Patricia Belyea is wired for the Web. The ebullient Seattle personality has been a fixture on the Northwest design circuit for more than two decades. In recent years, this savvy communications strategist has resembled a living, breathing hyperlink — instantly connecting people, projects and ideas in and around the Puget Sound graphic arts community. What clicks with Belyea most of all is design creativity, her knack for coming up with iconoclastic bursts of creative ideas as easily as hitting the refresh button.
While her native habitat is the design firm she founded that lives inside Seattle’s Tower Building, the Belyea name also “links” to a number of other venues. Like the workshops she teaches on “Creativity Calisthenics” for Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts or the workshops she delivers for her design contemporaries and colleagues at other top-notch firms around the Emerald City.
Truth be told, Belyea.com was the first Website of a graphic design firm anywhere in the Seattle market, born in 1995. And it was Belyea Design that created the first corporate Website for Weyerhaeuser, planting the first cyberseed for the Northwest icon on the Net. [We time travelled in the archive.org WayBack Machine to locate that early Web sapling and it appears below]. Today the Belyea Web portfolio includes Nautilusnet.com, rosanneolson.com, sonatacapital.com and most recently BodyGlide.com.
“We started with a fractional T1 line, a router, a Web server, and built our first site with an ominous black background,” she remembers. “We were so far ahead of the curve it took two years for our clients to catch up and get email so we could finally correspond with them electronically.”
The Belyea Internet era was underway even before partner Ron Lars Hansen, Belyea’s Design Director, came on board. At that time, the firm’s third partner, Michael Stone, tended to the local area network inside the office, before migrating his talents and nocturnal work habits as Belyea’s IT Director on the Internet front.
When the flood of newly spawned Internet companies began saturating the market during the Net’s heady “gold rush” days, Belyea kept a low profile, anchoring the firm with premium print and communication projects. The era was marked by overpromises by Internet companies, she laments, and a lack of design integrity for the companies the overpriced Websites were purported to represent. By the time, the floodwaters subsided, Northwest marketers found their way back to more communications-savvy, design-proven teams.
We caught up with Patricia on her way to the GraficEurope.com conference in Berlin to ask her about her Web world.
Seattle24x7: How would you characterize the Belyea approach to Web design?
Belyea: We think it’s important to start at the beginning. We have to understand the strategy. What are we trying to accomplish? It means taking the time to get to know our clients, collecting lots of information, and getting involved in the messaging. To us, messaging is both the words and how the visuals tell a story. The visuals convey a whole sense of personality and style. They engender how you feel about a company, their quality, how things are focused. On the Web of course, it’s how the design and function intersect and work together.
We view the Website as one piece of the total communications campaign. We’re paying attention to all the other parts of the program as well. From brochures to newsletters to direct mail. It’s more than Flash, although we do that as well. It’s connecting the dots to the dot com.
Seattle24x7: Can a small design studio compete with the big Web shops?
Belyea: We have an environment in this one office where Sun Microsystems, Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac all reside. We actually have more technology backing us here than is politically-correct for the scale of our business. Every system that is here is made for a company that’s probably ten times our size. It’s amazing what we can do with a staff of nine people.
Seattle24x7: You’re off to Europe for a graphics symposium. Has the Internet made your design world smaller?
Belyea: Yes, and here’s a perfect example. At the moment, I’m working on a portfolio-style book for Rockport Publishers which is going to be a world showcase of designers. I need to get samples from people to go into the book and one of the mandates is that one-third of the projects be international.
I used the Web to locate firms around the world and then emailed them my request for entries in the form of a .PDF. What’s so fabulous about it is that I’ve heard back from designers who are literally all around the world. That’s the power of the Internet at work.”
Sounds like they’ve all found the link to the home page at Belyea.com [24×7]
Patricia Belyea is linking a legacy of design leadership in the E-City with the next generation of multimedia Internet communication.
