an interactive contact sheet of shots from the Wedding.

Weddings Interface

Susan & Angelo Wedding Index

The shots are gorgeous and touching. Having a regularly updated selection of Wedding shots online will help to promote this aspect of JDH Photography & Imaging, and will give clients a broad idea of the quality and scope of JD’s work.

Thanks for another great project, JD. To the rest…book early!

Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in the availability of “nostalgia” compact discs. Nostalgia CDs are reissued compilations of pre-rock ‘n’ roll era music, especially recordings by swing bands, dance bands, singers, and small jazz combinations. Because this repertory was originally recorded on 78 rpm records, which held about 3-1/2 minutes of music on each side, the producers of nostalgia CDs make numerous aesthetic, practical, and even curatorial decisions as they select, remaster, and package their products. These decisions are also at play for the increasing number of CDs featuring off-air recordings of historic radio broadcasts. The modern technologies of digital recording and the World Wide Web have helped make old music more available than ever: this website addresses the role that CD reissues play in shaping understandings of popular music history-and historical memory more broadly.

In order to bring her research and data to a broader audience, and to develop a set of tools which would facilitate further research, Dr. Baade and I worked together to build Swinging Nostalgia into a fully searchable, highly editable web application. At the site, researchers as well as casual users can search the database to find information about the Artists, Labels, Collections, and Songs from this era, each collated to the others to indicate the popularity, relationships between, and relative importance of each as it pertains to the genre of “nostalgia” releases. Additionally, readers can keep up to date with and contact Dr. Baade as she continues work on the project.

Swinging Nostalgia Home Page

Search Form

Search Results

The site was developed by Creative Creature using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. It also includes a number of features to improve user interaction and ease of use in the administration of the site and application data, including significant use of AJAX techniques, and a cohesive, communicative interface design.

Contributors to the project can add Artists, Labels, and Songs to the database, and associate them through Collections, which in turn contain multi-disc Tracklistings as well as Album Artwork. This data can then be edited and manipulated as the project grows. Furthermore, each element can have Notes and Documents associated with it, to enrich the data with the researcher’s own thoughts and connected materials (links to external URL’s, PDF documents, images, etc.). The result is a dataset which is flexible and powerful enough to offer researchers a venue in which to ask complex questions and develop answers in collaboration with one another.

Administration Interface

Collection Creation View

I hope the site is a useful research tool for Dr. Baade and her colleagues, and a good resource for those interested in learning more about Swing music. I also hope it is the first of many Ruby on Rails web applications I have the pleasure of working on!

The solution was fittingly named Amass: “to gather together or accumulate (a large amount or number of valuable material or things) over a period of time.” JD has selected a range of images from his archives and organized them into events he has photographed, and a group of images he calls Heart Felt. These images conjure views of a realm that is unsettling, intriguing, emotive, and which always seem to hint at more than the subject offers at first glance. Feeling that such images should be searchable by mood as much as subject, JD has tagged his images with emotive, expressive keywords, rather than restricting his descriptions to subject and composition.

Amass has been integrated with JD’s Portfolio in two ways. First, a beautiful tab has been embedded on the right side of the browser when viewing the Portfolio. On rollover, it slides out gracefully to reveal itself, and a click takes the user to Amass. Additionally, images featured in the Portfolio which are available in Amass are marked with a subtle purchase link which appears above the image in question. Selecting this link presents the user with that image’s details and purchase information within Amass. The works are available in both digital and print format.

The design of the site reflects the ‘floating’ nature of the Portfolio design, keeping visual distractions to a minimum and the work at the forefront. This is further emphasized by the minimal, muted colour palette and font treatment, all of which suit the elegance and austerity of the images.

As always, it was a pleasure to work with an artist of JD’s calibre. I’m sure this won’t be the last innovative project to come from his direction.

