Hi, I’m Peter.
For many years, I worked as an animator, technical director, and designer on commercial, industrial, and artistic projects for animation, video game, and advertising studios.
Since then, I’ve applied that experience as a visual technologist and product designer, leading interface research, design, and prototyping for security and GIS companies.
I’m currently open to new opportunities – contact me, view my CV, or check out some case studies if you’d like to learn more.
I grew up in a tiny coastal town in Alaska famous for disasters, where extremities of scale, weather, and character felt not so much normal as inscrutable, as though there was no angle from which they would ever make any sense.
So: I’ve been interested in describing hard-to-describe things for a long time.
The town itself was situated on the side of a fjord – a bay scooped out by glacial activity – where it had been relocated from the end of the fjord, building by surviving building, after the 1964 Good Friday earthquake and attendant tsunami took out the port and destroyed much of the town.
Adaptation, exploration, learning from mistakes, and living in the face of loss.
The scale and scope of life on and near the sea feels to me like a deep reflection of what it means to be alive on Earth. In particular, I’m impressed by the design and practices of maritime industry and services, especially the US Coast Guard and organizations like it around the world.
The work of search and rescue, lighthouse-keeping, wayfinding and signaling, and maritime health and safety inspires me to make everyday things clearer, safer, stronger, more resilient, and more accessible to help us all cope with the extremities of experience in unstable circumstances.
“Fjord style” is an appreciation of layers, weatherproofing, clearly-marked routes, non-skid surfaces, dark neutrals with bright accents, and lists of things which turn out to be metaphors.
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Reorientation
If I'd grown up online I might feel differently about the last five years, but without physical human interaction, the bite-sized epistolary nature of social media seems hollow. You're great, but you're better in person. -
Where I'm At
Once, Saint-Exupéry “circled the airport for an hour after returning, so that he could finish reading a novel.” I deeply empathize. -
Parallax Shift
This is a continuation of Going Into Depth, examining the construction of a custom parallax shader in WebGL, doing something I've wanted to try forever. There will be math, but also pictures, and isn't that the best case scenario? -
Going Into Depth
This post describes a variation on parallax mapping that I used for a recent project, with detailed examinations of the rationale and a breakdown of the technique in the abstract.