How many times in a career is a client going to show up with a quote from William Blake and ask if you can build a little site for his hand-printed books? Nothing in my repertoire could do justice to Eric's passion, humor and craft, so we surfed all his competitors' sites and went off in the opposite direction. Utter simplicity.

Way back, when the web began, we all designed and coded like this, pixel by pixel, so I knew how to control placement without adding layers of intimidating stylesheets. The point was not that Eric become dependent on me to add new volumes to his book list.

I particularly like the way the site feels like an extension of Eric's work. A lithographer sweats over alignment, as I did to keep that logo in the left corner from jumping as you clicked through the pages. And, of course, the way we lifted stray images from his prints to add depth as backgrounds.

Eric's from Iceland and his grandmother was a noted Icelandic poet. His parents were dyed-in-the-wool San Francisco Socialists of the 30s and his wife is a soc professor. Oh, this man was born with stories. Then he compressed them into poems and solo sketches in order to fit them into a union carpenter's life of early hours and strenuous days. One he wrote about the thrill of standing on the rafters of a new skyscraper at airplane heights with the wind in his ears makes you teeter at ground level. Dig around -- the site's much deeper than it looks.

He's not on the web to hammer at you to buy his or his clients' books. I don't do hammering. (Should I break here into a story of the summer my dad enlisted me to help nail floorboards to the joists of a new home? I'm zipping along the fantasy living room and when I jump off the foundation, thinking I am the coolest girl in the world, my dad says, Annie, bend down and check your work from the bottom. That's his style -- not to point out your mistakes but to expect you to see them for yourself. Every one of those stupid nails was bouncing sunlight back at me. He made me rip them out. My whole afternoon. ) I don't do scrapping, I don't do rubber-stamping, and I don't do the same website over a hundred times in different colors. I just wanna have fun.