Odin Lonning's web site (odinlonning.com) is an online portfolio for this very talented Tlingit artist.

The biggest technical challenge when designing this web site was to make the page load time reasonable and still give you high quality images of Odin's art. One of the methods for accomplishing this was to use multiple "zoom" levels, so that the pages load with smaller images and you decide which ones you want to enlarge.

An example of this is on the drums page. We only show three drums at a time. This has the dual purpose of making the page load faster so you don't have to wait as long to see it, plus, equally importantly, the page is not cluttered. We want you to see each of the individual images as distinct and separate pieces of art.

Javascript is used extensively on this site. If you want to see a larger image of a drum, for example, all you need to do is roll your cursor over one of the images and only that image will quickly increase in size by about 4x. However, javascript is not required to use the site. If someone doesn't want to run it on their machine, they don't have to.

Almost all the artwork also has a 3rd level of magnification, which you access by clicking on smaller image of a piece or the name of the piece. This brings up a page that is dedicated to just that drum (or panel or pole or mask etc). You do have to wait a little bit for this large image to load unless you have a super fast (expensive) connection to the internet, but the page includes a description of the piece which you can start to read while you wait.

The paddles page is a particularly fun page because you can make the paddles "dance". The 3 step magnification is implemented a little differently than on the drums, panels, poles, and boxes pages. This came about as a solution to the unique dimensions of the paddles, since they are long and narrow, instead of roughly even heights and widths. Each of the little square images is a rollover which causes an intermediate enlargement of that portion of the paddles to appear in a central area. Once you have made your browser load each one of the intermediate enlargements (so that they are loaded into your computer's cache), you can roll your mouse back and forth across the squares and the paddles will appear to dance. If you want to see an even larger image, you just click on any one of the thumbnails.

The artwork for the general design of the site has an interesting origin. The image that looks like it could have been on soapstone was actually a doodle on a white napkin which I manipulated in a graphics program to create the seamless black and grey tile background. If you look closely at the red "blanket" that is behind the banner area, you'll see the same image.