Bio

I design, build and maintain websites for individuals, small businesses and enterprises that think globally and act locally and compassionately.

I started doing graphic design and illustration as a little kid when my mom first asked me to draw something to help her sell light bulbs after the Sunday service to benefit the church choir. Next thing, I was making posters for the Strawberry Festival, the Chicken Barbecue, the Pancake Dinner... My favorite work from this era was a series of swirly, mind-blowing Day-Glo patterned posters that my bud Steve Weldon and I created for the young people's Friday night canteen at St. Mary's Church in Ardmore, PA, in that misty spring before the Summer of Love.

A bit earlier, in 4th grade, my friend Martha McLean and I authored and illustrated, The Red Hot Mud Monsters, a story about a community of hippo-like beasts that lived beneath the Earth's surface, stood on two feet and wore sweatshirts and sneakers. We were, of course, convinced this was a masterpiece. Tragically, however, my mom threw the manuscript away during an uncircumspect cleaning foray, depriving future generations of our combined genius. We got right back in the saddle a mere 47 years later when Martha published, Looking for Sheville (2011, as "Matty McEire"), with cover art done by Wild Blue Pixel.

Fast forward to 1981, senior year of college, Critical Theory class: Despite years of carrying a dog-eared copy of Catcher in the Rye in my back pocket, I was stupefied by the deceptively simple essay question, "What is Literature?" After that soul-wrenching semester, 27 units short of an English degree, I wandered the Earth, or more precisely, South Jersey, in shame. I labored through the eighties as a humbled editor and technical writer in the computer industry, composing 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, much to the dismay of my production supervisor.

In the mid-eighties, I began taking classes in microcomputer graphics using software that cost Rutgers a zillion dollars. But the incipient software industry was evolving rapidly. In 1990, the affordable Coreldraw 1.0 made its debut onto the PC scene, making it possible to create graphics on my lumbering 80286 AT (with an entire megabyte of RAM), a hand-me-down from one of my technical writing jobs. Amazing, that I would cheerfully wait all night for a single graphic to render and print...

One day during my lunch hour, away from my job of composing mind-deadeningly humdrum computer user manuals, somewhere around 3rd & Chestnut Streets in the City of Brotherly Love (a hop and a skip from the Liberty Bell), graffiti scrawled on the side of a brick building caught my eye: "QUIT YOUR JOB." I didn't really need much arm-twisting. Soon thereafter, I resigned from my technical writing position to embark upon the adventure of a freelance graphic design career.

In 1991, I moved to Tucson, Arizona. Over the course of that first year in the Sonoran desert, after a hard drive crash or three, I decided to develop a little technical prowess so I could solve my own PC issues. My long suppressed left hemisphere stepped unexpectedly into the limelight when a seemingly innocent class in microcomputer repair opened the door to a torrent of classes in computer science and engineering, physics and math. A few thousand cups of espresso later, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in Applied Math.

I decided I would apply this hard-earned knowledge to solving environmental problems so I entered a graduate program in Geography to continue studies in Remote Sensing that I had begun as an undergrad. Remote Sensing is the science of using aerial or satellite imagery to find answers to questions like: What's the relationship between climate variations and biomass moisture in regions with really diverse terrains where wildfire is an urgent concern?

Sometime in the summer of 2005, 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—and Wild Blue Pixel was conceived.

The guiding objectives of Wild Blue Pixel are simplicity, clarity and elegance. I execute each project lovingly, as if it were my last. If you are interested in a website handcrafted by a website designer with a leave-no-stone-unturned work ethic and a winning price tag, contact me!

Susan Taunton
Last updated January 2, 2012