Treasure State Development Web Site (2004)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:34:08 +0000

Treasure State Development was one of the few private sector web sites I did at Northrop Grumman. They were already a client of our Network department, and this was low budget follow-on work to that contract. The entire design was based on their logo, the woodcut in the upper left corner combined with the text in the masthead. I dissected it, pulling the colors out of it and other graphic elements such as the masthead background and bullets. I used a third-party javascript slider to make the menu bar at the top slide into place at the top no matter how much the user scrolled the page. I also used a third-party random quote script in the left sidebar. The site was constructed with semantic markup and entirely styled with cascading style sheets (CSS). No content management system was used, although the site was built upon a basic template structure using server-side includes (SSI) for common elements.

Apparently the site no longer exists. I never heard what became of the family-based company.

Economic Impact Summary (2004)

John — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:04:08 +0000

Northrop Grumman in Helena publishes a summary of how our company and group of employees effects the local economy. It includes everything from education information to home remodeling dollars spent here. Most years I’ve designed a cover for the document, usually involving a theme of growth or partnership with Montana. After the purchase of TRW by Northrop Grumman in 2003 there were a more stringent set of guidelines for designing any corporate materials.

Repeat after me: blue horizontal bars. ::sigh::

So my job in subsequent years consisted initially of finding something to stick in between the bars. A photo or some sort of collage. Later I tried to find ways to spruce it up a little more.

“Defining the Future” was a corporate slogan (I still see it pop up 5 years later). In 2004 we were looking for something “futuristic” to go with it. Sorry, no rocket ships allowed (darn). I was fiddling around in Photoshop and came up with the planetary eclipse graphic. Management liked it and we used it not only for this EIS cover, but a myriad of other local advertisements for about two years. I haven’t decided how much of the “eclipse series” to include here, but I’ll probably include at least one example of some sort of advertisement.

My Graphic/Web Design History » 2004

Treasure State Development Web Site (2004)

Economic Impact Summary (2004)