Tag Archives: Portfolio

Portfolio

Natchitoches Historic Foundation: Community-Based Preservation Nonprofit

Leave a comment
English: River Walk, Natchitoches, Louisiana
English: River Walk, Natchitoches, Louisiana (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I served on the board of the Natchitoches Historic Foundation throughout much of the 2000s. NHF focuses on preservation, education and advocacy of cultural heritage in my hometown of Natchitoches, La. My work was focused on promotions and design of print and digital assets.

Brochure Newsletter Writing and Design

The newsletter was still in print at that point, and I took it to a process color quadfold, designing it in Adobe Indesign. It conveyed the necessary information in a concise, easy-to-consume manner.

Tradeshow Display conceptualization and design

NHF held numerous events, and was looking to take its message to events by others during that time. I put together the design shown below, which was printed, laminated and adhered with velcro to a trifold tabletop fabric display.

Gala Invite Postcard

This print postcard was used to promote NHF’s biggest fundraiser, the Preservation Gala. It’s a simple black-and-white design accented with fall colors. The design and typography echos the look and feel of the membership newsletter.

Sacred Places Tour Poster

One of NHF’s most popular events was the annual tour of American Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in the state. Community members would tell the stories of those interred while dressed in period costume. In 2006, the tour was renamed the Sacred Places Tour and expanded to churches and other sacred sites of historical significance. NHF hired a professional photographer to capture representative scenes from these places and I designed the 16×20″ posters below, which were used to promote the event.

Website

It was NHF’s website where I first cut my teeth on WordPress. As in, I developed the site as seen below and then exploded it and had to start over. It was developed with an early StudioPress theme.

NHF 07 website

Portfolio

Interpretive animations can activate audience connections to history

Leave a comment

For me, enjoying a museum visit has always required a leap of imagination. After all, a glass case or a room barrier inherently separates you from objects. Interpretive animations as short-form video are one way to get a visitor into a state where they can better understand the context is which a space, object or event “lived” its historical purpose due to its interaction with humans.

I experimented with this concept as part of a partnership with University of the Arts in Philadelphia and my colleague, Michal Meyer. Abstracting the object or story with animation really helped focus on imaginative storytelling and more effective interpretation.

Here is a playlist of animations produced as part of this partnership.

Some are definitely better than others, but they increased in quality as we refined the process. One challenge related to this experience (where we were working with a class) is that there is much work in getting the students up to speed on the meaning of the content and desired outcomes for audiences. These were also semester-long projects for an animation class, so they are several months in production. Some animations were never quite finished.

Overall, I think they turned out wonderfully. My personal favorite is an animation of an old alchemical painting the organization had, which explained what was going on through the eyes of a creature featured in it. Here’s a preview to the high-resolution source image for that from Wikimedia Commons (click for original):

Interpretive animations Interior of a Laboratory with an Alchemist 17th century David Teniers II.tif
Interior of a Laboratory with an Alchemist by David Teniers II, 17th Century

I saw that painting almost every workday for three years. It captured my imagination all on its own, and was a no-brainer for this project. To give these project some extra attention, we “premiered” these as part of a live webcast that featured a graphic novelist and a comic book historian.

Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels from ChemHeritage on Vimeo.

There are many examples of museums using animations as pre-visit prep (manners in the museum) as seen below, but few featuring sophisticated storytelling and animation.

There are also examples of animations being used in museum interactives, such as these at the Benjamin Franklin Museum.

I looked for examples of interpretive animations produced by other cultural institutions, and they are hard to find. If you know of something out there, please link to it in the comments. Of course, there are many examples of object-inspired animated GIFs being used throughout social media, but that’s another post.