About
My name is Susan Taunton—I am Wild Blue Pixel. I design and build websites for individuals and small businesses. I am especially glad to offer my imaginative energies to enterprises that "think globally and act locally." I offer gracious discounts to nonprofits and starving artists.
I've been doing graphic design and illustration off and on for my entire life, beginning as a little kid when my mom asked me to draw something to help her sell light bulbs after the Sunday service to benefit the church choir. That went over very big. Next thing, I was making posters for all the annual events: the Strawberry Festival, the Chicken Barbecue, the Pancake Dinner... My favorite work from this era was a series of mod posters that I made, along with my bud Steve Weldon, for the young people's Friday night canteen in the spring of 1967. Steve now has his own costume design business, Stelar Designs.
That was serious fun, but then I grew up and had to pay the bills. I always loved writing. Indeed, in 4th grade, my friend Martha McLean and I wrote a book called, The Red Hot Mud Monsters, about a community of beasts that lived beneath the Earth's surface.This was never published as someone's mom unfortunately threw out the manuscript. But Martha is still writing and currently authors the Matty McEire series.
But I never completed the last 27 units I needed to get my Bachelor's in English. I was so shamed by the revelation that I was not able to answer the seemingly simple question, "What is Literature?" in a final paper, that I never returned after that soul-wrenching semester. I spent the eighties as an editor and technical writer within the computer industry, writing dreary user manuals and wearing someone else's clothes.
All along the way I kept pining for a chance to draw or design, and kept conniving ways to slip in artsy projects, like the cover for the student poetry review at my college or the elaborate graphic icons I obsessed over in my technical manuals. It never occurred to me that I would even have a chance of getting into art school.
In 1990, I discovered Coreldraw 1.0, which made it possible to create graphics on a PC. I loaded it up on my 80286 AT and poured myself into figuring out this software. I was so completely impressed by this primordial computer art, that I cheerfully waited all night for a single graphic to print.
One day I saw the writing on the wall. During my lunch hour, somewhere around 3rd & Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, a scrawled command on the side of a brick building, authored by an unknown but wise graffiti artist, caught my eye: "QUIT YOUR JOB."
Soon thereafter, I resigned from my technical writing position to begin my freelance graphic design career.
I moved to Tucson in 1991. In my first expansive year in the Sonoran desert, I felt the pull of another lifelong dream: to study science and math. A single innocent microcomputer repair class, taken so I could learn how to repair and maintain my own PC, somehow magically led to a stream of classes in computer science and engineering, physics and math - lots of math - until I graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in Applied Math one very, very fine day.
It was my greatest desire to apply this hard-earned knowledge to solving environmental problems. I decided to enter a graduate program in Geography so that I could study Remote Sensing, the science of using aerial or satellite imagery to find answers to things like: What's the relationship between climate variations and biomass moisture in regions with really diverse terrains where wildfire is a big concern?
In the course of exploring the medium of the web as a way to exhibit the results of my master's thesis, I began to build a website. As I wrestled with the php code to develop functionality that would also be aesthetically appealing, I experienced a glorious rush as the two sides of my brain came together in epiphanic union.
Each of my projects serves to sharpen, deepen and strengthen my understanding of CSS according to the World Wide Web Consortium, Search Engine Optimization and Accessibility. In addition to keeping abreast of ever-morphing, current methods and best practices, I nurture a flexible, longterm vision.
Can we guess what the Web is to become or what brand new technology is about to redefine everything? The explosion of blogs onto the web scene, just for example, suggests the future will shine warmly on web code that can support the "evolutionary life cycle of digital information" (from the Wikipedia definition for Content Management), and which will allow regular folks, not just the technically savvy, to present information over the Web dynamically.
My guiding objectives are simplicity, clarity and elegance. I execute each project lovingly, as if it were my last.
Susan Taunton
Wild Blue Pixel
October 27, 2007
