Once Upon a Time...

The ideas in my brain broke loose. Kinetic Shadows is a small design studio located in Lake Oswego, Oregon established and headed by designer Brian Rhinehart since 1999. This site is part portfolio and part sandbox where I can try out new designs and coding techniques. As such it may change on a regular basis or not at all for some time. If you're curious about the inspiration of the current design, let's just say I used to watch my fair share of Outer Limits, Godzilla and 50's monster movies as a kid and never lost my fascination with things that go bump in the night. If you're not too keen on my little friends who are hanging around here, head on over to the CSS Style Selector and turn on the lights for a "safer" viewing experience. More about the site's design and style selector.

Services

You've probably read every "Hello, we offer the following services..." on the web while searching for the right designer to fill the creative bill. I'll keep it short and simple, below is a list of some of the services offered by KsDs. As far as what I do primarily, that would be design: pixel, vector and CSS/XHTML wrangling.

Design Services:

Web Design, Logo Design, Graphic Design, User Interface Design, Illustration, CSS, XHTML, Template Development

Portfolio

About, Et Cetera

Life of Brian

I started my design career in multimedia and web design by attending the San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies Program in the early '90s just as the California Bay Area was buzzing with the ideas of multimedia, interactive CDs and virtual reality. Back then, we had to walk five miles barefoot in the snow... just kidding. Well almost. When I first started putting web pages together, we had basically two browsers, Netscape and Internet Explorer. No Google, CSS or Javascript and very few images were used in websites due to bandwidth constraints - can anyone say 28.8 kbit/s? But I digress. I started freelancing while still in college. Doing 3D animation I got my feet wet and gained some good experience before getting my first full time design position with an interactive development shop doing more 3D work and interactive design for companies such as Apple and HP.

The New Way or How I Learned to Stop Hurrying and Love the Dot-com

After finishing school I worked my way up the ladder for several years for various agencies wearing many hats and honing many skills around the SF Bay Area and Silicon Valley . I was quite content to go about creating new fangled things for this client and that until I had been a Senior Designer for a time. I found myself being taxed constantly to rapidly "produce" more and more of what I felt not to be my best work. Not that I mind quick turnarounds and tight deadlines, but when they just keep coming, something had to give. One day I decided that I had had my fill of playing "Telephone" with the profusion of project/account managers and their interpretations of client design requests. So, I decided to venture out on my own to see if I could provide a different way to serve the needs of clients and also allow myself to deliver the level of design I knew I was capable of creating. Several years later and after a subsequent move North, I am happy to say I'm still here doing what I love to do for a living.

About the Site (code name: Sybil)

Push the Red Shiny Button

The CSS Style Selector, as you may have already discovered, is a bit of javascript that allows the user to select their preferred viewing experience - sorry IE6 users, no soup for you. Anyway, I decided that I wanted more than one design for the site. Why the multiple personalities you ask? It's simple, some people don't like to read light text on dark backgrounds. And I figured while I'm changing the text colors why not add a second theme to the site. That's the nice thing about using CSS, I can just change out a few images and a bit of code and there you have it, a new design theme. Well that's over simplifying it a bit, but you get the point.

Minimum Movement Principle

As far as the structure goes, I decided to put everything on one page to keep things simple and compact for the user and for maintenance reasons. I try to keep the site updated with recent work, etc. so I wanted to whittle things down from previous versions of my portfolios that contained a plethora of pages. This also made it easier to implement the style selector as I didn't need to hunt through multiple pages to see CSS changes to the layout.

Monster Island Redux

I've had more than a few people ask if I started with hand drawn illustrations when creating the "Shadows" masthead of this site, so I decided to post a quick synopsis of the process. Check out Carny Vorous here after being scanned in from a pencil sketch that was inked and then whisked away into Illustrator land. Once the scan had been placed as reference, I used a Wacom tablet to trace the original illustration and to also fill in additional parts not present in the initial sketch. The final result is what you see after some tinkering in Photoshop to adjust color, lighting and shading.

One last note about the characters found on this site. I'm well aware that black widows don't make orb webs, a Sally Lightfoot Crab would probably eat the Portuguese Man-of-War (if it washed up on a beach) and that giant squid don't sit upright and look at you like you're today's lunch - they only do that when you're in the water with them.

Recognition

Thank you to the following sites which were kind enough to feature this site in their design gallery or blog.

Awards & Articles

A special thank you goes out to following sites:

• Back to Essentials - "100 Creative Examples of Footers for Web Designers"
• Boxed CSS - "BoxedCSS Site of the Week" week of - October 12, 2008
• Cool Site Collection - "Cool Site" - January 04, 2009
• CSSArts - "Best Website of the Month" - December 2008
• CSS Count - "25 Gorgeous Websites of October Round Up" - 2008
• CSS Pig - "Eye Candy Award"
• De Web Times - "25 Beautiful One Page Long Websites"
• Deviant Design - "Webdesign Inspiration: 70 dunkle Websites"
• DreamCss - "30 Mind-blowing CSS Design Inspirations For Designers"
• Foliostars - "Best of the Month" - October 2008
• Mabucplus - "Featured Website" - week of November 04, 2008
• RGB Garden - "Garden of the Day" - October 02, 2008
• Shakin.ru - "Creative Web Design - Fresh Ideas"
• Six Revisions - "30 Beautiful Web Designs Inspired by Nature"
• The Creative Unity - for including this site in their book, "The Creative Unity Volume One".
• UniqueCSS.com - "Monthly Seven Finalist Winner" - December 2008
• Web Designer - "5 Inspirational Page Headers | Pt II"

Contact Me

To inquire about services, availability and estimates please fill out the form below. When submitting your contact information please be sure to include your email address and/or phone number so that I have some way of contacting you.