by Court Evans
"What the f...?"
Yep. Some websites are so wack that their designs make you shout an expletive or two. Then, there's Entropy8.
A little more than a year ago, a colleague of mine pointed me to the then "Cool Site of the Day" ... Entropy8 Digital Arts. It was the most artistically designed website I'd ever seen and the first frames site, with javascript no less, that I'd ever visited. The site loaded and out popped a control panel window that gave access to an orderless artistic environment of poetic phrases and numerous graphics. It took me more than 20 minutes to find homegirl's resume (still does)!
"What the f...?"
"Damn!"
Like a doe with its eyes caught in the headlight glare of an 18-wheeler, I was confused and impressed. Twenty-seven year old Auriea Harvey, a Parsons School of Design graduate and an Indiana native, is busy breaking all the rules with her Brooklyn (New York) based personal and corporate website. I love and hate every minute of it. Her site is innovative. But, the probability of getting busted for surfing the web rather than working on the web rates extremely high when visiting Entropy8.
Time easily flies when checking the site's numerous animations or perusing through its portfolio, which includes site design work for Virgin Records' Lenny Kravitz and Janet Jackson, Broadway's Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, Conscience Records website, and sites such as PBS's Point of View, web pages for MTV, Charged.Com and much more.
And then there were two.
A business originally launched by Harvey in 1995, Entropy8 Digital Arts is now a duo of Harvey and Marc Antony Vose, the minister of technology and developer behind MacSport.
From its beginning in a web-industry that is a mere six years old, Entropy8 has garnered 13 digital art awards including the 1997 & 1998 Webby Awards and the first-ever computer arts related fellowship for its owner in 1997 from the New York Foundation for the Arts. The website also has been sited in five industry books like "Mastering PhotoShop 5 for the Web" by Matt Strasnitskas and "Browser: The Internet Design Project" by Patrick Burgoyne, Liz Farber, and Lewis Blackwell (editor). And, as if that weren't enough, the website is sited in several online and print publications such as The New York Times Online, the Village Voice, MacHome, the defunct The Net magazine, and an 8 page feature in the June 1998 issue of Design Graphics Magazine."
How could something so seemingly wrong be so right? The Entropy8 website is pure hell to navigate. Not to mention, the site's owner keeps designing and redesigning it, which oft times, unfortunately, yields a broken link or two. Yet, they still manage to design web sites and pages for an international clientele. Again. How could something so seemingly wrong be so right? The duo preach a simple formula when it comes to designing for its clients: Flex your creativity and incorporate practical navigation, quick-loading graphics and cross-browser compatibility. Give the client what it wants but deliver the unexpected. It is what Entropy8 does well.
"We're an eclectic company and we know it," so goes a brief description on the Entropy8 site. "But then, that's by design."
http://www.entropy8.com
http://www.suzerain.com/macsport/
Is the Internet the financial cure-all for graphic artists? Will it put an end to the traditional poor artist lifestyle? Discuss this topic and the Entropy8 website in ventureForums.