After missing the Purolator guy by ten minutes on Friday, I had to wait out the weekend to get my hands on Leopard. However, once I let it out of its cage, I found it had eaten the following parts of my favourite pet Tiger:

• My hard drive! Well, then it regurgitated it. Upon initiating the install from the Leopard DVD, I clicked through the setup options (Language, License Agreement, etc), only to get to the Select a Destination screen…with no hard drives displayed. Confused, I clicked back through to the beginning, wondering what was happening. I then moved back through to the Select a Destination screen, again with no drives displayed. I opened up my old iBook and went online to see if anyone else was having the same problem, and found this forum post, which explained that Leopard was inspecting the drive for problems before offering it as an install disk. I waited, as suggested in the Apple forum, and after a few minutes, my internal hard drive appeared, but greyed out. After another 30 seconds, it became opaque, and I selected it to install. Not so slick, Apple. Would a progress bar have been so hard to implement?
• My custom icons for Terminal, Grab, and my external drives (but not for other apps, including Address Book, Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto). Not sure why it would lose some and not others.
• Inquisitor. Perhaps because this isn’t really its own app, but rather a ‘plugin’ for Safari that resides as a Preference Pane in Safari Preferences. It’s fully compatible with Safari 3.0 and Leopard, but I guess it was too tasty to pass up .
• My hotkeys in Adobe Illustrator CS (but not Photoshop CS). I hadn’t realized how consistently I use the hotkeys until they stopped working. Apparently, forthcoming Adobe updates will address these kinds of bugs, although this quote has me concerned: “Users of older Adobe applications, including Creative Suite 2, may find unexpected compatibility issues. Adobe stated that it has not tested its older applications for compatibility, and will not provide any Leopard-specific updates for pre-CS3 apps or the applications it acquired from Macromedia.” (source). Really? CS is only 3 years old, and they will not test it for compatibility with the OS that the majority of their creative professional users will upgrade to? That’s disappointing in a lot of ways.
• My custom Terminal welcome message.
• My energy saving settings. I don’t want my display to go to sleep after 1 minute, thank you.
• My (everyone’s) black arrow active application indicators, though you can get them back with a little bit of hacking. I find the new glowing blue dots inferior both aesthetically and functionally. Change for the sake of change is not a good thing!
• My Junk folder in Mail. I got it back by selecting Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail > Enable junk mail filtering. Not sure why this would be turned off by default, as it was on and working in Tiger.
• My notes in iCal. The new pop-up interface is kind of cool, I guess, but not as functional. Plus, it keeps opening up halfway between my two displays, rather than recognizing the screen edge and opening in the appropriate direction.

The Things Leopard Threw Up

When downloading an application and opening it for the first time, Leopard prompts “‘AppName’ is an application which was downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” I know this is here to protect users from accidentally running malicious software, but I should at least be able to disable it. It’s just annoying. Also, it’s the first time I’ve seen OS X copy a Vista ‘feature’, especially after making fun of it.

Besides that small thing, the new aesthetic generally feels heavy:

• the darker drop shadows on the Apple menu and active window
• the darker metal on application windows
• the chunky iTunes-style menus in Finder
• the new default folder icons
• the heavily depressed active buttons in toolbars
• the more heavily saturated red yellow and green window icons
• the over the top highlighting of matches using Safari’s Find feature
• the gears System Prefs icon

It’s all quite dense and technical looking. Not sure how I feel about it just yet, but I’m not sure that most of the visual changes are improvements. It doesn’t look bad, it’s just not as graceful as Tiger. However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

There are lots of good things about Leopard: spacebar to QuickLook a document (awesome!), Spaces, WebClips, improved Safari functionality (movable tabs, finally), and many more that I haven’t yet found. Additionally, the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard was actually remarkably smooth, especially in comparison to other operating systems. And it must be said that OS X is still the finest operating system interface design yet invented, both visually and functionally. These are just a few odd changes/omissions I thought I would point out!

Hamilton audio-visual art collective, ablockparentcommunity, led by producer Rob Liston and visual artist JD Howell, asked me to develop an ultra-minimal new site for their project. The design reflects abpc’s focus on the work: imagery and sound that invite introspection and an embrace of the subtlety and beauty of the things we find around us.

In their own words:

ablockparentcommunity is a multimedia art project which attempts to explore the undercurrents of community living through the juxtaposition of musical landscapes and audio-visual snapshots. Providing a seductive mix of electronic percussion and organic melodies, producers Rob Liston and JD Howell take the audience on a soundtracked journey down Main Street Everywhere, highlighting the extraordinary within the ordinary, the beautiful within the mundane. Look a little closer. Listen a little longer. We live where you live.

The site required a way to showcase the work of the group without the need for an overly complex system of navigation. My experience of the group’s work is that they are always interested in what’s going on now, not in cataloguing their past efforts or focussing on what others have to say. Therefore, JD’s design offered a perfect, compelling insight into their process. Images may offer a diverse view of a variety of subjects, or focus on a specific theme. There may be instrumental, organic songs alongside hip-hop remixes, or just one song looping, reflecting the thread of ‘attractive repetition’ in ablockparentcommunity’s art.

