Caroline Bird

When we were approached to create a web site promoting poet Caroline Bird it presented a somewhat new challenge in that we had to get ourselves into the mindset of creating something for an individual, rather than a brand or corporation. Taking inspiration from her unique brand of highly visual, often surreal poetry the AD (Eric) and I found ourselves bouncing around ideas of creating some fantastical journey or wierd surrealist online experience. This started to feel a little uncormfortable and it became clear to us that our approach should not be to try to illustrate or compete with the poetry, but to provide a blank page from which the words could have their own life. We acheived this by focussing not on the content of the poems, but on the tools used to create them – the pencil and paper.

Meeting Caroline you get a strong sense of her passion and desire to inspire others and get them excited about poetry. The blog gives her the opportunity to personalise the site and reach her readers. The ‘latest updates’ area ensures that any timely information is noticed. In this way the site serves it’s two targets equally: publishers/educationalists/etc who might employ Caroline, and fans interested in her poetry and readings.

Technically this was an interesting project too. We wanted the site to feel fluid, organic and slightly playful, so we chose Flash for its smooth animation capabilities and typographical possibilities. We based the Flash build on Steven Sacks’ Gaia Flash Framework (great out of the box deep-linking), which helped us concentrate more on the sexy bits. These included the mouse-tracking pencil that draws as you move around the site and the mouse-over scrolling technique, both of which I coded in ActionScript 3. Craig made some really nice paper animations in Swift 3D and I used ActionScript 3 and PHP to code a Flash/Wordpress integration (something I think we’ll be using a fair bit) so that the site could be managed easily by Caroline herself.