Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Blue Mouse Monkey is pleased to announce the launch of  SHnibbins dog snacks — the website and the product itself. We provided full branding and design services to enable SHnibbins to bring their new line of heart-shaped dog snacks to the market. From logo, letterhead and package designs, through to content creation, audio, website and social media, we created a new brand that focuses on the simple joy of doggie love. Get SHnibbified!

The McKenzie River Gathering Foundation is a wonderful Oregon funder that focuses on racial and economic justice, peace, environmental protection, and LGBTQ rights. Each year they have a fundraiser party, and it’s always quite a shindig. This year performers include Spoken Word artist Toni Hill and Afro-Cuban musician Virginia Lopez. More info here.

This year Blue Mouse Monkey is sponsoring a table of ten. The party’s at the Ambridge this Saturday April 21st, starting at 7:00. Get your ticket here and support an amazing local foundation. See you there!

The Northwest Health Foundation wanted a new website to support their work in public policy advocacy. Built on the concept of a video magazine, each issue of Points of View covers a topic germane to the work of the foundation, with a short introduction and a collection of videos that reflect the point of view of the NWHF, along with the many points of view represented by their diverse community partners.

Formerly the Community Health Priorities project, this site has been given a fresh new look as it has morphed into The Conversation, the blog of the Northwest Health Foundation. The blog encourages Oregonians to participate in surveys, share feedback, read news, peruse resources, and apply for grants. Since its inception 2008, participation has climbed steadily, and the site returns data that the Northwest Health Foundation can bring to the state legislature.

Now it’s time to present a personal project! Parts Per Million is a novel about a group of Portland environmental and media activists. I’ve been working on it for a decade, finished it this year, and am in the process of seeking agent representation. Check out the site for photo galleries, excerpts, illustrations by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, and more.

Blue Mouse Monkey is pleased to announce the launch of the website for Portland artist Marlana Stoddard Hayes. Her interest in living communities leads her to explore the relationship among various nested systems found in the natural world, and she uses elements of nature in her painting practice, such as spore prints from fungi. The site is starting small, but with a CMS (content management system) in place, Marlana can add new portfolio pages over time. Marlana Stoddard-Hayes is represented by Butters Gallery.

After a hectic spring and summer at Blue Mouse Monkey, projects are wrapping up and my workload is decreasing. And I’m loving it. All of a sudden I have time for family and friends. I have time to just poke around the web, or stroll around outside. And time to get working on my second novel.

Okay, there I said it. Yes, I am working on a second novel. The first one, which took me 10+ years to write, is in the process of being queried to agents. Many readers tell me it’s an important story that needs to get out there, and I do hope it finds its way in the wider world. Learn more about Parts Per Million here. This second novel won’t take me 10 years. This time I’m starting with plot and moving towards crafting sentences, instead of the other way around. And its going to be more of a literary thriller. Parts Per Million has some thrillerish aspects of uncovering secrets and facing dangerous repercussions, but I wouldn’t call it a bumper-to-bumper thriller.

The new novel is going to be about a rogue biohacker. I’ve started research (which means amassing folders of related articles Thank you New Scientist) and am sketching out plot. I’m also working on making my rogue protagonist sympathetic. You’re going to be on her side, even while she wreaks havoc, because, well… I don’t want to give it all away!

And as the summer closes there’s time for pickling cucumbers and steaming home-grown edamame, and drawing on rocks with a 15 lb yellow-orange crayon. We were at Crescent Beach last weekend, and at the patch of basalt scree at the far end of the beach I discovered a rock, a piece of sandstone perhaps, that had oxidized (or something – I have no idea what I’m talking about, really) and was coated in a 1/2 inch layer of soft, crayony bright yellow…stuff.

Basalt, which Oregon is full of due to the massive basalt floods of 17–14 million years ago, is dark gray. Rather a somber stone, and not particularly inviting. But when columnar basalt breaks off it does so with smooth, slightly curved planes. Nice to draw on. I had fun brightening up the jumble of gray at the end of the beach.

And now that the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis has passed, I’m ready to put that difficult year behind me. When my GP broke the news to me last July, she said, “This will dominate your life for a year.” And she was right. And now I’m better, stronger, healthier, and so happy to find a soft yellow rock to draw with.

It’s difficult to share the work we do behind the scenes of organizations, but at least we can show a screenshot. The Northwest Health Foundation needed an internal portal. They were tired of communicating via long email strings, and tired of piecemeal distribution of information. They needed an easy archive-and-retrieval system for their meeting materials from their multiple committees. Plus they wanted a central space for announcements, and an internal blog. Additionally, they needed to control granular access to this material: it was important to allow some committee members full access, and others access only to the minutes, materials, and blog posts relevant to their specific area of work.

We created an interface design based on NWHF’s public website, to make the new portal familiar and friendly to the staff who use it. We also used Expression Engine’s membership tools to allow granular access at different levels of membership. Named “B0utros” after a staff-member’s dog, the new portal has become the lively, always-accessible home to the foundation’s communications and record-keeping.

Austin Granger is a photographer and writer who has produced three books, and wanted us to create online versions of each of them. The challenge was to reproduce the books in web form in a way that preserved as much of the flavor of “book”, with its concomitant hierarchies of information, while maintaining good digital user interface and information design. The resulting triple-website presents nearly 400 photographs, along with Austin’s 9-chapter essay on Point Reyes. Check out the three books: Elegy from the Edge of a Continent: Photographing Point Reyes, Lights and Keepsakes, and Astoria.

The Tobacco Free Coalition of Oregon (TOFCO) is revitalizing anti-tobacco advocacy in Oregon through a grassroots movement and outreach to communities most impacted by the harmful effects of tobacco use. Blue Mouse Monkey is proud to have worked with TOFCO to create a website that acts like a virtual staff member. The site provides relevant information to community advocates and decision makers, builds the tobacco-free movement support base, increases efficiency, and elevates TOFCO’s presence in the community at large.