Spending the last few weeks reading extensively about visual dynamics has been a very applied process for me. The story goes like this…

The elixir of grand/ridiculous plans. From HeadCRasher on Flickr.

Nearly two years ago, in pursuit of best practice insight into outdoor/environmental education I signed up for weekend workshop in Kuala Lumpur. The leader, Kenny Peavy, led an inspiring two-day session and I returned home to Tokyo committed to learn more. Months later, during a follow-up service-learning workshop back in KL, I ran into Kenny again. This time, he wasn’t running the workshop, so we had time to go for a few beers. And as with many grand schemes, this next one was concocted in the pub.

Kenny told me how he was looking to move full time into environmental curriculum consulting, and growing his NGO, The Environmental Education Association of South East Asia. So, in part to grease the transition, and to launch this NGO he had this crazy project in mind… He wanted to bike across South East Asia and make a documentary about environmental stories as he went. He had summer 2012 in mind.

Team Tanuki tuks towards the finish line! From LARGEMinority on Flickr.

We spoke about it for hours. It didn’t strike me as crazy at all. For one, I’d recently completed a tuk-tuk rally driving 1100 kms around Cambodia. This in a vehicle that resembled a motorbike your grandma would laugh at, pulling a tin can chariot (see Team Tanuki & The Cambo Challenge for more). Plus if you had asked me ten years earlier what I wanted to do with my life, I would have answered without hesitation: environmental advocacy film-making, but I was too busy cycling around the backroads of Eastern Canada at the time. Seriously.

So over the following hours and drinks, I shared a lot of ideas about what I thought would make something like that work cinematically and narratively, and became progressively greener with envy. Towards the end of the night, Kenny popped the question… “Why don’t you come?”

At the time I yeah-yeah-yeah’d it and brushed it right off. But over the following weeks I found myself thinking about it more and more, eventually asking myself the question: “Well, why don’t I go?”

It’s quite possible that my email to Kenny looked like this: “I’m in. But what am I in by the way?”

And all this takes me here. Applied visual dynamics. I’ve become the production side of this traveling twosome. The website, graphics, cinematography, direction and editorial responsibilities are mine. I’m loving them, but it’s been a long time.

So over the past weeks I’ve been building our site greenriders.asia. We’ve gone through a good number of design generations already. It’s amazing, when you look at something as simple as the background for a site, how many variations I went through before coming up with the current one. Color, contrast, complexity, content. I think it took me four days to settle on the current burlap-chic. For a long while I was stuck trying on an enormous range of foresty leaf patterns. Clair Weston put that momentum to rest for me when she asked: “Why is there a cabbage in the background?”. I decided the leaves may not set the right tone.

GREEN Riders home page: Burlap 1, Cabbage 0

So I’ve been developing a visual aesthetic for this project. I feel like it needs to be scapbooky and hand-drawn, dominated by elements central to the journey. Bikes, tire marks, mud, jungle, travel, remoteness… Macro-themes and micro-themes. I know that whatever static design concepts I bring to the site are ones I also want to be able to echo in the YouTube video-serial I’ll be producing along the way. I know I want it to feel scrapbooky and intimate, without any of the dreaded iMovie tacked on slickness. I want it simple, playful and dirty.

So, my design challenge is this: To use WordPress tools to build a functional site that captures these energies, in a way that can be translated onward to film, and in aspects to Facebook, Twitter and more… Let me know what you think! (And don’t worry, I’ve deleted any suggestions of cabbage.)

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