Craigwork

Birdhouse Hosting is super-proud to announce the launch of craigwork.com, exhibiting the work of Bay Area artist/sculptor/spacemaker Craig Hansen. Craig does absolutely mind-blowing work with cardboard, pencil, fabric, Kapla blocks, and other materials. Think you’ve made cool cardboard rockets with your kid? Check this one. His pencil drawings of objects found near a river are absolutely jaw-dropping (yes, they really are pencil drawings). If you’ve taken your kids to the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, you’ve probably experienced some of the educational space designs he helped imagine and construct.

 

Hansen was one of the lead designers for the “Forces That Shape the Bay” exhibit at Lawrence Hall of Science. If you’ve got kids and live in the Bay Area, you’ve almost certainly experienced the earthquake fault  simulator and river-blocking paddle system on display there.

Craig has also built some of the  tallest unglued Kapla Block constructions you’ve probably ever seen (the construction/demolition video is great).

I’ve worked closely with Craig over the past few months working out the web presentation for his work. The design is an example of “design by subtraction” – we started with an artist’s theme for WordPress and slowly removed elements we didn’t need until only the bare minimum remained. We hit a lot of roadblocks along the way, but I’m really proud of how the site turned out.

Geek note: WordPress doesn’t allow for icons representing categories and subcats, but I did find the excellent Category Icons plugin to get the job done. Unfortunately, a bug in the plugin causes the numeral “1” to be spit out after each icon. I tried many times, but could not get a response out of the developer, even after offering to pay for support. Didn’t have time to rewrite the plugin myself. In the end, I papered over the problem with a bit of jQuery that searches for the numeral “1” in a div and renders it white. Against a white background, the bug appears to vanish.

jQuery("div:contains('1')").css( "color","white" );

Feels a bit dirty, but also devilishly satisfying.

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