Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

From L to R: Not Noticing, Three Comets Arrive, Thought and Spirit, and 40 pieces from the Symbols Inventory. Julia Stoops, 2012 – 2013

Blue Mouse Monkey’s own Julia Stoops is a web designer by day and an artist by night. For her first major exhibit since 2007, she  teamed up with Portland artist Meg Peterson for The Space Between, a two-person painting exhibit at the North View Gallery at PCC Sylvania.

Julia and Meg were awarded a project grant from RACC to fund the production of a catalogue. With design by Meris Brown of Fancypants Design, and an essay by Amy Bernstein, the catalogue is almost as good as seeing the show live.

The Space Between is up through April 27th. Gallery hours are  8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 12 to 4 p.m., Saturday. The North View Gallery is located in Room 214, CT (Communications Technology) Building, PCC Sylvania. (Same building as the theater) See PCC Sylvania in Google Maps »

Here’s an excerpt from Amy Bernstein’s essay:

“The Space Between is an exhibition of investigations. Stoops and Peterson play upon the tropes of science fiction, landscape, and contemporary spirituality to subtly subvert our ideas of the physical evidence of existence. Through their shared fascination with the mechanisms and laws that govern the material world, they create scenarios in their work that examine the discrepancies and similarities between microcosm and macrocosm. Stoopsʼ paintings are littered with a visual particulate energy that is frenetic yet highly ordered: the delineated evidence of thought and the lyric play of creation. She uses sets of symbols consistently, designing them as tiny oracles to float through her protagonistsʼ worlds of revelation and transformation.”

Here at Blue Mouse Monkey we’re happy to announce the launch of a new website for Portland’s Sound Roots School of Music!

Chris and Fara Heath started Sound Roots in 2008 to fill the void of music education left by tightening school budgets and lack of resources. They set out to teach students how to love learning. Today, Sound Roots has helped thousands of kids and adults achieve their musical goals.

Blue Mouse Monkey was pleased to partner with Subtext to create a new site for one of Portland’s leading printing companies, Bridgetown Printing. The original Bridgetown site was a single page placeholder, so everything in the new site was created from scratch, including new information architecture, look-and-feel, and content. We’re proud to participate in the growing trend towards responsive design with this website. Check it out on any device such as your iPhone, Kindle, or large desktop display, and the layout will rearrange itself to fit the context!

Blue Mouse Monkey is proud to announce the launch of an art portfolio website for Portland artist Lisa Onstad. Lisa works in book arts and painting, and she teaches workshops at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and elsewhere. Lisa wanted a clean, minimal design to present her work, and a scalable content management system to enable her to add and edit content over time. Check it out at LisaOnstad.net.

Brave on the Page, edited by Laura Stanfill

The book Brave on the Page is remarkable for three reasons. Well, many reasons, but three that I’ll focus on. Firstly, it’s an Espresso Book, a wonder of modern technology that “prints a book faster than you can make a cup of coffee,” creating and assembling the tome on what looks like a copier on steroids with glass walls that let you watch the inner workings. And what comes out is a real book, with a real color cover and pages that feel like a book, not like a photocopy.

The book emerging from the espresso book machine

The second remarkable thing about Brave on the Page is that it pulls together the thoughts and experiences of forty-two Oregon writers, in the form of interviews and essays. As such, it offers a rare snapshot-in-time of regional thinking on the craft of writing and living the creative life.

The brainchild of writer Laura Stanfill, Brave on the Page grew out of two years of posts on her blog, Laura Stanfill: Writing. Reading. Community. But the book is not just the blog posts lifted and dumped into print. Laura, being the consummate professional (she’s an amazing fiction writer as well as a journalist by trade) moulded the material into print form, which meant re-editing everything to match the more straightforward tenor of a printed book. A blog can be informal and chatty, whereas a book doesn’t come across so well that way (unless you’re Mindy Kaling and you write chatty comedy.)

Anyone with any interest in writing in Oregon should read this book. It’s varied and comprehensive and reveals another rich layer to the wealth of creativity and talent in Oregon. Oh, and yours truly is included, specifically an interview about my novel, Parts Per Million.

The third remarkable thing is that the book is self-published. Which means Laura didn’t have to shop a proposal around to agents and/or publishers then, if accepted, wait years for the book to crawl through the glacial publishing process and possibly emerge as a distortion from her original vision. Instead Laura had an idea and she went ahead and executed it. Just a few years ago this would have been an almost unthinkable level of individual power over media. Wow!

Brave on the Page is published by Forest Avenue Press. You can order it online, or visit the Espresso book machine at Powell’s downtown or at other locations in the US.

Here are photos from the launch party at Powell’s Books, and the 2012 Wordstock festival. Congratulations to Laura for bringing so many writers together in one book. I’m proud to be part of the collection!

We are very proud to announce the launch of the new website for Upstream Public Health. Upstream is an Oregon non-profit that researches innovative public health solutions and moves them into the mainstream dialogue, providing expertise in regional policy and decision-making. Upstream’s old website obscured the impact of their work. Upstream enlisted Blue Mouse Monkey to provide them with a distinctive platform to frame issues, provide timely information to their audiences, and express the values and upbeat personality of the organization.

Blue Mouse Monkey, Inc. is now officially certified with the state of Oregon as a WBE – that’s a Women Business Enterprise. It took two tries – the first attempt was thwarted by a joint lease agreement. Now that the BlueMM office space lease is solely under Julia Stoops’ name, the certification was approved. It also helped that Blue, the furry Blue Mouse Monkey, is a girl.

Blue Mouse Monkey’s Julia Stoops and and Shelise Gieseke presented a talk yesterday about User Experience Design called “Website Hotseat: Do you know what your visitors are feeling?” at the WVDO (Willamette Valley Development Officers) annual conference.

After a brief overview of what User Experience Design actually means and why it’s important, Julia critiqued several websites point-by-point on their level of user-friendliess. Which, unfortunately, was generally low.

The presentation seemed to have struck a chord with many attendees and Julia and Shelise received lots of good feedback. Julia’s personal mission is to beautify the Internet one website at a time, and today’s talk was a reminder of how much work there is to be done in that regard.

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!