To realize the design technically, I built a two-part system. All content is managed by the group using XML files which describe the content they would like to display at any given time. This data is then loaded into Flash, and is used to populate the interface that you see. Images are loaded at random from a small, constantly updated selection, and fade in and out of the view over time. Likewise, songs are presented in a simple media player which selects a song at random on launch. Besides these central elements, the site offers a simple way to get in touch, and a brief news feed, also updated via XML. The overall effect offers a minimal aesthetic which communicates graceful elegance, and invites the viewer to experience something different…yet familiar.

Given Ian’s long term involvement with web technologies and open source projects, web standards were an integral part of the redesign. I was able to cater to this emphasis through a set of CSS-styled XHTML templates for the top level of content, thoroughly tested in as many browsers and platforms as we could get our hands on! These templates were informed by a visual design which is fairly minimal, yet friendly and professional. After a few iterations of the design, Ian and I arrived at a look and feel we were happy with, and I worked to extend it throughout the layout, various visual elements, and logo (which would also shrink to become the favicon) to present a consistent and attractive interface.

It was interesting and rewarding to work with Ian on his site. The breadth of content it contains, which spans a diverse career as a physicist, academic, author, and now consultant, offered a challenge for me as a designer. Usually, a project has a fairly narrow focus and audience. Designing for these instances offers more obvious directions for the look and feel of a site. However, with the various aspects of Ian’s content, it took a while to arrive at a design that communicated his professional life while making lots of room for the content of the site. I think the final product represents a successful integration of these factors. Thanks for the project, Ian!

Over the past year, I have worked alongside Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, Dr. Madeleine Jeay, and James Chartrand (Open Sky Solutions) to develop a literary research application at McMaster University. The result is a preliminary launch of PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire) (en français).

PBLit is an experimental project that aims to develop strategies for the simultaneous exploitation of multiples databases using a single unified interface. Many resources exist for literary research, but most are only available through their own interface. This makes research across a multitude of resources a time-consuming and learning-intensive task. PBLit offers a model prototype for navigation and research across literary resources, and functions as a proof of concept that multiple resources, in different formats and containing various datatypes, can be utilized simultaneously through an integrated web application.

PBLit (PolyBase Littéraire)

http://tapor.mcmaster.ca/pblit/accueil/
ROLE: Designer, Interface Developer
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, Cocoon, CForms, moo.fx

My role on the project was initially as a graphic designer and interface developer, and grew to include some responsibility for the XML/XSLT development of the project (particularly in the implementation of the CForms, and in the search results display), as well as writing and debugging a portion of the JavaScript, and managing the localization of the application using i18n. Several exciting features were developed to facilitate the usability of the application, including an AJAX Search Suggest mechanism on all search fields, and an Advanced Search form which has been developed to allow for future versions of the application to offer resource-specific search fields to allow users to refine their searches to target specific resources.

I have worked closely with Dr.’s Sinclair and Jeay before on SatorBase and Hyperlistes, and as always it was a pleasure to learn from their years of experience undertaking academic projects. Also, it has been an excellent experience learning from the process and open-source knowledge of James Chartrand and Open Sky Solutions. Thanks to everyone, and here’s to a job well done!

Steps

1. Download the template you would like in your preferred format:
   Adobe Illustrator CS (baseball_card_template.ai) [494kb]
   Adobe Photoshop CS (baseball_card_template.psd) [454kb]
2. Select a photo you would like to turn into a baseball card using your favourite photo management software.
3. Crop that image to a 2.5:3.5 aspect ratio and save it. This fits the 2.5″ x 3.5″ format of the baseball card.
4. If using Illustrator, Place the photo in the template by selecting File > Place… and selecting the photo.
   If using Photoshop, select the Paste Photo Here layer and paste your photo.
5. Resize your photo as necessary, making sure to maintain the aspect ratio.
6. Clean up extraneous elements in your file (extra starbursts and text, credits, etc.).
7. If using Illustrator, Export your card by selecting File > Export…. Select your desired file format (.jpg, .png) and file location and press Export.
   If using Photoshop, save your card by selecting File > Save As…. Select your desired file format (.jpg, .png) and file location and press Save.
8. Email your cards around to your friends/teammates, or take them to the print shop!

If you end up using the template, let me know! I’d love to see what people do with it. You can see lots of examples of the template in action at my Baseball Flickr Set.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.

