The Studio // Edge & AEO
Irishguy
Design Studio
Founded 2002 · Fulton Opera House projections, noted in The New York Times · Head of Web & AEO at Method Q for the past four years · Host of AEO Decoded · 400/400 Lighthouse Architecture
The Founder
Gary
Crossey
Founder & Principal Architect.
The Autodidact’s Method
Nobody handed me the systems. I took them apart, measured them, and rebuilt them until they behaved. Thirty years later that is still the whole job.
- 01 // Measured Light
I started taking photographs at thirteen. In the darkroom I treated light as something to measure, log, and repeat.
- 02 // Frame-Accurate
Early web animation drifted, its frame rate floating with whatever the processor was doing. At DagNabit Animation I locked the visual timeline to Flash’s audio stream clock so every frame landed where it should. That work won Wired Magazine’s Best Business Site. Later, my frame-by-frame digital animation was exhibited at the Royal Palace in Belgium alongside Bart Peters’ photography.
Watch early animation on YouTube (part 1) ↗
- 03 // Stages as Systems
In Asheville I built stage environments from my own field photography instead of stock footage. For the 2004 world premiere of Terpsicorps’ Alice at the Diana Wortham Theatre, I designed the digitally animated projections. The forest scene alone used more than 650 of my own photographs of trees, each one remapped into the stage. The production made the cover of Mountain Xpress, with a cover image I created. Years later, at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, my raked-stage projections for Pride’s Crossing were singled out in The New York Times, and the next season, in 2018, I created the video for The Irish… and How They Got That Way.
Source: Hendersonville Times-News, Aug. 8, 2004: “Alice to be performed by dance troupe” ↗
Source: LancasterOnline review, January 2018: “The Irish… and How They Got That Way” ↗
Watch the Alice opening scene on YouTube ↗
Watch the Alice backdrop flood on YouTube ↗
Watch the Alice projections on YouTube ↗
Watch more Alice footage on YouTube (part 1) ↗
Watch more Alice footage on YouTube (part 2) ↗
Mountain Xpress cover by Gary Crossey, 2004: “High-tech Alice puts Asheville in the big dance.” Mountain Xpress // Cover // 2004
Mountain Xpress cover by Gary Crossey, 2004: “High-tech Alice puts Asheville in the big dance.”
- 04 // Systems, Then the Studio
FastFWD, the studio I co-ran with Brian Jones, put the Alice projections on the front page of the Asheville Citizen-Times on August 12, 2004. Through FastFWD I brought the same rigour to the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, Baxter Healthcare, and Cane Creek Cycling. As an Academic Technical Reviewer for Thomson Delmar Learning’s university textbooks, I checked other people’s systems for a living. Irishguy Design Studio, founded in 2002, is where all of it lands: zero-bloat web architecture built for people and for answer engines.
Watch a FastFWD award show production on YouTube ↗
Asheville Citizen-Times // Front page // Aug. 12, 2004
“Digital meets dance in ‘Alice’ production,” by Dale Neal. Photo by John Coutlakis. Asheville Citizen-Times, Thursday, August 12, 2004, page A1.
Still logging // More than 2,100 consecutive days of Japanese on Duolingo, kept the same way I logged light in the darkroom.
30 Years of
Architecture1996–2026
Irishguy
FastFWD & Industrial
FastFWD
Terpsicorps’ Alice: Citizen-Times Front Page & Mountain Xpress Cover · Asheville Chamber of Commerce Economic Development · Baxter Healthcare · Cane Creek Cycling
Spatial & Programmatic
Wired
Royal Palace
Wired Magazine “Best Business Site” Award · Royal Palace Exhibition (Belgium)
1996 — 2000 // Foundation
Optics & Academia
Thomson
Delmar
Academic Technical Reviewer for 6 Thomson Delmar Learning University Textbooks (AIU Buckhead, Atlanta)
Let's Build.
Thirty years of systems thinking, applied to your website. Book a working session in person or via video.
Book a Meeting →