After Eve shipped, I agreed to help out on Starwave's Family Planet to fill in for a departing art director. Working on Family Planet turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to learn the various aspects of online production. For a brief period following, I also worked on ABCNEWS.com prototyping news features, infographics, and a gallery which is still in use on the service today.

Designer 9/96-12/96 Responsible for daily art requirements on Family Planet: banners, marquees, charts Designed web pages in PhotoShop and implemented in HTML Worked with journalists on ABCNEWS.com to provide graphics as needed Created ABCNEWS.com slide show

Creating banners was one of my responsibilities on Family Planet. For this piece I ditched my original orange and black creations and instead went with something a little different.

I made three snow globes for Family Planet's Advent calender. The art was plugged into a Java applet and the user could shake the globe and watch the snow swirl around and fall in multi-layered simulated 3D paths.

This animated graphic was created to be an eye catching link to an ABCNEWS feature story. Creating charts and graphs for Family Planet's news stories involved making all the information fit in a graphically pleasing, low bandwith graphic.

"Planetary Probes" was by far my favorite type of infographic to work on. It involved quickly rounding up all the pieces, colorizing or color correcting them, and then placing them on the planet in a believable perspective. The last step was adding the finishing details like the Martian tire tracks, "radar" beam, and text labels.

The ABCNEWS.com slide show was adapted from the gallery I developed to showcase my own work and which appears in the Personal Work section of valazza.com. I used the same control buttons and background tiles from my personal gallery, but shrank the overall dimensions and simplified the frameset. The slide show is still used on the service for in depth features.