The animated graph demonstrates the different trends (historic and anticipated) in greenhouse gas emissions in the province from 1990 to 2020, with Kyoto Targets and specific milestones illustrated. It will not be available online until after the Minister’s announcement for the new climate change plan, so I will not post it here. However, here is a screenshot.

The graph uses XML data to load in the various trends, targets, and milestones. All information regarding the statistics and presentation of the graph is included in the XML document to allow the client to easily add, remove, or edit the data as new information becomes available. This is then loaded into the Flash Player at run time, where the interface is populated with the trends, and the user is able to selectively play, show, and hide each trend on the graph.

In addition to this work, I was asked to develop some ideas for how to visualize our carbon footprint. Each Ontarian is responsible for about 5.7 tonnes of carbon each year (excluding the impact of industry, which bumps each individual’s footprint to 20+ tonnes). Nobody likes the sound of this, but educators in the field recognize that such a number is not the easiest statistic for people to relate to. To that end, the following were some brief ideas or sketches which came to my mind to try to visualize these concepts. The materials are intended for an upcoming Ministry website intended for a younger audience (10-20 years).

It has been interesting and fun to work on this project, and I hope to continue to combine my work in design and multimedia with environmental education and awareness.

Interactive Matter

www.interactivematter.ca
ROLE: Designer, Blog Admin
TOOLS: XHTML, CSS

Interactive Matter is a collection of academics, industry professionals, researchers, technologists, students, writers, innovators and experimentalists concerned with imagining, creating and critiquing new interactive media: “Interactive multimedia is the new medium and we are just learning to create and communicate through it. Interactivity is not narrative, it is not image, it is not linear. It is more than an art and it is more than engineering. Interactivity is playful, it is like a conversation, and it matters to the arts, humanities, sciences and the new media industry. Interactivity matters now.”

This site is used as a hub for information about the project and its various participants and partners. It also functions as a repository for current information about Interactive Matter’s bid for continued funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

The Goethe-McMaster Project

www.goethe-mcmaster.com
ROLE: Project Web Lead, Designer, Programmer, Conceptual Consultant
TOOLS: HTML, CSS, PHP, Flash 8, Flash Video

“German Expressionism in the Classroom is a website aimed at anyone interested in art or German as a private individual or within the field of education. 30 pieces of art taken from the collection housed at the McMaster Museum of Art are introduced as a virtual exhibition. This exhibition is accompanied by materials in both English and German providing background information on the time period, artists, and works of art and by exercises related to the works of art, German language and culture.”

I worked closely with representatives from the McMaster Museum of Art and the Goethe Institut to develop this resource in a short period of time in August and September of 2006. On September 14th, the website went live to accompany the launch of the German Expressionism exhibit at the museum, and has since been widely used by students and teachers of Art and the German language at the high school level.

SatorBase

www.satorbase.org
ROLE: Designer, Debugger, Programmer for certain updates
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, HTML, CSS

SatorBase is a relational database of literary topoi and their occurrences in texts from 13th to 19th century France. I was contracted to redesign the resource from the ground up, as well as to isolate and fix a number of application errors. Additionally, I worked with Dr. Madeleine Jeay, director of the Sator Society, to add in new functionality to the application.

Hyperlistes

tapor.mcmaster.ca/~hyperliste
ROLE: Programmer
TOOLS: PHP/MySQL, XML/XSL

Hyperlistes is another literary research project created by Dr. Madeleine Jeay of the McMaster Department of French. My role on this project involved translating the core functions of the project from Perl CGI scripts to PHP, and setting up a MySQL database to house the site content, as well as tweaking the functionality of the XSLT transformations.

I developed the project in two stages. First, I designed an XML schema which the client could populate with albums of works, separated into Photography and Imaging sections. Each work can be tagged with an optional Title and Description. This setup allows the client to populate and update their current works without needing to use Flash, and without the need of a developer.

Secondly, I built the interface in Flash. After importing the XML, the interface is populated with Albums, each of which holds a set of works. When an album is selected, the works within it are loaded as thumbnails, to be selected by the user. The fun part was developing the animations which are generated dynamically between image positions. First, the border of the image tweens from the current to the selected image shape and size, then the entire interface shifts to center the new image. When this is complete, the image is loaded in, resolving in from a blur and oversaturation filter. Check out the site to get the effect, as these screenshots only tell part of the story!

JD makes beautiful images, and it was a pleasure as always to work with him on this project. He had a clear vision for the site, and it was fun to work together to get the transitions and effects right to suit it.