Figure 1.

GIDDY UP
When not designing and coding sites for corporate giants like HP and Sun Microsystems at his Denver interactive firm, Focus Logic, creative director Ian Coyle moonlights under the swinging shingle of Hello Sexy. The charming creative outlet “to show who I really am” allows Coyle to produce animated sites for some rather unexpected independent artists like world-renowned horse portraitist Sherrill Brooke. Brooke’s “exceptional eye for horseflesh” demands that the viewer step closer to the canvas. So when it was time to trot his equine work online, Coyle saddled the site with possibly the strongest magnifying glass on the internet. www.hello-sexy.com, www.brookeart.com

Figure 2.

THE PINK DRESS
Look for puppetry to give chase to anime as part of the recent Japanese design explosion. After visiting the abandoned WWII Japanese-American internment camp in Granada, Colo., puppeteer Leslie K. Gray of Los Angeles wrote a family puppet theater piece about the three years her mother spent—or lost—there as a little girl. Faced with wearing the required drab uniform, the young protagonist Tsuki decides to wear a pink dress to her junior high-school graduation to prove she is not “an ant,” but an individual. Beth Peterson designed the entire cast of banraku-style puppets— a modern design approach adapted from the ancient Japanese art form of banraku puppetry, which requires 30 years of study in order to become a master. “The Pink Dress” will be performed at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in June. www.janm.org

Figure 3.

EGGS IN ONE BASKET
When bored programmers or copyright-infringing cowboys hide a special little something on a DVD or CD, it’s known as an Easter Egg. These hidden tracks are found in everything from Hollywood blockbusters on DVD to software install disks. Try this: While using QuarkXPress, select an object, push Command + Option + Shift + K, and a robot will walk across your screen, shooting a laser at the object to make it disappear. You can check out a compilation film of such programming puns, created by graphic designer Jenny Conte, at the Aurora Picture Show, a nonprofit organization that shows micro-cinema (noncommercial film, video, and new media) twice a month in a converted 1924 church in downtown Houston. www.aurorapictureshow.org